I needed a band-aid this morning, and when I was getting it out, it occurred to me that there are some subtle details of packaging technology that pretty clearly mark this as the future, not the past. I’m not sure when the transition was, but if you’re around my age or older, you can probably remember the useless little red strings that used to be an integral part of the band-aid packaging. In theory, you were supposed to pull on the string, and use it to tear the paper wrapper around the bandage, but in practice, the damn thing always just pulled straight out of the package, and you ended up ripping the wrapper open with your teeth.<\/p>\n
I can’t recall the last time I saw one of those, so I’m not sure when they got rid of them, or how they did it (I know why– because the damn things never worked), but there must’ve been some reason why they used to do it that way, and some advance in packaging technology that let them eliminate the stupid little strings. And good riddance to them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is a specific example of a larger trend, though, namely the steady small evolution of packaging. Lots of things that used to be ubiquitous are gone and mostly forgotten– pull tabs on aluminum cans went away in the 80’s, styrofoam fast-food boxes in the early 90’s, and so on. These changes are almost always for the better– pull tabs were an annoying and mildly dangerous component of litter (and choked the occasional idiot who dropped the tab into the can, then chugged the contents), and stryofoam food boxes were a huge waste of resources. You can also probably use them as markers for a sort of pop-culture stratigraphy– if the picture of someone ordering a Big Mac has it in a styrofoam box, it’s from the 80’s, if it’s a paper box, it’s from the late 90’s.<\/p>\n
There’s probably a reasonably interesting book to be written about this, covering the evolution of the technology used to package stuff, and also the way we think about it. There are a bunch of different aspects to this– pull tabs went away because they were sort of dangerous, styrofoam boxes because public opinion turned in a slightly more environmental direction, and band-aid strings because… it was cheaper? I don’t know why, exactly, but somebody could probably write an interesting story about why they were there originally, and why they went away.<\/p>\n
Or maybe not. Anyway, that’s the sort of thing that occurs to me early in the morning, after trivial amounts of blood loss. And really, isn’t this sort of thing what blogs are for?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I needed a band-aid this morning, and when I was getting it out, it occurred to me that there are some subtle details of packaging technology that pretty clearly mark this as the future, not the past. I’m not sure when the transition was, but if you’re around my age or older, you can probably… Continue reading Packaging Technology… of the Future!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,75,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop_culture","category-society","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}