Social History of the Cardboard Box

Amid confusion there was a friendly sign. A smile. An arrow. A smarrow. Stacked up between street trees along the service road behind my Manhattan apartment were thousands of cardboard boxes standing on end — Chewy, Blue Apron, Peloton — the rising stars of internet commerce in the early months of the pandemic. And, of course, Amazon. Every third box was Amazon’s, instantly recognizable, with that famous logomark connecting two letters in the company name, promising to deliver with alacrity everything from A to Z. This was essential work, or legally constructed as such. Almost overnight, East 23rd Street became a curbside distribution hub, where workers unloaded trucks and moved boxes by handcart, bringing shampoo and socks, meal kits and milk-bones, stationary bikes and sourdough starter kits to the 30,000 or so humans, plus a few thousand pets, holed up in Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. We extracted our wares, carefully flattened and stacked the boxes, sent the cardboard back to the curb, ready for reincarnation at a recycling center. There was comfort in this ritual — or at least familiarity, which passes for comfort in difficult times. The smarrow points the way forward. (...)

As historian Maria Rentetzi writes, “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.” 

Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains. The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them. 

Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there. The Container Corporation of America was founded in 1926, and upon those claims it built an empire with surprising reach. The CCA made collapsible shipping boxes, and it transformed packaging into a science and an art. It advanced market research, shaped mid-century taste, and altered the chromatic universe through color standards. (...)

Of course, the spiritual heir to Walter Paepcke’s CCA — the vertically-integrated, multiply-armed hegemon of packaging, shipping, branding, resource extraction, and cultural influencing — is Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. Meanwhile, the intense relationship between cardboard boxes and graphic design, fused in the art department at the CCA, has influenced a new generation of package design.

The rise in online commerce has created what The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull calls a “packaging arms race” wherein the box is commonly designed alongside the product. “Regular people are conversant in the language of branding,” and are also branding themselves, through the aesthetic spectacle of unboxing videos on TikTok and Instagram. That, in turn, has led to more telegenic boxes. As Orora Packaging Solutions’ Chris Bradley told the publication Packaging Dive: “I’m thinking about the way that a YouTuber … would unbox it when we’re in the design process, because we want to have that big ‘aha’ or ‘wow’ moment.” Packaging is engineered to produce a crinkly sound, to evoke sonic memories such as the rustle of tissue paper on Christmas morning. Boxes are fit tight, anticipation building with just the right amount of friction and drag, until the lid slides off, releasing a gust of air and a subtle pop. Apple’s elegant boxes are tiny white-cube galleries showing off objets d’art. And sometimes patterns or messages are designed inside the box to cultivate interior ambience and intimacy. (...)

The mark emphasizes efficiency and systematicity. It wants us to feel plugged into the systems of global capitalism that bring this fuel to our doorstep, the logistics hubs and data centers and cardboard waystations, and the geographies and communities shaped around them. All those boxes piled up on 23rd Street, whether stamped with a crass Walmart starburst or a “local everywhere” sunflower, they’re all printed somewhere, on offset presses in factories that flatten and fold the fibers from pines grown in the southeastern United States or Brazil or some new frontier. And they’ll have a life beyond their brief stay in our homes, whether they’re sent to the recycling plant or repurposed for local uses — in some cases, providing shelter for, or delivering humanitarian aid to, human beings who have little time for Instagram or fancy olive oil. (...)

Under consumer pressure, Amazon and Walmart have also implemented “sustainable” packaging standards in an effort to cut back on all the boxes and plastic air pillows. But that hasn’t worked exactly as planned. It’s spawned a new repackaging industry, which relies on intermediary contractors to unbox and re-box goods from third-party sellers so they meet Amazon rules. As Josh Dzieza explains, “Amazon only accepts goods that are packaged a certain way. Products need to be made ready for the automated gauntlet of the fulfillment center. Old barcodes and prices need to be covered up and new ones added. Glass needs to be bubble wrapped. Loose items need to be bagged.” These re-boxers, who operate their own small-scale prep centers across the country, and especially in states without sales tax, are an integral, if invisible, link in Amazon’s logistical network. And that network, too, runs on cardboard.

Cardboard is more recyclable than other packaging materials, yet each regenerative cycle shortens and weakens the pine fibers, pushing degraded bits through the screens. Fibers can typically be recycled only five to seven times. So our seemingly endless need for boxes demands new trees. In a vivid feature for The New York Times Magazine, Matthew Shaer reports, “In Georgia and Alabama, family operations have given way to small empires of tree plantations, built largely on private land, and largely by planting pines in a region where other types of trees — or other varieties of crops, like cotton — once grew.” These monocultures are less biodiverse and more poorly able to store carbon, filter drinking water, and reduce erosion. It’s “just pines, pines, as far as the eye could see.” New plantation pines and old Amazon boxes feed the region’s new mega-mills. (...)

In his 1946 book Paperboard and Paper Containers, Harry J. Bettendorf extolled the civilizational gifts of the cardboard box: “Out of the piles, confusion and dirt of the earlier period came the cleanliness, order, precision and efficiency of mass production goods through the employment of mass production packages of paperboard.” In this moment, in the pause after World War II, after the Container Corporation had sent its boxes into battle, but before it endeavored to shape civic discourse through Aspen elites, here is a historian who believed cardboard boxes could deliver us to a better future. Little did he know what piles of waste, ideological confusion, and environmental destruction would be generated by the whole box-powered system of mass production and hyper-capitalism. Bettendorf’s box was a Trojan horse. A smarrow. A promise of progress that delivered not only order, precision, and prosperity, but also waste and exploitation.

This medium, in its most rudimentary form, has six faces, with two liners — an inside and an outside surface — each of which tells a different story about its journey, and ours. A package appears on our doorstep. Its printed exterior graphics identify and emblematize the sender. Its interior graphics constitute an intimate form of address. The mailing label on top documents, in terms intelligible to the humans and machines that constitute a delivery service, the route by which which its contents have reached us. What terrains and portals has it passed through? Who has scanned its barcode, and where? The seal on the bottom chronicles the box’s journey from paper roll through three-dimensional form awaiting fulfillment and activation. That seal, a story, has an unwritten preface, too: it tells of trees and forests, of land as yet another subject of mass production. It also has a tacit postscript: reincarnation as a placard, a plea, as cartonera, as a wish that its own future conditions of production and distribution express and enact a world better than the one we have now. A box that treads more lightly on the landscapes from which it derives and through which it travels.

by Shannon Mattern, Places Journal | Read more:
Images: Nick Shere, via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; Sainsbury Archive; Fabrice Florin, via Flickr under license CC BY-SA 2.0

[ed. Always feel slightly conflicted when I get a few new packages from Amazon (and see other piles stacked around the neighborhood). Especially when the boxes are oversized and overstuffed with packing materials. Bubble wrap for books?!]