Since the beginning of recorded history, humankind has always had stuff. We had some form of clothing, food, beverages and the essentials. We were always trying to find ways to keep those things longer and to transport them easier, so we looked around and we got invented. Ancient packaging was made from woven, grass, leaves, bark, animal skins and hollowed gourds. We were pretty innovative with what we had available to us thousands of years ago. Packaging has come a long way and has had to adapt to the ever-increasing stress and demands of e-commerce and the supply chain. Today I will give you a snippet of packaging history.
We used so many different kinds of packaging in our everyday lives.
Have you ever actually stopped to think about where these various substrates came from? Let’s start with glass. Glass bottles can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Mesopotamia. The process to develop glass was first discovered when the natural component Natron combined with sand and a fire. A few hundred years later in Syria, the process of glassblowing was created and glass became a much more popular method of containing liquids than the previous forms of doing so, such as gourds, animal skins or pottery.
Next in the long history of packaging comes paper. Paper as being used for food transportation is credited as being created in China a little more than 2,000 years ago. While the Chinese were initially using treated mulberry bark, the process of extracting cellulose from plant fibers was developed over the next centuries. This process is actually pretty similar to the one we still use today. These examples of paper packaging are considered the oldest forms of flexible packaging known to exist. Cardboard is one of the next major innovations, but we have to jump forward all the way to the 1800s before we start seeing it used commercial lanes. The process of creating corrugated board is also credited to the Chinese a few hundred years prior, but the earliest known example of cardboard being used for packaging can be found in Germany in 1817 for the strategy war board game. The game of besieging cardboard became very popular in both Europe and the Americas due to it being both cheap and durable.
Lastly, we arrive at plastic, one of the most recent but also most heavily utilized substrates out there. Although the first man-made plastics were created in the mid-1800s, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that the origins of modern plastic really took shape. Cellophane, the same clear material we know today, was created in 1908. The first fully flexible waterproof flexible packaging ever made. As we move on through the century, the first commercial plastic bottle was created in 1946 for the deodorant brand Stopette. The success of this product led to many copycats as well as further innovation with the material. Today various plastics are among the most commonly used packaging materials thanks to their durability, flexibility and recycle ability.
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