How We Make Bubble Wrap
The raw material for bubble wrap is polyethylene. Polyethylene is probably the most commonly used polymer in everyday life. It is the polymer that is used to make grocery bags, shampoo bottles, children’s toys, and even bullet-proof vests! The polyethylene enters the bubble wrap factory in a bead form (the size of a small pea).
This beaded polyethylene travels through a corkscrew and is heated (a process known as extrusion) and melted into a liquid to create a clear, plastic layer. Two flat layers of film are produced from this process. One layer is passed over a steel cylinder with holes in it. A powerful vacuum pump inside steel cylinder pulls the flat polythene layer tight over it to create the bubble.
The second flat layer of film is the passed over the cylinder-laminating itself to the first layer to seal everything together and make it impossible for air to escape the bubbles. The two most common sizes of bubble available (large and small) are made using cylinders with different sized holes. Small bubble has a diameter of 10mm and a height of 3.5mm per bubble – large bubble has a diameter of 20mm and a height of 7mm.
Bubble wrap is the best way to package fragile and heavy items to ensure they will not break or chip. Compared to other cushioning materials, bubble wrap holds its air longer and more consistently. It is also thicker than most cellular cushioning materials, making it stronger and more durable.
Bubble wrap will also save you money on shipping fragile items. Because you do not need much bubble wrap to properly secure an item, less material is used to provide better safety and security for the item.
Bubble wrap also provides some environmental benefits. Not only is it recyclable at many independent recycling centres, but people can use it over and over without it reducing its effectiveness. The fact that less material is used for packaging when you choose bubble wrap also emerges as an environmental benefit.
Manufacturers love bubble wrap because they have found that when they use it for shipping their products, a much smaller number of replacements are needed. When using other packaging materials, the number of replacement items is always elevated.
When Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes invented Bubble Wrap in 1957, they marketed it as a textured wallpaper but unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down well with consumers. They then decided to sell it as a form of greenhouse insulation (some still use it for this purpose today). However, the material didn’t become popular until IBM sought a material to help protect its shipment of its brand new 1401 Data Processing System – three years after its invention.
On the 12th annual Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, the creators of the material decided to conduct a survey to see how much stress relief popping its bubbles provides. It turns out that just a minute of Bubble Wrap popping has the same effect as a 33-minute massage! Don’t have any Bubble Wrap to hand? This app will let you pop virtual bubbles all day long!
There’s a World Record for almost everything – Bubble Wrap included! On 19th September 2015, 2,681 people popped Bubble Wrap together, smashing the previous record of just 942 simultaneous poppers. We’re sure this a record that will get broken again in the future!
Each year, the world produces enough bubble wrap to cover the entire earth ten times over. That is a huge amount of bubble wrap! Whoever said bubble wrap was hard to find?
