But with lower material costs per item, that saves someone money. And the less trees you need, the less fertiliser, and the less shipping of everything.
And not All trees used for paper products are from farmed trees, just in some countries. On the other hand, they’re probably the ones that use the most cardboard boxes.
Rubbish. The definition of cardboard certainly covers this type of material. If its made of wood pulp and its thicker than paper, it’s cardboard.
It’s and interesting concept, they should be commended for thinking out of the box(ha!). Good designs have often been compromised during the manufacturing stage(i.e. Concept vs production vehicles). A product design might be brilliant, but if the manufacturing of that product using existing tooling wastes material/time, then the tooling and manufacturing line might also need a redesign…
Here’s my critique for the two students:
Regarding the design, I think the biggest flaw of your design is that the dieline required to manufacture the RPC is overly complex. Shipping boxes come in many sizes, and as such the ability to generate new box sizes will require an expensive die punch for each size. So not only do you need a cutting die blade for the outer perimeter of the box, but since you’ve spec’ed and reversible recycle benefit, instead of having a crushed or scored fold line, all your fold lines are perfed. Any die that needs to shear material will dull and require replacement during manufacturing.
Another flaw, as other commenters have indicated, is that it doesn’t look like your design will tessalate without waste.
Lastly the wax stripe that functions as reusable closing adhesive requires a secondary manufacturing step to add it to box either mechanically or manual tip in. This process, if mechanical, needs to be registered correctly to function, so that adds to the manufacturing cost.
The video presentation states that the problem to be fixed is that of the 100 billion old skool kardboard boxes being manufactured in the US, they are wasteful, hard to open, and difficult to pack.
You state that the solution is the rapid packing container which is environmentally friendly, quicker to pack, easier to open, and easier to store and recycle.
You claim a single RPC uses 15-20% less cardboard, and this looks to be a fairly accurate statement. Based on what I can see from the video, there is not the wasteful double layer of corrugated for the top and bottom faces of the traditional cardboard box. But the environmentally friendlier claim doesn’t include manufacturing waste. The quicker to pack claim is based on the folding and packing jig. Unfortunately if this tool is lost or damage, any timesaving for folding and packing the container are lost if a manual fold needs to happen. Since the RPC doesn’t have any glue lines, it appears that all the open edges of the box are brought to a single (top) surface, so the claim that it’s easier to open seems to jive. As far as storing an unfolded RPC, since it no longer has a rectangular perimeter, the potential of damaging a critical tab/edge/slot kinda negates the ease of storage claim.
I give you kudos for the clever folding pattern to save material, but I don’t think that will offset the added expense of a more complex manufacturing process or the waste cutoff from the dieline. You might have solved the ease of use issue, but I don’t think that the benefit is enough. Using tape to seal a box and using a knife/keys/pen to cut the tape to open a box isn’t that big a deal nor does it take a lot of time or effort. If your going to design a product that’s more difficult and expensive to produce and require a new tool to use, make sure you are solving real problems. If you still want to reinvent the box, study origami and design a single sheet box that requires fewer cuts and folds as a standard box.
Historically we’ve gone through an awful lot of archival boxes at work (SI-NMNH), and they tend to be rather boring - just stiff shells with a single top that fits over the bottom. They have the benefit to the user of being very easy to operate, require no glue or tape to assemble (they come to us fully formed and ready-to-use), and they create a pretty effective air seal (without being air-tight, of course).
Cardboard is a paper product that is rigid by dint of its thickness. If you examine corrugated fiberboard you’ll see that it’s made up of three components: the outer faces, and a corrugated liner, all flexible paper, none of which can maintain rigidity on their own. I’m sorry to say I worked in the corrugated industry for years.
I’m sure you’re right as far as the usage inside the profession goes.
Unfortunately the term “corrugated cardboard” is in pervasive use.
As with many professional jargons, all you can do is accept that colloqual usage differs from formal usage.
Barn. Horse. Door. VOOM!
Your time in the industry obviously deafened you to common usage.
The cardboard article on wikipedia even mentions that industry dislikes the term cardboard, precisely because it covers many different materials:
Despite widespread use in general English,[1][2] the term is deprecated in business and industry.[3] Material producers, container manufacturers,[4] packaging engineers,[5] and standards organizations,[6] try to use more specific terminology. There is still no complete and uniform usage. Often the term “cardboard” is avoided because it does not define any particular material.
Next you will be telling us that those big bricks are not called “cinder blocks.”
xept they are.
I’m not debating, and I’m aware of colloquial usage, but I was just pointing out that there is technically a difference between the two materials. Call it cardboard- if it’s ok with Wiki it’s ok with me.
What do I care what you call big bricks? Do you know who else didn’t care what you call them? Hitler 
I don’t know, he seemed to have a thing for categorizing…
Cementitious building units, if you please. Same issue different field.
Thanks to all warehouse, packaging and “cardboard” folks who responded. The thing I love about Boing Boing is, the forums are like taking a class in some esoteric, but fascinating subject. This one’s better than an episode of “How It’s Made.”
To those who are worried about these students being subjected to excessive criticism:
The kinds of critiques and criticisms herein raised are typical, even moderate, relative to the critiques that occur during every collegiate industrial design product presentation. I studied ID at Auburn University, and if any of us hadn’t considered manufacturing waste, materials, cost, strength and so on, we would be duly ridiculed by both our professors and classmates during the Q/A.
I made the same mistake–not considering waste–with my very first product design project. But there’s a lot to be learned by taking an idea from start (ideation) to finish (polished marketing pitch), even for an inherently flawed design.
To the students: Nice video, guys! You certainly get full marks on “virality.”
And postal theft went up 90000% the first day
Well I’ve seen amazon boxes alone change significantly several times over the last 5 years.
Tsmall boxes not aren’t boxes so much as carboard envelopes glue sealed with tear strips, bigger boxes tend to have far less tape on them than traditionally they did.
Other poeple have taken this apart but thinking for 5 minutes shows that I’m sure the box industry has clearly been innovating and clearly this style tape-less box is something they would have considered but there are clearly reasons why it’s not happened (and many peple here seem happy to enlighten as to why that may be.
I have moved using tapeless boxes from http://theboxcompany.com. Their boxes work very well and last much longer for reuse afterwards - all other moving boxes tend to get trashed after the move. No tape definitely helps keep them strong since I don’t rip off part of the box with the tape. A tapeless system has merits for this use though it’s true it’d be easy to steal out of this box. However, I agree the easy open feature of the students design is poorly conceived.
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