I was looking at bubble wrap Christmas Countdown calendars, and what did I find? Britain's most accident-prone street made safe...with bubblewrap.
How did I miss this? It was a while ago - in January 2010. A road in Worcester turns out to generate one of the highest number of accident claims in the entire UK. So as a publicity stunt, they used 1,500 square metres of bubble wrap to cover everything out in the open. It was a stunt to celebrate the 50th anniversary of BubbleWrap.
That means bubblewrap (aka bubble wrap) has been around longer than I had imagined. In 1957 two inventors tried to create a three-dimensional plastic wallpaper, and failed. They took two shower curtains and sealed them together with air bubbles in between. They thought it might be greenhouse insulation, but it didn't actually insulate. They then turned to packaging. Sealed Air was the company - makers of Bubblewrap - and many kinds of wrapping products including Bubble Wrap Brand Inflator Solution Set, inflatable pillows, inflatable pouches, and more recently plant-based packaging.
I would expect that Sealed Air has been a leader in contributions to pollution with all the sealed packaging solutions they have produced. Not so anymore. Now they have a large section on priorities and commitments towards environmental excellence, workplace diversity, and so on. Here's an example:
"Commit to design or advance 100% of packaging solutions to be recyclable or reusable, eliminate waste by incorporating an average of 50% recycled or renewable content into solutions, and collaborate on advanced recycling technology and infrastructure all by 2025."
Seems a bit like something Greta Thunberg would judge to be "blah blah blah." It is hard to know whether these are actual commitments or corporate jargon. One can go to many sites that have reviews from the employees on what the company is like to work for- glass door.ca, comparably.com, careerbliss, zippia, and so on. But then employees don't cover whether the company is actually fulfilling its commitments. We leave that to Fortune 500 best companies reviews. That seems dubious to me.
The accident-prone street was one of the top ten publicity stunts of 2010. The stunt took eight people more than 12 hours to complete. People woke up to a bubble wrapped street.
It was covered in top publicity stunts, and it was fascinating to scroll through them. I found a Richard Branson stunt: "donning a wedding dress for the launch of Virgin Brides." Yes - it is a picture of him in drag - wedding gown, veil, earrings and makeup.
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