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Published: January 19 2012

Buzz Fleischman - Columnist Page The importance of cardboard to our culture is on par with astrophysics and the technology that allows us to speak to and see someone in Tonga via our computer for as little as .002 of a cent per month. (All we need to do is find someone in Tonga willing to speak to us.)

Raw cardboard fresh from the factory is by itself benign, but configured into boxes it houses civilization, including flat screen TVs, auto parts and candy.

Cardboard, in truth neither card nor board but somewhere in between, is ubiquitous and highly useful. But it can also mislead.

Take, for example, the cardboard packaging for an item in a gourmet emporium, such as you'll find in Teuscher Chocolate of Switzerland. In the back rooms of Teuscher, incredibly artistic and imaginative gift wrappers toil, tying tiny ribbons and affixing other ornate decorations to gift boxes of candy you hate to open. Just seeing this packaging is almost reward enough.

But open them we must. The packaging, 10 inches long by 2 inches wide by 1 inch deep, looks more than capable of containing as many as 10 or 15 almond rochas. But the beautiful packaging in reality contains only two candies.

Why? Well, why not? The package is the selling point. We buy with our eye. We bought the package.

It's like big government; you expect a fair shake, but you don't get a lot. Packaging, as often as not, is more important than the product.

And we keep that packaging long after the product is used. What do we do with the box when the computer's been delivered? We save it. If there's a problem and we need to send the computer somewhere, we'll need the original box. That goes for a lot of products.

We're savers, and taken to the next level, Americans are 'stuff junkies,' which is proven by the great amount of store-your-stuff facilities in place and being built. Places to package your packages.

After all, what do we see in these compendiums of crap? Cardboard boxes.

And those not containing our stuff are still not broken down flat so as to save space, but still in their original configuration because we haven't figured out the tab 'A' into slot 'B' thing yet. That means we're basically storing air. We've saved more cardboard than the law should allow, in the process creating a whole industry.

We can recycle millions of pounds of cardboard into those cup sleeves you get at the coffee bar to keep your hand from burning, or we can continue to store it in case civilization breaks down and we have to send everything back.

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