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Sealed Air Corp., the original seller of Bubble Wrap since 1960, is introducing a new version of its signature product:
Dubbed iBubble Wrap, the new packaging is sold in flat plastic sheets that the shipper fills with air using a custom-made pump. The inflated bubbles look much like traditional Bubble Wrap, with one key difference: They don't burst when pressure is applied.
Charlotte N.C.-based Sealed Air is betting iBubble Wrap will appeal to space-conscious online retailers who are driving swift growth in the global packaging business, even as fans are disappointed by the lack of pop. Traditional Bubble Wrap ships in giant, pre-inflated rolls, taking up precious room in delivery trucks and on customers' warehouse floors. One roll of the new iBubble Wrap uses roughly one-fiftieth as much space before it's inflated.
Though an afterthought for consumers, protective packaging is big business: World-wide sales hit $20 billion in 2013, the most recent data available, according to Freedonia Group, a research firm. An increasing number of products and components are shipped around the world as manufacturing has become more global. Retailers like Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp. are constantly experimenting with new types of packaging as they look for ways to undercut rivals to offer cheaper, faster shipping, all while ensuring products reach their destinations unscathed.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Friday July 03 2015, @07:18PM
The bubbles do deflate into the adjacent bubbles, rather than to the surrounding air.
The only thing separating bubbles is a pinch seal between adjacent bubbles (which are only closed off by the air pressure of an inflated bubble's walls.)
This is how they are filled in the shipping room, they are simply inflated by the pump, and the inflation air seeps between bubbles.
Squeeze them, and the pinch seal gives way, venting one bubble into the next in line.
A much better source article is here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/revamped-bubble-wrap-loses-its-pop-1435689665 [wsj.com]
An image is here: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BT-AC841_BUBBLE_9U_20150702145723.jpg [wsj.net]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 03 2015, @07:20PM
That's actually an extended version of the Marketwatch article I used, only the WSJ paywall didn't kick in for some reason...
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday July 03 2015, @07:31PM
The paywall may come back after a while. WSJ is not as bad as NY-Times, and often let some pages be available for free forever, especially if Sealed-Air corp is willing to fork over some money an treat it as an advertisement. Also WSJ's paywall is a wrapper around their articles that you can often outfox by dumpster diving through their code.
I always try to test links for paywalls via a secondary browser that doesn't share cache, running abp and cache clearing, etc. But even this can't be trusted if you've already exceeded you weekly allotment of NYT articles or what ever method they use this week.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday July 03 2015, @07:44PM
Video how it works here: http://www.sealedair.com/product-care/product-care-products/newair-ib-express# [sealedair.com]
Difference is you can inflate it onsite, rather than shipping monster rolls. Hard to tell when the payback of buying that machine might kick in.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2015, @09:33PM
It is great for people receiving the bubble wrap. I had a ton to throw out and the real bubble wrap required me to walk all over it and pop each individual bubble which was fun for about 30 seconds and then got super tedious. The new kind I was able to slice with a knife, it was easily 10x faster to deflate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2015, @04:24PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:40PM
Do not need to horde more crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2015, @05:58AM
"Squeeze them, and the pinch seal gives way, venting one bubble into the next in line."
RX'd a package containing this stuff. It looks like nice big burstable bubbles, but alas, as noted, they're all connected. To pop it, you have to compress an entire row of bubbles. Probably easiest to just stomp on it if you want that loud pop.