I read that certain street food vendors in a Beijing sell edible cakes made of card box pulp, fatty meat and powdered seasoning. This confirms that recycling is inherent to human nature, or perhaps that cardboard is a truly versatile material. Cardboard is engineered paper, just as plywood is engineered wood, and therefore has extraordinary mechanical properties that make it suitable for many uses. Since our Western capitalist societies are based on individual accumulation and accumulation has its own spatial demands, it turns out that the cardboard box, understood as deployable, efficient and economical storage container, is one of the most ubiquitous objects in our homes, one that inevitably we recur to many times during the course of our lives. A British company commercializes cardboard boxes that incorporate a grid of pre-punched circles that you can pop out to create a label. It used to be that you picked up a marker and wrote “blankets” on the side of a generic cardboard box that you were reusing for the tenth time. With a MeBox, you have to pay $15 per box, after seriously considering the color combination of your choice; you have to think hard about the label design; you pop out the circles (oops! I popped out the wrong circle, I need to spend another $15); and in two years, when you want to reuse the box to store something completely different, the label does not work anymore...ah, the great benefits of good design!
