Engineer Al Fielding and Swiss inventor Marc Chavannes envisioned a textured wallpaper in 1957 New Jersey. In order to create the texture they imagined, they attached shower curtains in a way that would capture air bubbles. The wallpaper idea,however, did not sell as most people did not care for textured wallpaper as these designers did.
After realizing that the wallpaper idea was unsuccessful among consumers, they were still determined to find another purposed for the sealed air they came up with. They thought that they could use the bubble wrap for greenhouse insulation. Although bubble wrap has somewhat of an insulating effect, it was another unsuccessful product idea. It wasn't until Frederick W. Bowers first coined the term "bubble wrap." In late 1959, IBM announced their new word length computer, and Bowers thought Bubble wrap would be a good packaging material during its shipping. After pitching this idea to IBM and demonstrating its protective abilities, IBM began buying it to protect their fragile products that had to be shipped.
The main ethical concern that bubble wrap arises is the plastic pollution. Millions of packages are shipped on a daily basis from hundreds of companies, and consumers do not properly recycle or reuse the packaging material. This improper disposal of packaging material negatively impacts the environment. If it was only used as wallpaper (as originally intended), the sealed air would mostly be on walls rather than in oceans.
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