ExpandOS

2010-05-29 : rambling

Every once in a while, an idea comes along that’s so obvious you’re offended it took so long to get to this point.

Today I was exposed to ExpandOS. I’d never heard about these before. They take recycled (and recyclable) cardboard and make it into thin sheets. Then they have a machine that folds pieces of the sheets together into little rigid interlocking space-filling triangular prisms. These displace things like packing peanuts, air packs, bubble wrap, and so forth. I found that they held things VERY securely; unlike with packing peanuts, things don’t have a tendency to fall through and end up one side of a box. So, they’re better for the environment and they’re actually better at what they do than the product they replace. This is a rare thing, I’m impressed.

1. I hope these catch on!

   I like the name “expandos”, but I’m not sure about the capitalized “OS” part. It looks more like the name of an open source project that way.

   
   — Niki    29 May 2010    #

2. Yea, i thought it was going to be a computer thingy.

   
   — Brendan    30 May 2010    #

3. I’m still not convinced it isn’t an operating system

   
   — Adam    31 May 2010    #

4. How is their rigidity?

   Because I can pack thing really tightly with metal spacers, too — I just wouldn’t want to.

   
   — Bill    31 May 2010    #

5. They’re pretty rigid, but not overly so — they definitely fail and start to compress/unfold/fail as stresses are placed on them; I would not expect a heavy impact to the box to make it to what is contained within, but I would expect them to keep their shape without fatigue or deformation under light/blunt/well distributed loads.

   They don’t have as much capacity to be compressed and then to spring back into shape like Styrofoam peanuts do — I suppose this is one downside, but in my experience, boxes that have suffered substantial compression (such that the peanuts really have to compress and decompress) are either going to have damage or not, it’s just whether or not the box restores to its original shape.

   Of course, I am not a packaging engineer…

   
   — Aaron N. Tubbs    31 May 2010    #