Cardboard Boxes

31-10-23 00 / episode: 288

Hi and welcome to the Les Perras podcast . Today . You're listening to episode 288 about cardboard boxes . My son and I like to make things together . We bought Lego and we would make things out of the lego kits . It was fun . But one day we weren't at home, we were at my school and we didn't have LEGO . He said, I wanna make something . I got a cardboard box and I said, let's use this right away . We had trouble because it was difficult for him to cut the cardboard . His hands weren't strong enough . I worked with him for about 15 minutes and taught him some cutting techniques . And then he was able to cut the cardboard by himself after he had the shapes cut out . There was another problem . The problem was putting the shapes together, the glue that he had in his pencil case wasn't very good . It wasn't strong enough to hold the cardboard together . I thought for a minute and then I said, let's get some tape . I got something . It's rather like duct tape . And we used that, but it was difficult for him to cut the tape . And again, I thought about it and we looked at some techniques and I taught him techniques to cut the tape so he could put the cardboard together to make the shape he wanted . It was a small success for us . And after that, if he began his career of building things with cardboard boxes, he would make guns, he would make tanks, he would make helmets and shields . Like he was inspired from the Avengers comics . It was wonderful . Cardboard is a wonderful thing . It's very, very versatile . Most of the time we use it just for making boxes . And the first cardboard box was made about 200 years ago . However, it was just cardboard . It was one sheet of card paper . About 18 71 they made corrugated cardboard . Corrugated cardboard is the three layer cardboard . There's a layer on top, a layer on the bottom and in between is the wavy up and down layer for what they call corrugation to give it strength and the cardboard is quite a bit stronger with the corrugation . Now, if you're using cardboard, you can rest assured cardboard is a renewable resource . That means we're not pulling oil out of the ground to make it and we will run out in the future . We can keep growing trees but don't abuse it . Don't use it too much because we still have to think about the environment . Well, thanks for listening today and come back again tomorrow .