World in a Box: Cardboard Media and the Geographic Imagination
Some of my favourite quotes:
There was comfort in this ritual — or at least familiarity, which passes for comfort in difficult times. The smarrow points the way forward.
The comfort and familiarity of convenience — endless resources at our fingertips, summoned by a tap on a rectangular ‘Buy Now’ button. It is recyclable, in other words, redeemable. Our material desires, and our attempts to fill the void they leave behind, become symbolically cleansed as we flatten boxes and place them into the recycling bin. A ritual of redemption, however futile.
It was a boom time for cardboard. Amazon leased a new warehouse in Hunts Point. Another in Red Hook. One on Staten Island, at the Matrix Global Logistics Park. Nationally, the company doubled its real-estate footprint (before scaling back a bit). 4 But as delivery trucks proliferated, so did tent cities. Homelessness in the United States rose to levels not seen since the Great Depression. On any given night last year, more than 650,000 people were homeless, and more than a third of those lived outdoors, shielded by tarps and tents and cardboard sheets. 5
I am particularly drawn to cardboard’s symbolic role in the polarised distribution of wealth and resources. The same material that safeguards consumer goods for the housed becomes a sheltering skin for those without homes. A box can deliver comfort — or be the last thin boundary between a body and the street. The juxtaposition is devastating.
…for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. 8 It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. 9 Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.” 10
The box, silent and brown, is a messenger. It arrives at our doorstep having passed through hands and systems we seldom consider — customs, sorting hubs, fulfillment centres, and last-mile drivers. It embodies a kind of invisible global intimacy, connecting us with labour and infrastructures far away. Its presence in our homes is not neutral. As Walter Paepcke once said, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.”
I was impressed by the carefully engineered systems and the graphics that make them legible — from the safety signage and floor markings, to the performance dashboards and meticulously organized tool kits. The careful scripting of how paper and cardboard move through this plant suggests how the box itself moves through the world, along logistical pathways.
It’s important to remember that this article is written by a Western academic describing a highly advanced, likely well-funded paper plant. Not all cardboard is produced this way. My mother once visited a paper plant in China for work, and the chemical smell was so overwhelming she had to step out for breaks. She noticed that most workers were not wearing proper protective gear. These conditions — underregulated, unsafe, and toxic — are not exceptional in the global waste and production industries, especially in developing countries. Behind the choreography of logistics lies a messier, more precarious world.
but “most of the innovation,” said communications manager John Carmichael, “is in graphics,” especially printing inside the box…Paper, easier to print on than canvas or wood, was ideal for that purpose…Another advantage was marketing. Flexographic presses printed directly onto cardboard, opening up “many million square feet of free advertising space” on cartons as they moved from train to truck to doorstep.
This echos Paepcke’s point that packaging are communications.
As Hine observes, packages today are media with many authors: “typically the work of designers, engineers, and one or more government agencies including the Department of Agriculture, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Customs Service.” 40 We can add trade organizations and advocacy groups, too.
They’ve modeled developments in paper production. They’ve chronicled the evolution of commercial graphic design. Cardboard boxes have circulated the icons and lexicons of local and global brands and standards of distribution: addresses, weights, dates of dispatch. And as we’ll soon see, they’ve brought many defunct paper mills (and presses) back online to support the demands of a digital economy. Their macro-scale flows, across land and sea, map and index many globalized processes.
But by the 1950s, the CCA was running ads that did not mention its products at all. They were about the United Nations, or about “great ideas” expressed in philosophy and literature…This worldly sensibility paralleled the Container Corporation’s reach into international markets, its acquisition of foreign companies, and its extraction of natural resources.
Bayer’s atlas, an abstract design language that concealed the violence of colonial extraction and uneven development…the intense relationship between cardboard boxes and graphic design, fused in the art department at the CCA, has influenced a new generation of package design.
Packaging is engineered to produce a crinkly sound, to evoke sonic memories such as the rustle of tissue paper on Christmas morning. Boxes are fit tight, anticipation building with just the right amount of friction and drag, until the lid slides off, releasing a gust of air and a subtle pop. Apple’s elegant boxes are tiny white-cube galleries showing off objets d’art. And sometimes patterns or messages are designed inside the box to cultivate interior ambience and intimacy.
All those boxes piled up on 23rd Street, whether stamped with a crass Walmart starburst or a “local everywhere” sunflower, they’re all printed somewhere, on offset presses in factories that flatten and fold the fibers from pines grown in the southeastern United States or Brazil or some new frontier. And they’ll have a life beyond their brief stay in our homes, whether they’re sent to the recycling plant or repurposed for local uses — in some cases, providing shelter for, or delivering humanitarian aid to, human beings who have little time for Instagram or fancy olive oil.
A promise of progress that delivered not only order, precision, and prosperity, but also waste and exploitation.
What terrains and portals has it passed through? Who has scanned its barcode, and where? The seal on the bottom chronicles the box’s journey from paper roll through three-dimensional form awaiting fulfillment and activation. That seal, a story, has an unwritten preface, too: it tells of trees and forests, of land as yet another subject of mass production. It also has a tacit postscript: reincarnation as a placard, a plea, as cartonera, as a wish that its own future conditions of production and distribution express and enact a world better than the one we have now. A box that treads more lightly on the landscapes from which it derives and through which it travels.
Related references
Where Does All the Cardboard Come From? I Had to Know.
Designing a Reuse Symbol and the Challenge of Recycling’s Legacy
Excerpt from my symposium last year:
Interestingly, the recycling symbol was actually commissioned by the Container Corporation of America, a cardboard manufacturer, on the first Earth Day in 1970. Since then, large volumes of cardboard have been produced and consumed, benefiting from its reputation for being highly recyclable. This paradox highlights cardboard’s unique role in our growth-driven society, making it an ideal material for examining issues of consumption, waste, and sustainability.
Shannon Mattern, “World in a Box,” Places Journal, May 2024. Accessed 15 Apr 2025. https://doi.org/10.22269/240515