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Yes, it cracks me up that kids think they are living lightly on the earth when they throw away pounds of single-use plastic every day!

Before 1960, hardly any products came in plastic containers. As you say, cloth sacks, paper bags, waxed kraft paper wrap for meat and fish, metal toothpaste tubes (that stayed squished and didn’t spring back!), even glass jars for toiletries.

I’m watching the first seasons of “Death Valley Days” and look for how things were wrapped for customers in the general stores. Early kraft wrapping paper and twine in abundance. Of course, kraft paper required the Kraft process and paper mills and they were fairly new at the turn of the 20th Century. The kraft process was invented by Carl F. Dahl in 1879 in Danzig, Prussia, Germany. U.S. patent 296,935 was issued in 1884, and a pulp mill using this technology began in Sweden in 1890.

I didn’t know that the kraft process was invented in Danzig. That happens to be where my Dad was born!

Thanks for your interesting post about kraft paper (for the uninitiated, it is the various grades of brown paper used for wrapping or constructing corrugated cartons).

We were fortunate as a nation to have abundant timber. All that scrap wood pulp and sawdust from the mills, and also cotton rags and scrap fiber from textile mills, is the raw material for sturdy paper. I toured paper mills as part of my job in the 80s. The sour stink of the fermenting paper mash was overpowering! And the paper-making machinery was amazing.

Because paper in the 1950s used to be made from original fibers, it was higher quality than the recycled stuff of today, where the fibers have been broken down again and again. Even the tissue paper that they wrapped your clothing purchases in at the department store was such excellent quality, home sewers saved it to make patterns with.

One of the delights of my childhood was receiving the shirt cardboards around which my dad’s business shirts came folded from the dry cleaners. My mom did all the laundry for the entire family, adults and kids, except for those five white shirts, washed, starched and steam pressed at the cleaners. Some of the shirt cardboards were just coarse-textured and gray; but sometimes they would come with a white paper coating on one side. The gray ones could be used to construct small containers, or houses and roadways for toy cars, but the white-on-one-side ones were great “canvases” for pencil drawings or tempera water color paintings!