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Key Takeaways Paper has had a decade-long head start as the “sustainable” alternative, and yet the global packaging waste problem is far from solved.
For entrepreneurs making packaging decisions, this reframe changes the game. The opportunity is not in finding a slightly less harmful disposable. It is in designing materials and systems where disposability itself becomes unnecessary.
Not many people spend their idle hours reading research findings about trash management. I do. What happens to a material at the end of its life is at the core of the work I do.
So imagine the shock I felt when I learned that a newspaper could be buried in a landfill and still be perfectly legible more than 40 years later.
We know this is true because of William Rathje, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona who spent decades doing something nobody else wanted to do. He dug up garbage. His Tucson Garbage Project excavated 10+ American landfills between 1987 and the 2000s, pulling out layer after layer of buried waste. His team recovered 2,425 newspapers, some from the 1950s, still readable. And paper was not some minor finding. It was the single largest category of waste by volume in every landfill they opened.
That fact stayed with me.
So when India banned identified single-use plastic items in July 2022 and tightened carrier bag thickness rules to 120 microns by December that year, paper bags flooded every retail counter and e-commerce shipment in the country. I assumed, like most people, that this was progress. Paper is natural. Paper is biodegradable. Paper is sustainable. Right?
Then something very odd hit me.
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