What if, along with Léon Marchand and the Friges, the recycled cardboard beds offered to athletes were the other stars of the Paris Olympic Games? “Too difficult”According to some athletes, who even had to go for a massage, these beds proved incredibly viral, giving rise to hilarious videos of strength tests and crazy rumours: certain followers of the nocturnal conspiracy wanted to see in these beds a precarious appearance, already used during the Tokyo Olympics for ecological purposes, anti-sex devices. More recently, they were back in the news during the Paralympic Games. A sitting volleyball champion who suffers from acromegaly, the Iranian athlete Morteza Mehrzad, 2.46 metres tall, received three extensions to complete his modular bed base and thus stop sleeping on the floor. Far from being anecdotal, this commotion about the cardboard bed tells in its own way of the central place that this material now occupies in our lives.
In the United States, the food companies Nabisco and Kellogg’s popularised its use for packaging their biscuits and cereals as early as 1905. A true extension of a brand’s image, cardboard offers additional space for placing a logo, a slogan, the colours or the universe of a company… “Packaging is the first physical link with our customer. It is an object in itself.”confirms Caroline Bordet-Le Lann, CSR Manager at Cdiscount. From being an attractive novelty, in just a few decades it has become an invasive evidence.
When TikTok star litter picker Ludovic Franceschet set out on a walking pilgrimage from Paris to Marseille in August 2023 to raise awareness of the issue of waste on his social media, he was quickly astonished by what he found in the trash trail: “From Brétigny in Essonne to Avignon in Vaucluse, we discovered real cardboard fields. Instead of poppies, the symbol of the Amazon, everywhere!” Every day, this garbage collector is in contact with the secrets of our trash. “Cardboard has invaded our lives, it is omnipresent in what we consume. Food packages, hygiene products, Vinted or Cdiscount, not to mention the thousands of pizza boxes!”, he says.
The instruction given to garbage collectors to collect only closed garbage containers is now impossible to respect: “We have to force everything into the yellow bin with our hands, partly because the size of our rubbish bins no longer adapts to our consumption.” When he comes home at night, he sometimes thinks about the boxes still lying at the bottom of the containers. “If it rains, they turn into compote and filter into our sewers and then into our rivers”“We are very pleased with the results,” says Ludovic Franceschet. “Although it is one of the best recycled materials in France, it is often associated with inks that may contain chemicals or heavy metals.” (especially food or promotional packaging). They are sometimes subjected to chemical treatments to improve water or grease resistance, and their decomposition can contaminate soil or groundwater.
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