When we ship to you the upcycled goodness you order from Hipcycle, our number one priority is to get your items to you safely and quickly. Right behind that in priority is to minimize the impact of shipping your order on our environment. We save pretty much every piece of packaging material that comes in to us and reuse it (you may see a new box from time to time, but that's only if we don't have a reused box that suits your order.)
All of this saving and reusing includes saving bags and bags of those little styrofoam space-filler thingees that keep things safe and snuggly when they ship to you. They have lots of different names:
- foam peanuts
- packing peanuts
- packing noodles
- packing foam
And my personal favorites: "ghost poop" for the white ones, and "clown poop" for any of the colored ones.
Despite their usefulness, aren't they irritating? If they get loose, they blow all over the place, and many of them are made from materials like polystyrene that are decidedly not eco-friendly. And boy, do we get lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them. We do our best to reuse every last one that comes in our warehouse door, and if you get some from us, I really hope you save them for a future packing use.
It's a battle we continually fight, so on at least a superficial level, we consider ourselves to be experts on ghost poop. Here are some of the ones we see:
| This one here is your "Basic Ghost Poop" or BGP. BGP is light as a feather, and so loves to blow away from you. They're really quite evil, actually... | |
| Speaking of evil BGP, this guy actually comes packing some devil horns....hmm, evil indeed. It blew away seconds after taking this photo. | |
| If the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was a ghost, and I'm pretty sure he was, this would be his poop. | |
| If the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was a ghost, and a CLOWN, this would be his poop. I apologize to anyone who is reading this and has had all of their childhood coulrophobia come rushing back to them. | |
| More clown poop, and this is one is maddening because the skinny middle means that it is more likely to break in half and become twice as hard to keep corralled for future use...grrrr. | |
| This little bugger is not from a Lucky Charms box, but rather was extruded for your packing peanut pleasure. | |
| Don't like green or white? At the Hipcycle warehouse, we gotcha covered with Pink Clown Poop (PCP). | |
| This one is just contrarian. Really, why is it necessary to make Ghost Poop in more than one shape? Who sits around thinking this stuff up? | |
| And this one? Less necessary than the last, and that one was completely unnecessary. | |
| And here may be the prizewinner of the unnecessary. Why take non-biodegradable Ghost Poop and keep it loose when you can seal it up in little non-biodegradable plastic bags? | |
| Yup, they seriously did that. I ripped it open just out of curiosity. Just BGP inside | |
| But not all hope is lost. This one is made out of corn starch, so they do biodegrade, but they also turn into a nasty sticky mess when they get wet. I would guess, being made out of corn, that they are edible. Anybody know? Anybody tasted them? How would you season them? Me personally? I'd go cajun. Mmmmm, Cajun Ghost Poop (CGP). | |
| We got some of these recently. They're not poopy. Rather, they are cardboard, and according to their website, they lock together to provide superior protection in transit. Hey, that's pretty cool! |
Have some Ghost/Clown Poop lying around? Heavens no, don't send it to us. We have enough of it already. It may be driving us to insanity...why else would we be cataloguing it, for upcycling's sake?
But, if you do have some, you can find places to drop off your ghost poop for reuse by clicking here.
What do you think of ghost poop? Share your thoughts below.
_____
For more great upcycling posts become a Hipcycle Insider! Sign up here:
Andrew Sell is Founder and Chief Hipcycler at Hipcycle, an e-commerce site for great upcycled products. When not fixating on upcycling, he fixates on...ghost poop.
1 Response
My cats eat the cornstarch 'poop'....and the mice in the attic when I tried to save a bag for future use. I think the mice have set up permanent residence since then. It must have been tasty, but stale....but worth hanging around for the off chance of getting access to more.
August 2, 2012 at 1:10 pm