Here's a tale of two packing pellets, also known as packing peanuts, with a dramatic difference that makes you wonder why the usage of one of them isn't mandatory!
Yes, the large packing pellet in the above photo is your typical styrofoam variety. Lightweight, easy to produce and inexpensive to purchase, this pellet does the job quite well. Unfortunately, it will likely get tossed after one use and then sit in a landfill or bob about in the ocean for the next 500 years.
Take packing pellet number two though, the smaller one in a cluster in the photo, and you have a very different story. This particular one is made of corn starch ( others can be made from grain sorghum) and while it is more expensive to manufacture and does add more weight to a shipped package, it is distinctive in that it is also compostable!
Not that I'd advocate using 20 litres of water to rid myself of a sinkful of pellets but the experiment does show that the pellets will simply dissolve when wet, a far cry better than the polystyrene version that should be outlawed.
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