The Eternal Kernel: Packers Cling to High-Tech Evil

Since publishing a complaint from English professor Fallon Evans about those satanic little plastic kernels that are used to fill the empty spaces in packages of merchandise, I have been trying to find out their origin and name.

Evans called them kernels and said they were walnut-shaped. They do have different shapes, but some of them look to me like peanuts.

Whatever we call them, almost everyone seems to agree that they are a mischievous evil. They flow from one’s hands, refusing to be clutched; they cling to one’s clothes, they float to the floor and bounce under chairs and tables; they are almost impossible to capture and dispose of.

My friend Herb Henrikson, the Caltech design engineer who makes machines that catch neutrinos and other subatomic particles, agrees that the little pellets are a nuisance, but he resents the public’s tendency to blame technology and engineers for every dubious invention.

“For as long as I can remember,” he writes, “advancing technology and its perceived villainous perpetrators, the engineers, have been taking the rap for almost every annoyance dogging us in our daily lives. It is time that the accountants and lawyers take their share of the responsibility.”

Henrikson recalls that the white pellets used for cushioning packages used to be “real, organic, biodegradable popcorn.” He remembers receiving delicate instruments packed in real popcorn. He ate some, he says, and found it tough and chewy but edible. Later the popcorn was dyed purple, and a slip in the package advised that it was not edible.

“I suspect,” he says, “that someone with a big appetite, a stomachache and a lawyer persuaded the shippers to forgo the purple popcorn. Shredded newspaper returned as the packing material of choice. True, the engineers came up with the inedible Styrofoam popcorn substitute. And true, the static cling is the real annoying aspect of the stuff.

“But it is a fact provided by a local supplier that there is a process developed by engineers that prevents the pellets from clinging to the customer’s clothes and hands. It is a pink antistatic coated variety, but (I’m told) it costs 15% more than the regular stuff and they sell 10 times more of the clingers than the antistatic variety.

“So in all fairness let’s blame the lawyers for the end of purple popcorn and the accountants for standing in the way of the 15% solution.”

Henrikson’s argument is seductive, but in the end it may be the public’s fault for not wanting to pay 15% more for something it didn’t want in the first place.

Also, I should warn Henrikson against calling the popcorn Styrofoam . I don’t know whether Styrofoam makes them, but it doesn’t make plastic cups, and if you refer to plastic cups as Styrofoam, you hear from their lawyers, Styrofoam being a trademark name.

Meanwhile, my neighbor Mike Mauer has his own name for them: “I have just finished reading about those horrible little plastic pellets,” he writes. “They are properly called baby guys , a term coined by my young nephew, Daniel, some years ago. I have called them baby guys ever since, in spite of their ugly, indestructible, and thoroughly malignant nature.”

Mauer is incensed by people who make no attempt to corral the escaped peanuts, popcorn, walnuts, kernels or pellets, as you wish, (several readers say they are called “angel poo” or “ghost poo”) and dispose of them properly.

“A few weeks ago a crew clearing brush from a slope across the street spilled a box of plastic pellets, without lifting a finger to capture them while they were relatively confined. Two cubic feet of baby guys will cover a half-acre of Mt. Washington in far less time than it has taken to write this paragraph. I am still picking the damn things up, and questioning the ancestry of the men who dropped them. Think globally, act locally.”

I found two plastic foam sales companies in the phone book. A woman at one called the pellets popcorn, though she didn’t know whether popcorn was ever actually used; a man at the other called them peanuts. He referred me to STOROpack, a Downey company that makes them.

A woman at STOROpack named Susan faxed me three yards of material on the various pellets they make. In the trade they are called loose-fills. PELASPAN-PAC looks like either a fat S or a peanut, and comes in antistatic pink as well as white. (By the way, the S shape is a trademark of the Dow Chemical Co.) STOROpack also makes saucer-shaped pellets and one, SUN-PAC, that is photodegradable, meaning that it disintegrates into dust under direct sunlight.

Let’s hope the baby guys spilled across from Mauer’s house are SUN-PAC.

Of course it’s possible that Henrikson found the popcorn tough and chewy because it was really plastic.