Okay, I'm Ryan December.
I am a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
That's a great name you have there, Ryan.
Yeah, it is.
Good one for you, too.
Two Ryans in two different studios here to talk about one cardboard box.
You're holding one in your hand right now.
Yeah, I grabbed one because they're everywhere these days.
The technical term is a corrugated packaging.
Cardboard is actually like your paper cup, but we don't have to quibble about that.
We won't.
Cardboard, container board, you know what I'm talking about.
The brown shipping box is maybe the least exotic object in the world.
This stuff is everywhere, crammed in recycling bins, on doorsteps, stacked inside e-commerce warehouses.
Yet if you thought we were living in the era of peak cardboard, you'd actually be wrong.
So you probably wouldn't guess it,
but we're actually, on a per capita basis, America's using a lot less cardboard than we used to.
Really?
Yeah.
When you break it down of boxes per person, we peaked in 1999, which is sort of hard to believe.