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Washington State will ban protective EPS starting next month

Interesting find Tim!  The Bill is dated April 19, 2021, but the article from EPE describing the bill is dated June 16, 2021, so I wonder if the Bill was amended or was the EPE article simply wrong?  It might take a bit more digging.

In helping products move from EPS protective cushioning to molded pulp I found the standard drop tests offered by ASTM, ISTA, FedEx and others to be insufficient.  What I did discover is that there was unknown design margin being offered by EPS cushioning that was never fully tested by the standard drop tests, though the real world was testing these packages in this way.  As a result, even though first rev molded pulp cushions easily passed shock and vibe tests, and read nearly identical shock transmissibility as their foam counterparts, they'd fail in significant numbers in real world shipping, especially in e-commerce and developing nations.  Why?  Because no standardized drop test actually tests all drop orientations, nor have more than one sequence of drops, though real shipping does both of these things.  On top of that, no standardized drop test attempts to measure the amount of design margin, meaning they don't tell you how much excess protection you might be providing over the go/no-go test levels.  The move from EPS to molded pulp made all of these shortcomings crystal clear.  It also became clear that the products most easily transferred to molded pulp protection were those with certain bare product attributes as measured in damage boundary testing.  Products with critical velocity change of 125"/sec (with 130 or 135"/sec even better) and critical acceleration of 50 G's were far more likely to be successful in transitioning to pulp and not requiring boxes to be made larger than when those same products are packed in molded EPS.  Many people think 50 G's is nearly impossible to achieve for their products, but a raw egg has a critical acceleration level of 60 G's, so maybe it's not as tough as some fear.  

Hi Tim,

Companies that use molded EPS cushions usually have high volumes of specific products to package and protect.  Molded parts provide predictable performance in shock, vibe, and compression testing, and they direct the load path of shock inputs into the strongest parts of a product and away from the weakest part of the geometry.  Molded pulp can provide all of these same attributes, though the parts are more fragile and weaken more readily with repeated impacts and compression load (which is why boxes sometimes need to be more rigid than when EPS is used).  The other reason for using molded parts is to speed up assembly lines and the packaging process vs. manually manipulating streams of paper.  

In contrast, Ranpak and Storopack provide good void filler in situations where boxes aren't holding the exact same product from one order to the next, or that product volumes are too low to warrant tooling for a molded solution.  These void-filler solutions can provide cushioning as well as blocking and bracing, but being manually placed means repeatability and predictability would be less than molded solutions.  Also, the cushioning isn't provided specific to the needs of a particular product, meaning the load paths aren't being engineered to direct impacts to the strongest part of a product.  Finally, settling can occur more readily in void filler solutions, thus leaving rattle space in the box if not filled fully.  If the product is vibration sensitive, then this can lead to problems.   

So, going back to your question, it would seem like comparing foam peanuts to bubble wrap to crinkled paper would be a better comparison than to compare those to molded solutions, whether it be molded pulp or molded EPS.