Packing Peanuts have always been fun to play with. After a box of some random or needful item(s) arrive from one shipping source or another; often packing peanuts would be inside. Children get hours of enjoyment out of jumping in them, and scattering them about in smaller hidden piles like mice harvesting cat food. These packing peanuts are now biodegradable.

It often is impossible to completely clean these kinds of kid made messes.

When intentional messes come up, like picking up after Legos, or tinker toys-often pre-planning is the most efficient means of clearing a messy play area quickly. One method is the draw string circular tarp method: Which involves cutting a piece or tarp that lays in a flat large diameter as the play area. When the multifaceted toy(s) are no longer of interest, the parent teaches the child to draw the string up, and the entire play area is contained in the resulting draw string tarp bag.

This method won’t work with packing peanuts. They get scattered over lawns, earthen floors of wooden areas under tree forts, in abandoned storm shelters that are now kid forts.

If a gardener digs down far enough in a neighbourhood that has been built over a pre-existing trash heap: Discarding packing material and other things surface over time in the garden.

Before biodegradable alternatives started being offered: these light weight packing peanuts were the environmental bane of every shipping and freight yard in America.

They were an environmental disaster twisting freely in the spiraling wind. Like insects they were too light weight for any maintenance crew to catch or chase down.

In the past janitorial staff and grounds keepers would have to hope they blew away, or wait until the wind died down, and hope to sweep them all up before a new gust picked them up again.

These light weight cushions often get picked up by the wind, after shipping and moved for miles.

They get swept up into trash cans, only to be knocked or nudged free by foraging animals, and exposure to the wind.

This is why anyone who uses packing peanuts to ship materials should use biodegradable packing peanuts.

These are the kind that archaeologists won’t find two thousand years from now.

They will have long decayed into natural soil and nutrient deposits: Or, been blow to the river and consumed safely by aquatic life nearly two thousand years prior to that inquiring dig.

These biodegradable packing peanuts are not only good for shipping. They make great party confetti.

They are great for dumping off the roof of a church, Masque, temple, or meeting hall on top of the heads of fleeing newly-weds. In fact these biodegradable packing peanuts are safer for birds than rice.

So, let the biodegradable packing peanuts get shipped around, then tossed by children into the wind as additional cushion in raked leaf piles, and tossed down at weddings, food fights, and town square pillow fights. Then get picked up by the beaks of birds, and dropped in water ways across America. It won’t matter; because they are environmentally safe.