My buddy Tom (famed co-founder of both the Ann Arbor Dueling Society and L & M Precision Machine, Inc.), isn't normally prone to take a hand in world affairs. He's active with home and work and family and friends, but not usually with matters beyond that.

But recently, he was moved to send an email to both CNN and Fox News. I present it here without comment:

If I wanted to know about American Idol, I would watch American Idol. Please stop polluting the airwaves with stories about American Idol.

Human ingenuity is always amazing. It creates wealth where none existed before.

OfficeMax sells a product that's so insignificant from their perspective that they don't even list it on their Web site. It's called Anti-Static Eco-Packing. It's a recyclable, biodegradable alternative to packing peanuts. And it's cheaper (though it's hard to tell for sure: both products are sold by volume, but this stuff is more compressible, so similar volumes aren't similar in packing value). From the picture, it looks like little spirals of some sort of springy substance.

So what is it? Looking inside, I find that it's the shavings left over when the box company cuts corrugated cardboard into boxes.

And it's perfect! Yes, it's more compressible than peanuts, but not dramatically so. And it does a nice job of filling in empty spaces in boxes.

Is it recyclable? Maybe. You could certainly reuse it if you were so inclined. But the more important fact is that it's already recycled. Before they decided to repackage it as packing material, this stuff would've accumulated on the box factory floor, gotten swept up, and been disposed of. I'm no paper expert. Maybe they could've pulped it for new cardboard. But I suspect they would've just burned it. All labor drains. Instead, they put that same labor to work creating something of value. I'm impressed.