As I work as an artist, I use a lot of plastic bubblewrap to wrap up paintings and wanted to try paper bubblewrap instead. To be fair I always reuse bubblewrap and it never actually gets thrown away.
The only time I need to buy more is if I wrap up a painting that is sold so I need to replenish it. This doesn’t actually happen a lot of the time as my paintings are more often sold at art fairs and exhibitions where they deal with the wrapping and selling.
However, I am aware that this is more plastic waste that is going into the environment so the last time I needed to buy more bubblewrap I went for the more environmentally friendly paper bubblewrap option to see how that would work out. I bought it online and it cost just over £20 for a 70m roll (75 cm wide) including postage and packing.
Now I can’t actually remember exactly how much the plastic bubblewrap costs but looking at prices online there doesn’t seem to be much of a cost difference between the two.
Anyway, the first time I needed to use the paper bubblewrap was when I sold a painting at an outdoor art fair and then I proceeded to try and wrap it up. Firstly you need to cut the paper bubblewrap with scissors as it doesn’t really tear that well. Secondly I then tried to tape the bubblewrap up. This is where I really struggled as the masking tape I use with plastic bubblewrap didn’t seem to stick to the paper stuff.
In the end I had to wrap the painting in plastic to give to the customer unfortunately.
I have also tried to stick the paper bubblewrap with brown tape and that also didn’t really work too well.
So unfortunately I can’t really recommend the paper bubblewrap. Much as I wanted to report that this was a great alternative to plastic stuff, it doesn’t really work that well. As it is I now have a large roll to use up so I will keep trying with it. Maybe I just need to tie it up with string rather than trying to stick it together.
I think it would work well with small items such as mugs that you can wrap it round but it just isn’t that great with flat paintings.
If you want to buy paper bubblewrap for yourself then I got mine from Kite Packaging.
