We’re pondering that too! There is so much space in those boxes that just goes waste. Why can’t they make smaller boxes or just fill the big ones up?

One reason might be that when these boxes are transported from one place to another, they get a lot of rough treatment. If the boxes would be packed tight with cereal, bigger flakes would break and then your cereal wouldn’t go snap, crackle, and pop.

Another reason might be that bigger boxes give the impression that there is a lot of cereal inside. However, a regular shopper would know that since all these boxes are half full, they all contain more or less the same quantity of cereal.

Is this a wasteful activity? Certainly, it takes up more cardboard than required. Cardboard comes from trees, and for each wasteful box, there is more destruction of forests. What’s the most ecological solution then? Standup pouches, for sure.

These stand up pouch bags are not made of paper, so they’re good for trees. The process of making pouches uses minimum energy, leading to a green manufacturing technique. Besides, since a pouch takes no more area than a flat sheet of paper, it can be shipped easily, saving more energy.

They are reusable, and with the addition of a zipper, the customer can take the desired amount of cereal and zip up the pouch. Once they are used and done with, they can be thrown into a landfill, where they take the minimum space. Thus there is no requirement for extra landfills. We’ve got limited space and we cannot add to it. More landfills mean less useful area.

And then they can be dug up from the landfill and grounded to form filler for various plastic products like park benches and dog kennels.

Are standup pouches biodegradable? No they are not. But wait, even as we say that paper bags are biodegradable; they need proper sunlight and oxygen to rot. Deep down in a landfill, where there is no air or light, a paper bag is as good as a plastic pouch. That thing is not rotting and it isn’t going anywhere.

Long story short – standup pouches are a greener alternative than cardboard boxes. They save trees and energy. If you don’t want large and wasteful boxes, you can go with standup pouches. But a bigger and more important question here is – is your cardboard box half empty or half full?