We love this hack, but why are water bottle cases shrink-wrapped in the first place? The process itself is no different than shrink-wrapping anything else: wrap in plastic, heat, shrink, and repeat. For big-brand water bottles like Kirkland and Poland Spring, that’s done on a production line, where the bottled water is covered in a thin layer of plastic polymer and put through a heating and cooling cycle that wraps the case tight before shipping it out.
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But why use shrink-wrap, when soda can cases are often packaged in cardboard, which is not only biodegradable but much, much easier to open? Plastic water bottles used to be packaged in cardboard cases, but manufacturers switched to shrink-wrap as a way to reduce packaging volume and attempt to make their products more sustainable. The shrink-wrap is also an opportunity to stand out on store shelves; companies use the shrink-wrap as a plastic canvas on which to magnify their branding with larger logos, setting themselves apart in a sea of competing bottled waters.
While the shrink-wrap is great for manufacturers, it’s difficult to remove as a consumer, which is why this hack is great. And unlike so many other TikTok hacks that crowd our feeds, this one’s not annoying. I’d even go so far as to proclaim it as the correct way to defeat shrink-wrap and do what I’m guessing we’ll all need to this summer: drink as much water as possible.
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