But when I tell you, it has one of the most ingenious designs that could revolutionize a huge portion of waste on this planet and transform how we think about design.

I'm not exaggerating.

And while this transformation may not seem that extreme, I'm about to explain why it is.

You've probably heard of Origami, the traditional Japanese art of folding paper to create shapes and figures.

But beyond even that, it's now being used in science to create robots and mechanisms that bend and modify in brilliant ways.

Now, Kirigami is Origami's lesser known cousin.

It's simply a variation that allows you to use cuts in the paper.

These cuts can help to produce some really magnificent 3D shapes as well, including those cards you've probably seen that pop up with complex designs when you open them.

But what makes Kirigami so special is that it allows you to deploy three dimensional shapes from flat material without the need of complex folding.

And when you have brilliant minds discovering the right shapes and cut patterns, the implications can be massive.

My name is Tom Corrigan.

I'm a scientist and engineer at 3M company.

Tom's too modest to say he's the genius mind behind this pattern in three 3M' Scotch Cushion Lock, which started out as a quest to create a self-assembling box from flat cardboard.

Such a cool idea, which hasn't been realized yet.

But in the process of experimenting with Kirigami shapes and designs, they realized they may have something that could be applied to revolutionize packaging and waste.

So I literally would sit with paper and a razor blade and a sheet of paper.

And I would like, what happens if I cut something like this?

What would it do?

And I'd be like, oh, that didn't work.

Oh, that's interesting.

And this was one of the early patterns that I did. This sort of pops up and it sort of absorbs a little bit of energy, but it doesn't absorb a lot.

I mean, I made hundreds and hundreds of patterns.

What I knew I wanted as a mechanical engineer is I wanted to get a piece of material and I wanted it, I knew I wanted it to be like vertical.

I wanted a vertical wall because a vertical wall as like a column is like so much stronger.

Now, we all know the planet has a plastic problem.

It's an amazing material that's incredibly versatile, but we use it in almost everything and often in single use form.

If every single person on the planet stepped on a scale, the weight of our plastic is about 26 times heavier and currently only about 9% of plastic is ever recycled.

And packaging of deliveries and boxes is a big contributor to this problem.

We're guilty of it too.

Whether it's air filled or packing peanuts, it's all plastic.

Well, not anymore, thanks to Tom's invention.

So 1000 square feet of this would be the equivalent of 2500 ft of plastic.

I'm gonna show them right now what that looks like.

So that is this. All those rolls of plastic wrap are the equivalent to this.

Once it's expanded, one truckload of this would be 10 truckloads of plastic bubble.

And then on top of that, this is made of recycled paper.

Right. It's 100 % recycled paper. That's the only raw material that we put into it.

Literally, just. Oh my gosh, that feels so good.

And then you said you can kind of.

You can change directions.

Roll it around and, something could be an odd-shaped item.

Whenever you're ready, you don't need scissors and then you don't have to add tape because it's interlocking to itself now.

And you can check it and see what happens.

The main design goals, outside of the environmental factors, were to optimize strength and stiffness so that it could maintain its shape when deployed (conformability),

so it could wrap around objects as well as maximizing the volume it would take up when deployed in order to absorb as much energy as possible.

And of course, having it start flat with the ability to pop open reliably with minimal tension.

After much experimentation, Tom and his team decided take advantage of the honeycomb shape, which is widely used when a strong stiff structure is required with minimal weight.

This is the basic, what we call the basic folding wall pattern.

And this is going to do basically the same thing that cushion lock did.

And when I pull on it, right, it pops up.

If we look at it from the top, it makes full on honeycombs where those walls are all vertical.

If we put this. Go ahead and give that a try.

If it doesn't work, it's not your fault.

It's not that you weigh too much.

I'm not heavier than I thought.

But how can you cut a flat sheet of material such that when you apply tension, it just magically pops up and does that.

That was the thing.

The small slits in the design are what give it its mobility.

And another clever design trick was these little finger-like cutouts, not only can you optimize on height by removing a little from one area and adding it to the other,

but when wrapped around it, these edges grip onto each other interlocking and allowing the cushion lock to self-adhere without the need of tape or glue, minimizing even more waste.

One of the really exciting things I think about Kirigami is that it does scale.

It sort of depends on the thickness of your substrate.

If this sheet of material was an inch thick, you might need to have 2, 3, 4, 5, 20 inches, you know, kind of the scale of stuff just to get it to be able to deploy.

But otherwise there's no, there's fundamentally no limit.

So there you have it. A seemingly simple yet, profoundly impactful design that's not only already having a major impact on the packaging world but has implications for future uses as well as research into Kirigamai.

I want to send a big thank you to Tom and Marsha for sharing their brilliant minds with me and to 3M for sponsoring this video.

It's always amazing to see simple, innovative ideas that are shaping our world and I hope you found it as interesting as I did.

Thanks so much for watching.

Make sure you like the video and subscribe and we'll be back with more science ASAP. Peace.