Many of us don't even think about whether there is a difference between these two names. Packages are so deeply rooted in our consciousness and their use is so familiar that for us they are one and the same thing, just synonymous words.

What is cellophane and what is polyethylene?

First of all cellophane - This is a natural material, not artificial. This is a transparent film that does not dissolve in water and practically does not absorb odors. This material is obtained by processing cellulose, and the raw material for it is wood.

Polyethylene is an artificial material that is obtained through the synthesis of ethylene.

Over time, polyethylene began to occupy a more advantageous position, because the production of cellophane is very expensive and labor-intensive. Although it is safer for the environment, since it can rot and decompose, unlike its comrade. Today, cellophane can still be used to make wrappers and packaging for cigarettes, sweets, gifts and flowers.

Distinctive properties of polyethylene and cellophane:

1. Color. Paint and designs on cellophane last much longer due to the structural features of this material. But with polyethylene they are erased much faster and the bags lose their aesthetic appearance.

2. Taste. Cellophane has a slightly sweet taste due to the glycerin it contains.

3. Tactile sensation. Cellophane usually rustles, bends very easily and is hard to the touch. Polyethylene is greasy and soft.

Cellophane and polyethylene in cooking

Regarding the use of plastic bags in recipes on our site or any other. Despite the fact that the melting point of high-density polyethylene (low density), which is used in the food industry for packaging materials, is from +100 to +108 degrees, the upper limit of its operating temperature is from +60 to +70 degrees. Therefore, each of us, reading a recipe on any culinary site using a plastic bag or cling film in boiling water, can choose for himself whether to use these materials or some alternative method. And on the packaging of cling film there is an inscription from its manufacturer: “For packaging and storing food products,” but not for boiling in water.

Consider replacing the plastic wrap with a baking sleeve (labeled to be used for blanching) or baking foil. Sometimes you can use ceramic cookware, with or without a lid. As a result, you will be calm that neither you nor your loved ones have received even a minimal dose of polyethylene into the body in our age of total environmental pollution, declining immunity and increasing incidence of incurable diseases.

We wish you good health, dear visitors of our site!

Posters and advertisements with photographs of babies wrapped in cellophane seem strange to us now.
But 70 years ago, cellophane was a new product in the West, advertised as a universal packaging product.
We were 50 years late. In the USSR, plastic bags began to come into use in the late seventies.
Before this, products were packaged in paper.
Cellophane advertising from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Sheets of cellophane from gifts were carefully folded, in order to, in turn, beautifully pack your present. Grocery bags were washed and dried, and large plastic bags were almost a cult item in the USSR in the 70s. Scotch tape was brought from abroad as a gift! It was definitely not on sale in the 70s, as far as I remember. We took care of the packaging from imported equipment, especially polyethylene with bubbles, which was folded and stored.

Cellophane is a material made from wood cellulose. His invention, as often happens, was a matter of chance. In 1911, a Swiss chemist tried to invent a coating for tablecloths that would protect them from stains. The result of his experiments was a moisture-permeable transparent film - this was cellophane.

The first industrial production of this material was established in France in 1913, and 11 years later the DuPont company acquired the technology and, having patented it, began producing cellophane the following year.

Thus, a new character appeared on the packaging scene - a transparent, moisture- and air-tight film suitable for storing food products.

Cellophane, the Flavor Saver! 1936

Another advantage of cellophane is that its packaging allows the buyer to hold the product in his hands and examine it from all sides without compromising the presentation of the product.

If previously a buyer could not pick up, for example, a bun from the counter, and then put it back and leave, then with the advent of buns packaged in cellophane, this became possible.

Ad-cellophane packaged bread 1940
"Cellophane by DuPont
"Fresh! Just like this bread in cellophane!

Cellophane made it possible to examine the product without opening the package, which significantly stimulated sales and increased the number of so-called accidental purchases, that is, purchases made under the influence of fleeting desires. Products in cellophane packaging aroused such desires more often than products in cardboard.
In addition, cellophane packaging carried three more qualities: shine, cleanliness and freshness.
Glitter surrounds the product with a kind of magical halo, creates a feeling of novelty of the product, and attracts the eye.

The buyer, of course, realizes that it is not the product itself that shines, but this does not prevent him from choosing a product in shiny packaging. There are known cases when, in order to revive sluggish trade in a store, products were wrapped in cellophane and trade went several orders of magnitude faster.

Tobacco and cigarettes

Hygiene

DuPont Cellophane 1938
"I never buy handled hosiery... heaven protect silk stockings from careless hands of shoppers and clerks!

The use of cellophane packaging gives the buyer confidence in the purity of the product. This effect was especially clear when children's toys were packaged in cellophane. It seemed to the parents that no one’s hands had ever touched the toys taken out of the sealed plastic packaging.

In The 1950's, Advertisers Thought It Was A Good Idea To Wrap Babies In Cellophane

70 years ago, the plastic wrap was considered to be a thrilling novelty, as shown by these bizarre adverts touting the versatile product.

Scotch
There are several versions of where the name "scotch" came from. According to one of them, the Americans nicknamed the adhesive tape scotch tape (English scotch - Scottish), since at that time there were legends about Scottish stinginess, and the glue was initially applied only to the edge of the tape.

Vintage Scotch Cellulose Tape packaging (pre-mid ’40s).

In 1925, Richard Drew got a job as a laboratory technician at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company, which produced sandpaper.

Management assigned him to oversee the testing of a new model of Wetordry sandpaper in stores and car repair shops. Once, while in one of these workshops, he noticed that when painting cars with two or more colors, the dividing lines were sloppy.
He promised the painter to come up with something. Drew brought 2-inch-wide adhesive tape to the auto repair shop for testing. The painter decided to use a prototype, but when he started applying a different color, he noticed that the tape was warping. Taking a closer look, the painter realized that, in order to save money, the glue was applied only to the edges of the tape, and informed the inventor about this.
But, since there was no funding, only a few years later Drew began refining his invention. And on September 8, 1930, a prototype of the tape was sent for testing to a client in Chicago. The results met all expectations and costs.

Scotch tape was originally used to wrap food, but during the Great Depression people came up with many other uses for tape.

Scotch tape was originally intended to seal food wrappers. It was to be used by bakers, grocers and meat packers. But people, forced to save money during the Great Depression, themselves came up with hundreds of new ways to use tape at work and at home: from sealing bags of clothes to storing broken eggs. It was then that the tape met torn pages of books and documents, broken toys, windows that were not sealed for the winter, and even dilapidated banknotes.

An unpleasant picture can be observed on city streets, markets and parks. The wind blows colorful bags from the products we consumed. Still, we are not civilized enough to throw a plastic bag in the trash.
The use of polyethylene is now widespread due to its practicality. However, it causes a very serious environmental problem. It takes years for polyethylene to naturally decompose, and if destroyed by fire, polyethylene poisons the atmosphere with toxic gases. The greenhouse effect from the release of large amounts of heat during combustion cannot be discounted.

The race for cheap packaging will someday push us to the extreme. But this was not always the case, if we remember that the “progenitor” of polyethylene was cellophane. Its production is much more labor-intensive and expensive. Therefore, cellophane was at one time supplanted by more “promising” technologies.

We can only hope that the efforts of environmentalists will bring back into use the wonderful environmentally friendly material that is cellophane. There is no need to confuse cellophane with polyethylene; these are different materials in nature and properties.
Cellophane was first made by the Swiss Jean Edwin Brandenberger in 1908. By the nature of his activity, as a textile chemist, Brandenberger set out to rid himself of the sight of tablecloths drenched in coffee in his favorite cafeteria. The morning cup of coffee made him sad, and because of his overwhelming disgust for dirty linen, he decided to soak an ordinary tablecloth with a thin layer of cellulose.

The first experiments did not satisfy him. The fabric became thick and brittle. Increasing the layer did not provide the required strength. Until one day he noticed that a too thick layer of cellulose lags behind the fabric and creates its own transparent film. With sufficient plasticization, you can not impregnate the fabric, but make a thin transparent material. What could be simpler than covering a snow-white tablecloth with transparent film that is not afraid of water?

So for the first time in Brandnberger’s favorite cafeteria, tablecloths began to please the eye with their cleanliness and neatness. The name of the new material was given by the inventor. The word cellophane consists of two words. The words "cellulose" and the Greek word "phanos" mean transparent. Transparent cellulose has long won the sympathy of food manufacturers. The first industrial production of cellophane was mastered by entrepreneurs from France. Since 1913, cellophane began its journey around the world.

Now cellophane is experiencing a new wave of popularity among connoisseurs of clean products. Expensive varieties of sausages, confectionery and elite varieties of bread are packed only in cellophane wrapping. The advantage of cellophane is that products in such packaging last longer due to sufficient moisture permeability, which cannot be said about polyethylene or lavsan.

It turned out that the aesthetic preferences of the Swiss textile worker were the reason for the great discovery.

Cellophane is a transparent, fat- and moisture-resistant film material made from viscose.

Cellophane is obtained from a solution of cellulose xanthate. By squeezing a xanthate solution into an acid bath through dies, the material is obtained in the form of fibers (viscose) or films (cellophane). The raw material for the production of cellulose is wood.

Sausage in cellophane packaging

As you know, many discoveries are made by chance. Thus, one of the most famous materials of the 20th century was invented and developed in the process of solving a completely different problem. Chemist and engineer Jacques Brandenberger wanted to find a way to keep tablecloths clean, and he found a material that revolutionized food packaging.

The foundation of this story was laid by British chemists Charles Cross, Edward Bevan and Clayton Beadle, who in the 1890s developed and patented a reliable and safe method for producing “rayon”, which they called viscose. Natural cellulose was treated first with alkali and then with carbon disulfide, resulting in soluble cellulose xanthate. When the viscous solution was fed through spinnerets into an acid bath, the cellulose was restored in the form of strong transparent threads.

Around the same time, Jacques Brandenberger (born 1872 in Zurich) graduated from the University of Bern and moved to France, where he took a job as a chemist for a textile company.

One day in 1900, Jacques was having lunch in a restaurant, and one of his colleagues, with an awkward movement, knocked over a glass of red wine onto the snow-white tablecloth. While the waiter was changing the tablecloth, Brandenberger finally had an idea in his head about how the tablecloth could be protected from such incidents. He assumed that by treating the fabric with viscose, it could be made water-repellent. However, the experiment failed. After drying, the viscose-covered fabric became coarse and did not bend well. In addition, the coating turned out to be fragile: it peeled off in the form of a thin transparent film.

This film interested Brandenberger. Transparent, like glass, but flexible and durable, it did not allow water to pass through, but absorbed it and allowed water vapor to pass through. The material looked so promising that Brandenberger spent several years developing a method for industrial production.

In 1912, Jacques Brandenberger founded the company La Cellophane (from the French words cellulose - cellulose, and diaphane - transparent) to industrially produce a new material. However, there was no talk of any mass production - cellophane was not cheap and was used only as packaging for expensive gifts.

In 1923, Brandenberger transferred the rights to produce cellophane in the United States to DuPont, a decision that proved fateful. A few years later, an employee of the American company Hale Church, having tried more than 2,500 different coating options, was able to eliminate the main drawback of the material, making it impermeable not only to water, but also to water vapor. This opened a wide path for cellophane into the food industry.

By the end of the 1930s, DuPont received 25% of its profits from the sale of cellophane, and it was only with the advent of polyethylene in the 1960s that the material ceased to be the market leader. But even now, transparent plastic bags are often called cellophane bags out of habit.

See other articles section.

Cellophane (from cellulose and Greek - light) is a transparent, fat- and moisture-resistant film material made from viscose. Sometimes packaging products (bags, product packaging) made of polyethylene, polypropylene or polyesters are incorrectly called cellophane. These are different materials with completely different properties.

Cellophane was invented by Jacques Edwin Brandenberger, a Swiss textile engineer, between 1908 and 1911. He intended to create a waterproof coating for tablecloths that would protect them from stains. During the experiments, he covered the fabric with liquid viscose, but the resulting material was too stiff for use as a tablecloth.

However, the coating separated well from the fabric base, and Brandenberger realized that there was another use for it. He designed a machine that produced sheets of viscose.

For the first time, industrial production of this material was established in France in 1913, and 11 years later, DuPont acquired the technology and, having patented it, began manufacturing cellophane the following year. After some refinement, cellophane became the world's first relatively water-resistant flexible packaging.

Thus, a new character appeared on the packaging scene - a transparent, moisture- and air-tight film suitable for storing food products. The freshness of the product contained in cellophane was no longer as illusory as the first two qualities. Cellophane film, due to its tightness, really helped preserve the freshness of the product, which was especially noticeable when packing cut meat in film.

Another advantage of cellophane is that its packaging allows the buyer to hold the product in his hands and examine it from all sides without compromising the presentation of the product. If previously a buyer could not pick up, for example, a bun from the counter, and then put it back and leave, then with the advent of buns packaged in cellophane, this became possible.

Cellophane made it possible to examine the product without opening the package, which significantly stimulated sales and increased the number of so-called accidental purchases, that is, purchases made under the influence of fleeting desires. Products in cellophane packaging aroused such desires more often than products in cardboard.

In addition, cellophane packaging carried three more qualities: shine, cleanliness and freshness. Glitter surrounds the product with a kind of magical halo, creates a feeling of novelty of the product, and attracts the eye. The buyer, of course, realizes that it is not the product itself that shines, but this does not prevent him from choosing a product in shiny packaging. There are known cases when, in order to revive sluggish trade in a store, products were wrapped in cellophane - and trade went several orders of magnitude faster.

The use of cellophane packaging gives the buyer confidence in the purity of the product. This effect was especially clear when children's toys were packaged in cellophane. It seemed to the parents that no one’s hands had ever touched the toys taken out of the sealed plastic packaging.

For us, everything is almost 50 years late. Cellophane and plastic bags in the USSR began to enter household use in the late seventies. Before this, products in stores were packaged in paper, from meat and butter to manufactured goods, bulk products in bags made of thick gray paper, large goods were tied with ropes or twine.

Sheets of cellophane from gifts were carefully folded in order to, in turn, beautifully pack your present. Grocery bags were washed and dried, and large plastic bags in the USSR in the 70s were almost a cult item.

After the development of new types of polymer materials in the 1950s, the role of cellophane decreased significantly - it was almost completely replaced by polyethylene, polypropylene and lavsan. However, the significantly greater environmental safety of cellophane due to the high rate of its biological decomposition and the absence of harmful plasticizers (glycerin is physiologically and environmentally harmless) is contributing to the revival of interest in this packaging material.