With plastic packaging we no longer had to melt down as much sand into glass or chop down as many trees and turn them into paper and card. Polyethylene insulation helped safeguard the Malaysian gutta-percha tree, not to mention other materials too. A Bell Labs report in the 1970s found that if America had continued to sheathe its telephone cables with lead rather than polyethylene, this use alone would have consumed four-fifths of all the lead produced in the country.
