An early spring — even if it's just a tease — has maple syrup producers tapping trees. A week ago, I was struck both by the unusual site of seeing dozens of trees tapped at a local park in mid-February in Michigan and also how extensively they used plastics in the process.
Plastic taps, plastic buckets, plastic bags and plastic tubing have taken over the tasks previously done with stainless steel systems. After seeing it, I found myself going down a rabbit hole about plastics and maple syrup, so forgive me as I share an interesting tidbit.
In an extensive history on the use of plastics in maple sugaring published in the journal Vermont History, Matthew M. Thomas writes that commercial sugaring operations brought in plastic soon after World War II and relied on it to lower costs, cutting a reliance on manual labor for daily sap collections since they could use plastic tubing to send sap to central collection points rather than going from tree-to-tree to empty individual buckets.
Plastics made it possible for sugarbushes to compete against cheap artificial syrup.
Nelson Griggs was issued a patent in 1959 for his use of PVC tubing in maple sap collection, used on two groves of 25 trees, Thomas said. Another Vermonter, George Breen, was working with 3M to put its medical PVC tubing to use on maple trees as early as 1953.
"Orders of blood transfusion tubing of [thousands of feet in length] got the attention of executives at 3M and early in 1956 Breen received a call from Erwin Brown, a vice president with 3M, asking what was going on in the woods of Vermont that required so much PVC tubing," Thomas writes.
Two years later, 3M rolled out the Mapleflo brand, tubing produced specifically for sap collection.
You can get even more information from Thomas' 27-page article, From Pails to Pipelines: The Origins and Early Adoption of Plastic Tubing in the Maple Syrup Industry, here.