Normally, we would feel a twinge of remorse packing up all of these incenses, giving out samples and all of that and create such a mess with so many plastic sleeves. That’s one reason why we use cellophane rather than plastic. Plastic is much easier to come by, and it’s considerably less expensive, but cellophane will biodegrade. In fact, they are so biodegradable that if we keep sleeves around for more than a year or so, they are already beginning to break down. Another reason we use cellophane is that it provides a far superior barrier for fragrance than plastic. Many fragrances are oils or are fairly oily. Plastic is somewhat permeable to these oils and the incense wouldn’t be as fragrant after a while. Cellophane is actually a polymer of glucose, and if anyone has tried to dissolve sugar in oil, they’ll find out they cannot. So these oils are repelled by the sugar-based makeup of cellophane. Cellophane also is permeable to moisture, so damper, fresher incenses won’t mildew. The easiest way to test if someone is using plastic or cellophane is the flame test. If it melts, curls up, sometimes it may drip while it’s burning, safe to say that’s plastic. If it burns more like paper, no dripping or curling up but perhaps a carbon residue, it’s cellophane. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep using cellophane. Sources are getting more and more rare each day.