Dave mentioned (rather briefly) the changes in packaging/padding materials, and I though I'd elaborate a bit since I ran into similar mysterious materials a while ago and wondered how they came to be...
First consider older padding materials, like the foam peanuts or bubblewrap. These work pretty well, but they already incorporate a large percentage of air (by volume.) that means they take up a lot of room in the factory, and they take up a lot of room being shipped TO the factory, both of which may be a substantial expense.
So a better idea is to send out plastic tubing, and inflate/seal it as needed for shipping. this results in those big "air pack" bubbles, which are pretty cool.
But plasitc of that sort isn't very "green", and is more expensive that the cheaper grades of paper (those already recycled at least once.)
So the next class of packaging material machine takes as its input a big spool of paper (say, 3 feet wide and 18inches in diameter - a hundred pounds or more of paper), and runs it though a machine that produces "crumpled paper" suitable for wrapping fragile goods.
The digikey wrapping is another step up. TWO kinds of paper, one of which gets criss-cross cut into a sort of net, co-extruded with a plain sheet of paper. More empty spaces, less actual paper. Saves the company money, and starts out as the same dense spools of paper, so you go longer between changing spools too. And of course the product is recyclable with other papers, and the source is also already a recycled product, so its relatively "green", but with the sort of repeatability and user efficiency you don't get from sending kids out to the garage to crumple up last weeks newspapers.
Some of the technology being developed is actually rather neat. Here's one vendor:
http://www.geami.com/protective-packaging.html