Where were the environmental group marches and protests, flags and symbols promoting the extinction of the paper bag and the salvation of our trees in the late ‘60s? It wasn’t covered by the news. I wasn’t made aware of a single rally.
Maybe because all the rallying being done at that time was pointed in the opposite direction and was directed by the industry standing to make huge profits in marketing their own innovative product. (A 30-second Google search could reveal that to the curious.)
The previously non-existent disposable plastic shopping bag has soared from its humble birth in the late 60s to a global $22 billion industry by 2020. And that has nothing to do with environmental visions: quite the opposite, in fact.
In 1965, the Swedish company Celloplast (inventor, developer and marketer of cellulose film) was working out ways to market their product and obtained a U.S. patent for “the T-shirt plastic bag.” This is the design of virtually every plastic bag you’ve ever been given (now sold) in a grocery store checkout line.
Mobil Chemical jumped on the bandwagon and by 1977 was producing its own patented bags.
Plastic grocery bags were first introduced to Americans in 1979; Kroger and Safeway had picked them up in 1982. But they really didn’t catch on.
In 1985, the Society of Plastic Engineers decided to give the industry a boost at their convention with a promotional speech titled: “New Materials and Profits in Grocery Sacks and Coextrusions.” The facts pointed out that plastic bags cost less than paper — one thousand plastic bags cost $24, while the same number of paper bags could set retailers back $30.
Because of the heavy sales push )and not because of environmentalists rioting in the streets), the end of 1985 saw 75 percent of supermarkets offering plastic bags to their customers. But customers still avoided them.
Plastic bags held just 25 percent of the market, and Mobil decided to wage war on the unenthusiastic public. “The last stronghold — the grocery sack bag,” a company executive proclaimed to the media: “We are going after that.”
Since then, plastic bags had captured 80 percent of the market, and as 2020 rolled along, the plastic bag generated $22.2 billion in global business. In just the U.S. alone, plastic bag sales were projected to reach $1.4 billion in 2020.
Now if we could only come up with a way to encapsulate water in plastic, we’d really be set.
Dennis Shain
Centralia
