The shift from durability to disposability

I found the text “Plastic A Toxic Love Story” to be enlightening as it showcases the shift in the purpose of plastic, from the perspective of marketing. In the text it’s mentioned, “when plastic first began to penetrate the packaging market, it was promoted for its durability, not its disposability”, and it only took a short while for corporations to realize that they could entice the public with increased convenience by promoting the disposability of plastic. In the early ages of plastic, plastic bags were expensive and were marketed as bags that could be used for “many seasons to come”. However, as we know today, that’s not how plastic is marketed anymore. The reason it was easy to convince the public to use plastic bags for one time usage instead of paper bags, which were the norm at the time, was due to the unique advantages of plastic over paper. The advantages include waterproofness, durability and its simplicity. However, it took some time to get around to using plastic due to issues such as, how some consumers wouldn’t like it when the checkout clerks would lick their fingers to pull a plastic bag from its stack, or the bag’s inability to stand up. However, it only took retraining clerks to teach them how to pack plastic bags, and also reducing the cost of producing plastic bags so it was 2 to 3 times cheaper than paper bags, thereby enticing shoppers, to change the perception of plastic bags. Additionally, since paper bags took greater area to store, stores were quick to start accepting plastic bags. Additionally, their low cost meant that both the shoppers and the stores were liberal with how much plastic bags they used. 

While reading the text, I was reminded of a documentary I watched called, “The Century of Self”, it primarily focused on the aspects that were involved in creating today’s brand obsessed and materialistic society. It also talked about how corporations exploited man’s innate desire for pleasure and one’s unconscious biases. There is a particular example of this given in the documentary, which was that when cars first became the norm among middle class families, corporates realised that not enough families were replacing their cars after their first purchase. To overcome this and reduce the period of how long a family didn’t upgrade to a new car model, corporates started to release car models with not new innovative features that justified an upgrade but simply changed the color of their new models drastically when compared to the older models. Before this change, newer models of cars relatively had a similar shade of color to older models, which the corporations thought was detrimental in helping to allow its customers to express their individuality. So, now each family can showcase to their neighbour not only their sense of style but also the fact that they had the newer model with greater ease. As such, corporations were able to breed competitiveness among its consumers which led to people replacing and buying cars more often than needed, contributing to generating greater waste and carbon footprint per individual. This showcases the lengths corporations go through to reduce the lifetime of their products, to make them disposable, which they succeeded in doing in the case of plastic bags.