Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Battle of the Bag: p. 140-170)
“Battle of the Bag,” Chapter 6 of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story explains the origins and trajectory of the plastic bag, one of the most widely targeted objects of environmental interventions. This offers valuable insight into the politics of sustainability in the US context and to human behavior that are applicable worldwide.
First, I took issue with the second line of this chapter, which reads “People have been known to cut down their forests, exhaust their local water supplies, and deplete their soil, failing to recognize or understand the natural foundation for human existence.” While this destruction is clearly rampant worldwide, the moralizing tone of this statement implies that people using natural resources have the agency to decide whether or not to do so. This sentence sounds like it is criticizing loggers, fishers, farmers, poachers, and business owners, for ignoring environmental impacts and opting in to the overextraction of natural resources. But people only “cut down their forests” when they see no alternative — generally when they are desperately trying to keep up with an exploitative global economy that demands this. On a global scale, it is evident that humans have indeed destroyed forests and water supplies and soil — but most often, this destruction is inflicted upon locals by imperial powers far away. People are most often not actively choosing to destroy all of their resources, but are either responding to a desperate history of empires extracting resources, or they are acting as agents of corporations or modern imperial powers, left with no alternatives.
On a global scale, however, it is clear that humans have wreaked havoc on the natural environment, and this reading provides an illuminating history of one of the most ubiquitous symbols of that destruction: the plastic bag. The plastic bag is the totem of our disposable society, in which nearly everything is packaged in plastic. In the 1950s, plastic bags were introduced for packaging. There was backlash when they showed the potential to suffocate, so a thicker variety was introduced. Choosing to create bags with more plastic/oil content is yet another example of choosing more resource- and energy-intensive production to change products, prioritizing temporary human health threatened by anecdotal health risks over long-term planetary survival. At the time of publication in 2011, it is said that half of all goods were packaged in some kind of plastic — but I am surprised this seems relatively low, and I imagine the fraction has significantly grown since then.
“T-shirt bags” were introduced and began to overtake paper bags in the 1960s. Polyethylene film was used to create a new type of bag, which first was unpopular but then became favorable for its low cost, cheap production and distribution, and durability. Today, there is a great deal of criticism because they take up landfill space, last hundreds of years, aerodynamically blow away and invade habitats, and don’t biodegrade. If a plastic or paper bag is used at least four times, the article says that has mitigated its environmental impact from creation to disposal. I am surprised how low this number is — it is said that reusable cotton tote bags must be used about 300 times to do the same. Life cycle analyses usually favor paper bags in terms of energy and water consumption for production and transportation, but the nonbiodegradability of plastic must be considered. In this sense, it could be a more long-term renewable resource if we learn to recycle better. But recycling is promoted by the plastics industry because it erases guilt: but in the end, recycling only profits the manufacturer, because they don’t have to spend money on raw materials, consumption increases if there isn’t guilt, it helps their public relations and makes customers buy from them even more, and makes profit margins longer. Overall, we must erase the mindset of single-use disposability: currently, the product of millions of years of production (oil) is destroyed for a product lasting just a few minutes or seconds.
Much of the bag backlash was sparked by its visibility and the obvious presence as litter on beaches and in trees. This really speaks to the power of “away:” countless other objects take up far more landfill space, don’t biodegrade, last forever, and invade habitats and kill more animals. But because they are not seen, the public has yet to mount resistance. The success of bag bans in San Francisco and beyond illustrates how precarious the consumer ignorance of waste is — the status quo enables industries and companies to get away with polluting, and they must keep that waste hidden or else bans on their products will grow in popular support.
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