Talk about dumb!

Published on October 22, 2005 By Rajiv Badlani In Business

Plastic bags don’t have a very long history. What looked like a miracle of convenience from its conception in 1957 until the late 1990s, has now turned into a monster that threatens life on earth as we know it. Here’s the chronological story of this tragedy unfolding. Who could have imagined this? 1957: The first baggies and sandwich bags on a roll are introduced. 1958: Poly dry cleaning bags compete with traditional brown paper. 1966: Plastic bag use in bread packaging takes over 25 to 30 percent of the market. 1966: Plastic produce bags on a roll are introduced in grocery stores. 1969: The New York City Sanitation Department's "New York City Experiment" demonstrates that plastic refuse bag curbside pickup is cleaner, safer and quieter than metal trash can pick-up, beginning a shift to plastic can liners among consumers. 1974/75:Retailing giants such as Sears, J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, Jordan Marsh, Allied, Federated and Hills make the switch to plastic merchandise bags. 1973: The first commercial system for manufacturing plastic grocery bags becomes operational 1977: The plastic grocery bag is introduced to the supermarket industry as an alternative to paper sacks. 1982: Kroger and Safeway start to replace traditional craft sacks with polyethylene "t-shirt" bags. 1990: The first blue bag recycling program begins with curbside collection. 1990: Consumer plastic bag recycling begins through a supermarket collection-site network. 1992: Nearly half of U.S. supermarkets have recycling available for plastic bags. This, as we all know now, is really just whitewash. No one is effectively recycling plastic even today. 1996: Four of five grocery bags used are plastic. 2002: Ireland wakes up to what is happening and puts a tax of 15c (9p) on them. 2003: Consumption in Ireland is down 90%. You'd imagine the world would learn, right? 2004: Nope. We're still dumping plastic bags at the rate of a million bags a minute! Talk about dumb!

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