Monday, September 19, 2005
Talk about dumb!
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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