Plastic bags: the saying goes, and it may be right, that you always have one as long as you don't need it, but there's none to be found the moment you do. In any case, it is a fact that plastic bags are such a common, everyday object that old paper bags are almost a rarity. But how was the plastic bag born, who invented it? None could tell us better than a Company who manufactures plastic bags every day, and we chose Celvil, a Company that's been in this business for more than 50 years, to be our guide.



To tell the story of the plastic bag, we need to spend a few starting words on the material it is made of: polyethylene. And like many of the materials we use every day in our time and age, it happens so that polyethylene was discovered… by mistake. It was actually first synthesized in 1898, in the laboratory of a Herr von Pechmann, a German chemist, who suddenly found himself with a small quantity of this whitish, waxy substance. And it was yet another accident, more than thirty years later, that made it so that in the Northwich-located laboratories of ICI, Fawcett e Gibson discovered, e Perrin perfected, the first practical industrial procedure for polyethylene production.

Polyethylene thus started being mass-produced, and got introduced into the market, in 1939, just seventy years ago. Still, it took no less than another forty years for the very idea of a polyethylene bag (which, we will add as a side note, is related to the hula hoop - one of the first products, in fact, to be made of polyethylene, and in the production of which great supplies of the first experimental samples of plastic, not up to specifications for more important purposes, were used) to be born. This times though we can report it was NOT an accident or a mistake of any sort: the plastic bag was born in the United States in 1977, with a precise plan and purpose. And behind that idea was the Dixie Bag Company, owned by a J.W. McBride, who was aptly nicknamed "The Bagman". McBride saw a future where the paper bags so common in shops and groceries would be completely supplanted by his new bags: which were lighter, cleaner, and stronger. And his Dixie Bag Co. ended up actually being a key actor in the devolution which, starting in 1982, saw the two largest grocery companies in America, Safeway and Kroger, accept to test and introduce the new product. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

A topic though still remains to be discussed, one which surely few people though about in far 1977, and definitely even less in 1898, but has nowadays grown to enormous attention and importance: the environmental impact issue. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the polyethylene bag, when compared to its historical competitor, the traditional paper bag?

Contrary to what is the common popular opinion, in many ways the polyethylene bag has a definitely lower impact on our environment than the one produced by the paper bag. Manufacturing and recycling it, in fact, consumes far less resources than the ones involved in manufacturing a paper bag, and the latter is up to seven times heavier and more encumbering - which of course leads to a far worse pollution problem at the time of distribution. On the other hand, it is just as true that plastic, if not correctly recycled, has a truly devastating effect on the environment, which paper does not have; also, polyethylene is manufactured from hydrocarburates, which are, as is common knowledge, an exhaustible and non-renewable resource. All in all, thus, the verdict is still open. As always, it is up to each one of us to make a difference.