Things that donors know: who invented the plastic bag and will it destroy us?

Yael asks "Who invented the plastic bag"

Sometimes heroes remain unsung. In the list of important events of the year 1965 on historical trivia sites, you can find the delivery of the first American fighters to Vietnam, the first spacewalk and the first rock concert by the Beatles in the stadium. But from a distance of 55 years, a short document published on April 27 of that year seems equally important. An unknown engineer, Sten Gustaf Thulin (Sten Gustaf Thulin), a man who has never been published and even Wikipedia does not credit him with an entry registered a modest patent, two pages bearing the gray title "BAG WITH HANDLE OF WELDABLE PLASTIC MATERIAL" . The bag, by the way, is not and has never been made of nylon but of a completely different material - polyethylene. The innovation that Thulin stated was a stronger bag than the paper bags and especially handles that are a continuous part of the body of the bag without the need for gluing. This simple idea injected capital into Thulin's employers and changed the way we shop. Almost overnight, the cloth baskets and mesh baskets disappeared and a cheap and strong multipurpose item conquered the markets.

And speaking of historical landmarks, it is worth mentioning that three years later in 1968, the first report of finding plastic waste in the digestive system of a sea turtle was recorded. Which brings us to Hila's question that her home school decided to encourage its students to give up the bags and bring the sandwiches in a reusable box and she wonders if the students will indeed contribute to saving the planet.

In recent years, the "nylon" bag has become a punching bag for environmentalists and it is easy to understand them. The carpet of bags that covers scenic sites illustrates our disdain for the place where we live. The most determined opponents of the bags (and plastic waste in general) are the marine biologists who anxiously follow the invasion of the bags into the vast oceans, the coral reefs and the bodies of countless creatures from penguins to dolphins.

The ones who are especially hurt by bags are the sea turtles who see the bag as their favorite snack - jellyfish and they swallow quite a lot of them. In the best case, if no intestinal obstruction or suffocation has been caused, then the path of the bag out goes through the cloaca, which is also used as a sexual organ and egg.

Even those who are not "tree huggers" will find it difficult to ignore the testimony of the researcher VIRGINIE PLOT who followed the laying of turtles on the shores of French Guiana: "On May 2009, 2.6 we noticed a female that looked distressed while laying eggs. After digging the nesting hole, she secreted into it, instead of eggs, a greenish liquid with a strong smell. A close inspection revealed that plastic residues were blocking the hatch opening. At this point it was decided to intervene and remove the blockage. Our efforts raised a considerable amount of household garbage bags. When the last piece of plastic was removed, a turtle started laying eggs... along with the eggs, a white and bloody liquid also flowed that indicated an injury due to the accumulation of garbage or during the intervention to open the blockage. ..the weight of the plastic extracted from the dump was 1.5 kg and included bags, the largest of which (a sack of rice) was XNUMX meters in diameter. ..”

But the damage does not end there. When the bag reaches the sea, it becomes a sailing vessel that sails far and may carry hitchhikers with it - sea creatures that will be transported with it to new environments. Thus, for example, it was found that plastic waste washed up on New Zealand's beaches contained dozens of foreign species of sponges, crabs and molluscs, each of which may become an "invasive species" and compete with the local beach population. The shallow waters off the coast of Antarctica are isolated from the world thanks to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which revolves around it and prevents the southward migration of sea creatures from the oceans to the frozen continent. But even this old stream is not a hermetic barrier against millions of bags and other pieces of plastic and those of them that manage to filter through bring invaders to ecological niches that were isolated for about 30 million years.

But when you wrap the sandwich, Hila, you don't necessarily send it to turtle stomachs or pristine beaches. Assuming that your house will throw the bag in the trash and then drive to the landfill site, it seems that the "nylon" is actually better for the environment than any alternative. Even if we assume that one glass of water is enough to clean reusable utensils, in 220 school days a year, about 27 tons of water will be wasted cleaning reusable boxes of students in a school with 600 students. This is without taking into account the environmental damage of loading the sewage system with more cleaning materials. Until the invention of the maligned bag, there was a golden age of paper bags that required a greater investment of energy and water in the production process, a process that is more polluting and emits greenhouse gases in a much larger amount than the production of a plastic bag of any kind. In addition, the plastic bag is a product that consumers tend to use more than once. There was someone who found that about 60% of the bags are used again for many uses, from collecting waste from around the kitchen sink to treating the pet's excrement. Reusable bags are indeed more environmentally friendly, but only if they are truly reusable: if you use a reusable bag for weekly shopping for one year and not two years, it is better for the planet that you use the regular plastic bag. The bag in which you put tomatoes at the restaurant or the girl's sandwich is an economical product in volume and weight - the bag can be loaded with more than 1000 times its own weight and if it reaches an organized landfill site, it will take up very little space and will not emit pollutants into the groundwater that will flow next to it.

There is no magic ecological solution, we buy a lot and therefore need a lot of packaging, all of which have an environmental price. The law requiring payment for bags at the cash register has succeeded in reducing their number on the beaches, perhaps because we took home fewer bags (although we continued to put plenty of disposable bags of fruits, vegetables, and other products into the reusable bag) and perhaps because the law raised public awareness of the environmental danger of plastic. But at the same time the amount of plastic packaging used by the international delivery industry of purchases on shopping sites is growing and increasing. In 2015, online shopping companies in China alone shipped over 8 billion bags and 16.9 million kilometers of plastic cling film to consumer homes in the world. From 2015 until the eve of the Corona epidemic, the rate of deliveries increased more than threefold. It's not Stan Thulin's genius invention that pollutes the environment, but our shopping lust.

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More of the topic in Hayadan:

• IBM will launch an autonomous ship that will investigate the ways of plastic accumulation in the Atlantic Ocean
• Clean the plastic from the sea - take 2
• Plastic infections have been found in marine animals all along Israel's coasts in the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea