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Many years ago, in the sixties and seventies the cloth bag or the proverbial ' jhola ' would rule the world. That was when we were young and long before petrochemical companies flooded the market with cost effective PVC that made the production of plastic bags cheap. I will not blame Dupont or Reliance for flooding the market with variations of Poly Vinyl Chloride PVC , Polypropylene PP or food grade plastics or any other variations because like any commercial industry they responded to the market demand. After the seventies consumer demand rose globally as Asia's billions joined the millions of Americans and Europeans as the empowered global consumer.
Cheap prices of PVC granules attracted the plastic bag producer who mass produced plastic bags from PVC and recycled plastic waste. The retailers needed bags in numbers to support the growing number of global shoppers who consumed a variety of commodities that needed cheap and temporary packaging of all shapes and sizes. The big retailer or the global brand readily spent money in providing a high quality bag complete with printing and advertising that carried its brand name to the consumer homes. Whatever became old or useless found their way into the garbage dump or the streets as people treated plastic as disposable waste till it displayed a cockroach like resilience to be indestructible. Soon it started clogging and choking the ecosystem and became cancerous for the planet earth just like tobacco had become for the humans after its explosive growth just a few decades ago.
It is no point in behaving like a school teacher and taskmaster to the unwieldy populations of diverse nations and telling them to stop consuming a cheap product. Stopping plastic bags is impossible unless we provide cheap sustainable alternatives. As paper bags also consume forest produce, despite the use of recycled paper bags, it does not look really the solution . We have therefore to explore here the making the cloth bag cheap and a mass produced commodity as an better alternative and sustainable solution. Getting designer cloth bags sponsored by the big retail brands is the next step to get wider consumer acceptance . Once consumer acceptance is received, the bags must be mass produced to flood the markets so that the retail needs are met without tapping plastics. The next step is to carry on the push effort for sufficient long duration so as to create a momentum and habit of using the cloth bag.Only once that happens the plastic bags can be replaced on a permanent basis and the environment freed from the plastic waste.
Many years ago, in the sixties and seventies the cloth bag or the proverbial ' jhola ' would rule the world. That was when we were young and long before petrochemical companies flooded the market with cost effective PVC that made the production of plastic bags cheap. I will not blame Dupont or Reliance for flooding the market with variations of Poly Vinyl Chloride PVC , Polypropylene PP or food grade plastics or any other variations because like any commercial industry they responded to the market demand. After the seventies consumer demand rose globally as Asia's billions joined the millions of Americans and Europeans as the empowered global consumer.
Cheap prices of PVC granules attracted the plastic bag producer who mass produced plastic bags from PVC and recycled plastic waste. The retailers needed bags in numbers to support the growing number of global shoppers who consumed a variety of commodities that needed cheap and temporary packaging of all shapes and sizes. The big retailer or the global brand readily spent money in providing a high quality bag complete with printing and advertising that carried its brand name to the consumer homes. Whatever became old or useless found their way into the garbage dump or the streets as people treated plastic as disposable waste till it displayed a cockroach like resilience to be indestructible. Soon it started clogging and choking the ecosystem and became cancerous for the planet earth just like tobacco had become for the humans after its explosive growth just a few decades ago.
It is no point in behaving like a school teacher and taskmaster to the unwieldy populations of diverse nations and telling them to stop consuming a cheap product. Stopping plastic bags is impossible unless we provide cheap sustainable alternatives. As paper bags also consume forest produce, despite the use of recycled paper bags, it does not look really the solution . We have therefore to explore here the making the cloth bag cheap and a mass produced commodity as an better alternative and sustainable solution. Getting designer cloth bags sponsored by the big retail brands is the next step to get wider consumer acceptance . Once consumer acceptance is received, the bags must be mass produced to flood the markets so that the retail needs are met without tapping plastics. The next step is to carry on the push effort for sufficient long duration so as to create a momentum and habit of using the cloth bag.Only once that happens the plastic bags can be replaced on a permanent basis and the environment freed from the plastic waste.
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