With supermarket chains, cities and entire municipalities forbidding the use of plastic bags as grocery carriers, it occurs to me that the most interesting aspect of this omnipresent object is the ephemerality of its function. Most people discard their supermarket bags right after they place their recently bought groceries in their refrigerator. Responsible folks try to find second uses for the bags, but things rarely go further than that. Third and subsequent uses are almost unheard of, due to the fact that recycling is still voluntary, rather than mandatory, in all countries, and people will always choose convenience over moral imperative if they can get away with it. The interesting thing about plastic bags is their uncontrolled afterlife, whirling around the streets in windy days, ending up caught in tree branches, or power cables. The design of the object makes it a remarkable wind catcher, something Max Schuschny, the Austrian scientist who invented them at the beginning of the 20th century, could hardly imagine. Shouldn’t we take the wind catching capabilities of plastic bags more seriously? Perhaps that is the key, more than keeping pouring demoralizing data about what they do to the environment. Personally, I am tired of environmental whining: new times demand new methods. What if we, as designers, would really try hard to find an imaginative afterlife for plastic bags? That, combined perhaps with hefty fines to supermarket chains for decades of irresponsibly polluting the environment with their branded plastic bags.
