‘We just didn’t think about it’: how did we let plastic bags get everywhere?
They’re under our sinks, all over our streets, and filling the stomachs of dead whales. What can we do to stem the single-use scourge?
Joan Shuttleworth has fond memories of her 1940s childhood in Orchard Park, near Buffalo. “When I was seven or eight I used to do the grocery shopping at a small store a block from our house,” she tells me. “It was all paper or cloth bags, and fish and meat would be wrapped in butchers’ paper. There was no plastic.”
The lightweight polythene plastic bags we know today were patented in Sweden in 1965. By 1979, 80% of European supermarkets were using plastic, and by the early 1980s they were widespread across the US – aggressively pushed by oil company Mobil. “We just didn’t think about it,” said Shuttleworth, a 79-year-old retired nurse now living in Oakland, California. “We didn’t realise what a scourge they would become. It was mindless.”