Here is a sentence that will annoy almost everybody.
The plastic shopping bag was invented for environmental reasons.
Not as a cheap shortcut. Not as a corporate scheme.
A Swedish engineer named Sten Gustaf Thulin patented the design in the 1960s specifically because paper bags meant cutting down trees, and he thought a thin plastic bag that people would reuse many times was the better answer.
His own son has said the family used the same bags over and over, and that throwing one away would have been unthinkable.
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So the villain of modern grocery shopping started life as the eco friendly option.
And it gets worse, or better, depending on your appetite for irony.
When American cities started banning them, researchers went and measured what actually happened. The results were not what anybody expected. Bag bans reduced plastic bag waste, which is good. They also caused people to buy dramatically more small plastic trash bags, because it turned out a huge share of those grocery bags were being reused as bin liners.