by Edward Humes
“That’s the reality of manufacturing in America,” he says. “Mostly, it’s not in America. And even if we did make the bags here, we’d have to import the fabric from China, because that’s where it’s all made.”
ChicoBag’s pitch is that a reusable bag, even made from virgin rather than recycled materials and imported from China, is vastly superior ecologically to the disposable alternative. For the average American, that alternative amounted to five hundred or more plastic bags made of petroleum thrown in the trash each year.1
By 2011, the company had expanded from Keller and his kitchen table to thirty employees and $5 million in annual revenues. ChicoBag had 14 percent annual growth in 2010. Competition is fierce in the reusable bag business—there are twenty rival bag makers in California alone, and they’re all wrestling over the mere 5 percent of Americans who choose them over disposable plastics. Keller’s business plan focuses on three revenue streams to keep the company moving: retail sales, custom orders (bags bearing the logos of nonprofits, universities, conferences and businesses) and educational sales.
It’s this last part of the business, where salesmanship meets green advocacy, that gets to the heart of Keller’s decision to go into business for himself making bags that, when rolled up, look like lumpy little Hacky Sacks. This is also the part of the business that almost ended the business and made him public enemy number one for the makers of plastic bags.
It started simply enough: Keller approached schools and suggested they rethink their community fundraisers by selling an eco-friendly, useful product—namely ChicoBags emblazoned with a school’s name and slogan—instead of selling candy and cookie dough in an age of childhood obesity. Quite a few schools took him up on the offer.
As part of this growing school side of his business, and also to promote the virtues of reusable bags over disposable plastic, Keller began passing on educational information about plastic’s footprint, waste and cost. He made school visits and suggested that students bring to class all the plastic bags they could find at home, tie them together, and see how far around the school building the chain stretched—a feat that usually left students and teachers alike stunned by their immense consumption of bags.
Then he did a few simple calculations for them and showed that if every American did that with all the grocery bags we use in a year, the chain would circle the earth. Not once, but 776 times.2
Next he started carrying around five hundred single-use bags (grocery bags, produce bags and other disposable sacks) jumbled together in a big ball to represent the average American’s yearly plastic bag habit. It was big enough for him to crouch down and hide behind, then jump up and startle passersby. He called this a “Candid Camera moment” that got people to laugh, then ask what he was doing. That was Keller’s opening to explain how that ball encapsulated what he saw on his first-ever visit to the landfill—and how it also represented the average American’s plastic bag use for one year. The five-hundred-bag figure was a conservative estimate, he’d say. The real number was probably higher. Counting just one-use grocery shopping bag, Americans were collectively consuming 102 billion bags a year.3 The count goes up to more than 150 billion when all types of plastic bags are included. And since every five hundred bags represent the petroleum equivalent of a half gallon of gasoline, that meant our disposable plastic bag habit was costing us 150 million gallons of gas a year.4 It was all so wasteful, Keller would say, and yet so avoidable.
“The reaction I would get,” Keller recalls, “was almost always: Oh my God, I had no idea.”
Eventually, he came up with his super-villain alter ego, Bag Monster. Instead of five hundred bags in a big ball, he made a costume out of them and wore the five hundred bags himself, becoming a roly-poly elastic Medusa festooned with streamers of plastic, his face the only visible human element (often contorted into wild expressions that gave him more than a passing resemblance to actor Jim Carrey). Bag Monster loved plastic bags and urged everyone to become one. The effect was disturbing, hilarious and irresistible. Schools loved him, requesting visits and demonstrations. Then green conferences and other venues and events started asking to borrow the costume. Keller made up several of them and started a free Bag Monster lending program after perfecting the costume design. (First-generation Bag Monster consisted of bags sewn to a graduation gown, which got hot and sweaty fast, after which Bag Monster got a bad case of BO. This was because the costume couldn’t be washed—the bags would just shred in the laundry. Second-gen Bag Monster consisted of Velcro strips with bags sewn on, which were then stuck on a jumpsuit. The strips of bags could be taken off and set aside, allowing the jumpsuit to be laundered, vastly improving Bag Monster’s personal hygiene.)
Demand was so great Keller ended up fashioning a hundred Bag Monster costumes. To go with them, he developed a ream of informational materials on single-use plastic bags, the history of plastic and the positive impact reusable bags could have. He put all this information on the company website as well as a separate Bag Monster.com site to promote the end of single-use bags. Then he launched a nationwide Bag Monster tour of twenty cities where officials were considering a plastic grocery bag ban. He drove around in a van emblazoned with a life-sized picture of his alter ego and a sign pleading with citizens to: “Help Stop the Bag Monster!” The tour culminated in August 2010 with Keller and ninety-nine friends—each wearing one of the one hundred Bag Monster costumes—descending on San Francisco en masse. They marched from the major Bay Area chocolate and chowder tourist spots of Ghirardelli Square to Fisherman’s Wharf and back. Then they held a press conference touting a statewide ban of single-use plastic bags, which the California Senate was debating at the time. The New York Times interviewed Keller. The TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference invited him to speak.
And that’s when the trouble started. Bag Monster, it seemed, had gone too far. And the plastic bag makers, whose spending on lobbyists in Sacramento alone dwarfs ChicoBag’s annual profits—decided to fight back. Three plastic bag makers filed a lawsuit and launched a public relations campaign intended to reveal Keller’s environmental message as nothing more than deceptive advertising and self-serving propaganda. It was time, the makers of plastic bags decided, to muzzle the monster.
HISTORY OF THE PLASTIC BAG
1957: Plastic sandwich bags are introduced to replace wax paper.
1958: Plastic dry-cleaning bags replace brown paper.
1959: After eighty children suffocate by plastic dry-cleaning bags, California tries to ban them. Industry lobbyists succeed in killing the ban in favor of a product warning label.
1961: The Keep America Beautiful antilittering campaign is launched with disposable-product industry funding, placing the blame for trash and pollution on consumer litterbugs rather than on manufacturers.
1966: Plastic produce bags on a roll replace brown paper sacks in grocery stores.
1974–75: Sears, JCPenney, Montgomery Ward and other big retailers replace paper with plastic bags.
1977: Paper or plastic? The plastic grocery bag is introduced to the supermarket industry.
1988: Suffolk County, New York, passes the first ban of plastic grocery bags. A suit by plastic bag industry trade groups overturns the ban.
1990: Maine bans single-use plastic bags in retail stores, but the law is overturned.
1996: Four of five grocery bags are plastic.
1997: The name “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is coined and brought to the world’s attention by Charles Moore and his Algalita Marine Research Foundation. They report that the plastic used in grocery bags is one of the most common found at sea.
2005: San Francisco proposes the nation’s first tax on single-use plastic bags—17 cents, the estimated cost to society and taxpayers of dealing with plastic bag waste.
2006: An industry-backed provision of the California Plastic Bag and Litter Reduction Act outlaws the sort of fees proposed in San Francisco.
2007: San Francisco bans single-u
se plastic bags.
2010: At least twenty communities nationwide follow San Francisco’s lead, either banning plastic grocery bags or imposing a fee on their use.
Sources: ChicoBag and the Packaging Institute
THE FAMILIAR plastic grocery sack with the two loops for handles began its conquest of the carry-home, take-out world in the U.S. in the early 1980s, after Mobil Chemical (now ExxonMobil Chemical) sued to overturn a Swiss company’s patent on the bag’s design. Mobil won the case and the right to make the bag (as did anyone else who cared to do so) and the plasticky floodgates opened, helped by the well-timed invention of a machine that could churn out those same thin, white bags at the startling rate of five hundred a minute. The demise of the patent and the near-simultaneous advent of such speedy mass manufacture ended what had been the venerable paper grocery bag’s cost advantage and, therefore, its industry dominance. Weight, price point and ease of shipping (one truckload of plastic bags had the grocery-carrying power of four trucks of paper bags) all were suddenly in plastic’s favor. And if plastic needed more of a boost, paper companies in that era already had been taking a beating on the issue of deforestation and endangered species. Even so, consumers at first wanted to stick with the familiar, sturdy, traditional brown paper sack. Paper bags held more, they stood up on their own, you could line them up in the trunk or the backseat of the car. Try that with plastic bags and everything flops out and rolls around. Customers hated them.
But then, consumers hated pretty much every plastic thing compared to whatever material the plastic was imitating or supplanting—at first. The manufacturers knew what would happen next, though. New habits would set in, old objections would fade away and pretty soon consumers would start behaving as if there had never been anything other than plastic laminate kitchen counters or vinyl chair cushions or car bumpers made of polyolefin or bags made of plastic film. All the bag makers had to do was flood the market, exercise a little patience and let the unnatural take its course. That’s long been the bottom-line truism of the industry: If you plasticize it, they will come—whether they want to or not. That’s how you build a disposable economy, and it had worked since the 1950s.
An overturned patent and speedier plastic bag machines, coupled with the relatively cheap oil of the era, meant the “Paper or plastic?” tide inexorably slid in favor of those flimsy white sleeves of petroleum extract during the 1980s. Plastic grocery bags moved from a 4 percent market share at the beginning of the decade to more than 50 percent by the end of the eighties.
This played out amid dueling PR campaigns between the Grocery Sack Council (twenty-six plastic bag companies) and the American Paper Institute, each accusing the other of hawking inferior products and harming the environment. There were some early successes by the paper industry and brief flirtations with plastic bans. In 1990, Suffolk County, New York, banned plastic bag use in grocery stores but not other retailers, a differentiation that had less to do with the environment and more to do with the fact that a major Suffolk County employer happened to manufacture plastic bags for non-grocery retailers. Plastic bag makers sued over the unfairness of this and won, overturning the law in less than a year. Also in 1990, a unique piece of legislation took effect in the state of Maine that stated: “All retailers in Maine shall use paper bags to bag products at the point of retail sale unless the consumer requests a plastic bag.” Maine became the one state in the union to change “Paper or plastic?” into “Paper (unless the customer speaks up and insists on plastic).” Maine also just happened to be a state in which the dominant industry and single largest employer at the time was paper and timber, and where the governor’s brother was a paid lobbyist for the American Paper Institute. The outcry over this bit of heavy-handed favoritism was so great that the law ended up repealed the following year. Stores could bag however they wished, with the only extra requirement being a mandate for supermarkets to have a recycling bin for customers to stuff their old plastic bags into if they felt like it. After that debacle, the paper-plastic war pretty much went plastic’s way for the next fifteen years.
By the start of the twenty-first century, plastic bag manufacturers controlled more than 90 percent of the grocery bag market. The plastic industry is one of the few U.S. manufacturers that has not completely offshored itself, employing a million and a half American workers in recent years. It is able to wield considerable political clout through a web of trade associations and groups, including the powerful, 140-year-old American Chemistry Council, the defender-in-chief of all things plastic as the ultimate in safe, cost-effective packaging.
Certainly grocery bags are among the most common and simplest of plastic creations, most often made from high-density polyethylene, which in turn is made from the fossil-fuel-derived gas ethylene. A relatively low percentage of such bags is recycled. That’s because recycling the bags is notoriously difficult, as the lightweight filmy sacks clog the machinery and end up being carted to landfills as recycling “residue” more often than not. The bags cannot be recycled endlessly, contrary to common belief, but can only be “down-cycled” one time into some product other than bags. (Paper bags are far from perfect and the question of which does more environmental harm, paper or plastic, is still open to debate. Paper bags, however, can be endlessly recycled and, unlike recycled plastic, recycled paper bags are cheaper than virgin materials.)
Up until 2005, the recycling figure reported by the EPA for plastic bags was 1 percent. After that year, the EPA only reported the recycling rates for all bags, sacks and wraps, a much larger, mixed category of products, for which the recycling rate in the most recent year reported was 9.4 percent, better but still anemic. The plastic industry, not the EPA, is the primary source for these recycling figures; the effect of the change, intended or not, was to conceal the true recycling rate for bags as a discrete category. And even the combined figure is suspect; the true recycling rate may be significantly lower than 9.4 percent. As the Columbia University/BioCycle biannual study of the waste stream has shown, EPA reports consistently underestimate the amount of trash made in America, while overestimating the percentage of trash that gets recycled. So the paltry 9.4 percent recycling rate represents a best-case scenario.
Around the time that Andy Keller started up ChicoBag, concern had begun to mount about the environmental impact of plastic bags in general, and single-use grocery bags in particular. These concerns—about ocean and river pollution, litter, impacts on wildlife, the cost to taxpayers of disposing of plastic bags in landfills, the ineffectiveness of recycling efforts for a product that was supposed to be 100 percent recyclable—led a number of local, state and national governments to take action. Which in turn led the plastic industry and the American Chemistry Council to fight back just as they had done with the paper industry.
Ireland was among the first governments to act, way back in 2002, and that country’s success became a model for the rest of the world. A plague of plastic grocery bags papered Ireland’s coveted green countryside, the Emerald Isle’s reputation for physical beauty marred by roads, gutters, foliage and trees sporting beards of windblown bags. Ireland’s lawmakers and voters decided they had enough: They passed a plastic bag tax of 15 euro cents (raised to 22 euro cents in 2007, the equivalent of 30 cents U.S.). The rationale for the new tax boiled down to this: Plastic bags are a great product, but they have been used and disposed of in a profligate and wasteful way. This is because the bags have been viewed as “free” by consumers, when in fact they cost quite a bit in terms of the burden they impose on the environment and on taxpayers, who have to foot the bill for litter cleanup, landfills and pollution. The tax simply reflected the true costs of the bags—in effect, proponents argued, it merely ended a kind of “plastic welfare” that had acted as a market force that favored waste and unproductive overconsumption. The tax proceeds went to Ireland’s environmental agency.
Fifteen cents is a relative pittance, but it does add up over hundreds of bags, and so it had an immediate and pro
found impact on the behavior of Irish consumers. They simply didn’t want to pay for a bag that had previously cost them nothing. Plastic bag use dropped more than 90 percent in a matter of weeks. Reusable bags became fashionable, while carting around plastic bags increasingly was viewed as a social gaffe. People would stump out of the store with loose cans and loaves of bread cradled in their arms and then dump it all in a heap in the trunk rather than buy a plastic bag. The tax was never much of a burden because relatively few people paid it—they simply avoided the bags. The windblown litter has been curtailed. The main question among the Irish was why it had taken so long to come to their senses.
Predictably, grocery chains acted as plastic manufacturers’ surrogates and opposed the levy. But they soon changed their positions for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it turned out to be good for business. “I spent many months arguing against this tax,” recalled Feargal Quinn, who founded Ireland’s top grocery chain. “But I have become a big, big enthusiast … Now we’re saving the environment, we’re reducing litter and since we’re not paying for bags, it ultimately saves money for us, and that reduces the price of food for our customers.”5
For the first time since the dawn of the age of plastic, a Western democracy, an entire people—one with whom Americans have long had a special affinity and affection—had turned away from a major component of the disposable economy. They had plasticized a common product, and people had indeed come—and then they left it in the dust and found they felt better off for it. The convenience of the disposable bag had turned out to be either an illusion, or simply not worth the trouble. The ban has survived all complaints and court challenges since.