May 2015 | Vol. 12 Iss. 5
FREE
Bangerter Tribute
2
swing for life
13
teacher of the year
13
poised for state meet
16
Paper Or Plastic: Is There An Answer? By Lewi Lewis
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ever heard of Sten Gustaf Thulin? Large-scale generalizations are a slippery slope, but when they fit, well … they fit: you’ve used his invention hundreds, if not thousands of times. Everyone has. Thulin was a Swedish engineer whose invention has changed the world and continues to do so in a very real way. Whether that change is for the better or worse depends upon with whom you speak. In the early 1960s, Thulin developed a process that allowed the creation of a simple, high load-carrying bag; the Swedish company Celloplast had it patented in 1965. His invention? We know it today as the single use plastic shopping bag. The plastic shopping bag, brought to the U.S. in the late 1970s by ExxonMobil, didn’t really take hold of the masses until 1982 when the country’s two largest supermarket chains, Safeway and Kroger, switched from the paper bag to the plastic one, and the question ‘paper or plastic’ has been part of our daily vernacular and
a constant source of contention ever since. Amidst all the back and forth, it is impossible to know on which side of the fence Thulin, if he were alive today, would land. Or perhaps, like many others, he would simply teeter in the middle like an unsteady egg. So what about it, paper or plastic? The invention and life of the plastic bag hasn’t generated so much contention and controversy over nothing. There are many on both sides of the line. Those that are fully educated and apprised of the actual situation, and those that take a stance simply because the answer is “obvious.” It may not be that straightforward. Nor is it, it seems, just a case of environmentalists versus “Big Plastic.” The fact that plastic bags are pretty much everywhere is indisputable.
Paper Or Plastic continued on page 4
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