Plastic Bags Swot Analysis

HISTORY OF PLASTIC AND PLASTIC BAG INDUSTRY

California made headlines this fall when it became the first U.S. state to place a ban on single-use plastic shopping bags. But how did we get here: from just a few grocery stores offering customers plastic bags in the late ‘70s to today, with Americans using 100 billion plastic bags each year? Just how did the plastic bag become both so popular in our society and so problematic to the environment?
In 1965, Swedish company Celloplast came up with the design on which all modern plastic shopping bags are based: a tube of plastic sealed at the bottom to allow for the packaging of goods, an open top to insert such items into the bag and handles for convenient carrying. This model bag, which later became

But the T-shirt plastic bag didn’t really start encroaching on the paper grocery bag’s territory until 1982, when two of country’s largest supermarket chains, Safeway and Kroger, made the switch from paper to plastic.
The bags caused controversy immediately after they hit grocery stores – and not just for their environmental impacts. Suburban shoppers preferred paper grocery bags, which could stand upright in the trunks of their cars, while city-dwellers found the plastic bags with handles were easier to carry on their walk home from the store, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1986 (paper bags didn’t boast handles until the 1990s).
“Some customers become real irate and start shouting if they can’t get the kind of bag they want,” a clerk at a Los Angeles Vons told the paper back then. “It’s amazing how they let such a little thing get them so upset. Years ago, they didn’t even have a

Plastic bags also pose a particularly serious threat to marine life once they end up in bodies of water. Marine animals often mistake the plastic bags for food and ingest them (bags look just like jellyfish, a favorite treat for sea turtles), leading to starvation, suffocation or drowning.
But what really drew the public’s attention to the environmental impact of plastic bags was the 1997 discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant gyre of plastic litter that has collected in the North Pacific Ocean.
By the early 2000s, governments across the world were placing restrictions on plastic bags: from Bangladesh’s ban of the bags, which clogged the city’s storm drains and caused severe floods, to Ireland’s 15-cent fee on plastic bags – which reduced plastic bag use by 90 percent in just three months.
San Francisco became the first city in the U.S. to ban plastic bags and place a 10-cent fee on paper bags, and now the City by the Bay’s state government has adopted a very similar law, prohibiting grocery stores, pharmacies and convenience stores from distributing plastic bags and charging customers 10 cents for a paper