THE PAPER BAG

The brown paper bag has just become a hundred year old, and we should celebrate.

That paper grocery bag is a symbol of many good things. We can bring it home from the food store full of meat and vegetables, and it becomes an image of prosperity; it brings thoughts of shiny apples, dry cereal, and clean, warm kitchens-America. When, we fold the bag flat and store it under the kitchen sink it becomes an image of thrift, of saving everything to use again.

Years ago, paper bags were made by hand by boys working for grocers. In 1851, a Pennsylvania school teacher invented a machine to make the bags, but his bags did not stand upright and could not be folded and stored flat. Then the first modern bag was produced; it had a flat rectangular bottom and pleated sides. And in 1910, manufactures began producing bags from a tough new kind of paper called Kraft (a German word meaning “strength”).

Every since then, the brown paper grocery bag has flourished. Every American home has a stack of neatly folded large bags which came home full of groceries and now wait for their next use. It’s a large stack, too, because many shoppers insist on “double bagging” to be sure their groceries aren’t too heavy for the bag. The bags will have many uses. They will take out trash and garbage; they will be turned into children’s costumes; they will wrap packages; they will be cut up for boo cover. There’s no end to things these bags can do.

There really are a lot of brown bags around. In 1982, the nation’s 26,680 supermarkets bought about 25 billion grocery sacks made from good, honest Kraft paper. Some, however, predict hard times ahead a forest product expert says the paper bag will eventually give away to a polyethylene one, just the way the glass milk bottle and the paper cup has. He says the plastic bags are almost cheap enough to replace paper bags now. For the moment, however, customers still prefer paper for their groceries. As one market manager says, “Maybe plastic is the wave of the future, but not to my customer. They all feel you can’t pit much in the plastic shopping bags and that they rip. I’d have a hard time selling plastic to them instead of paper.”