Core77's Next One Hour Design Competition: Ban the Plastic Bag
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 10. 6.07
The good folks over at Core77 have launched another of their One Hour Design Competitions (where you spend an hour conceiving, sketching and rendering a world-saving design concept -- we've mentioned them before) and this one's all about a subject close to TreeHugger's heart: ban the plastic bag.
The deadline is looming -- this Monday, October 8 -- but it only takes an hour, and you win a shiny new iPod nano (without a bag) for your efforts; submit your entries here. The challenge: "come up with innovative ways to get rid of the ubiquitous plastic bag. 60,000 of these things are used every 5 seconds in the U.S. alone (that totals, if you can believe it, to 43 million bags used during your one hour of design challenge. World-wide, the number of plastic bags used each year is a staggering 4,000,000,000,000). Better get to it." Hit the jump to see a few of the entries already received, and good luck! ::Core77 One Hour Design Competition: Ban the Plastic Bag
"Plant Bag" -- "A biodegradable bag that uses organic fertilizer for print and contains an embedded flower seed. The bag contains everything needed to grow a real flower and gains value. Once planted, the user is able to see actual evidence of the effect they have on the environment."
"(Heart) Your Plant with Pierced" -- "Pierced is conservation on several levels. On the surface it eliminates plastic bags, while its limiting nature encourages smarter shopping. Less buying in bulk and consuming needlessly. It could also cause manufacturers to rethink their packaging in order to accommodate Pierced's design, less plastic and waste. Imagined for grocers, baggers need only to slip the products onto the rope, made of a cheap fiber mesh, before fastening."
I just took a few minutes (I'm sure an hour isn't required) and put up my idea. I liked looking at all the ideas just so I could snag some to use myself!
Biodegradable plastics are a poorly conceived solution to a problem. One in ten million may have a useful home for a plant, as urged above. For the most part, they will never find the conditions for composting and will end up as just the same kind of plastic as before, with all the same drawbacks.. But even if they were all composted, what good does that do? All of the work required to create plastic - obtaining raw material, sorting it, refining it, subjecting it to the chemical processing needed to isolate pure molecules, polymerizing it, blowing it into bags and then distributing those bags - basically the same work as needed for fossil fuel bags - is to be used once and then discarded. The value of the compost is insignificant compared to the enormous input of capital, human effort, building and running factories, processing and material consumption. And is a pure molecule compost even worth anything? How much better it is to create reusable bags that will be used thousands of times, maybe during a whole lifetime and then some, not just once. Now that's how you really conserve resources in a meaningful way.
One-time discard products are the problem, not the solution!
There are better solutions than carrying bags in car. You don't need bags at all. See http://www.autocarts.net for a clever alternative to bags. This is the best solution to the problem.