On March 1, single-use plastic bags were banned in New York State. This measure is not perfect, and it’s long overdue, but it’s a big step in the continuing cultural shift toward reducing waste. Last week The New York Times published this article about the many plastic bags of New York City, documented by designer @shoshibuya.
In the piece, Susan Freinkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story describes the plastic bag as follows:
“It’s an amazing engineering feat. You’ve got this puff of polyethylene that’s waterproof. It’s durable. It’ll last a long time. It can carry a thousand times its weight. It’s an incredible product. But it was designed with no thought in mind to what happens to it once you get those groceries home.”
It got me thinking about these photos I took two years ago when I lived in New York, something I did because the bag felt like a naive relic of the past. It was a sentimental souvenir from an old fashioned licorice shop in Manhattan. I remember the bag more vividly than the candy that it carried.
My hope is that we can acknowledge our attachments to old ways of doing things while making strides to do better. We can recognize the beauty of this banal object and still do our part to make it a future artifact.