January 23, 2005
The Platonic bag
Apparently Glad has scored a bit hit with its new ForceFlex garbage bags -- which can stretch to seemingly impossible dimensions, and thus contain the ever-greater volumes of nonrecyclable carcinogens the average American family craps out every day. ("Hey honey, Johnny doesn't like his Jungle Gym anymore!" "No problem, sweetie -- we'll just shove it inside a single ForceFlex garbage bag and send it off to the dump so Johny's grandchildren can drink the entire goddamn thing 80 years from now when it leaches into the water table.")
Anyway, there's a great piece by Brendan Koerner in today's New York Times, in which he interviews Glad and discovers some interesting facts about the design process:
A ForceFlex bag looks a bit like an overgrown paper towel, with row upon row of embossed diamond shapes. Those patterns, explained Shaun T. Broering, Glad's technology leader, make the bags stronger and more flexible: each diamond is ribbed with tiny indentations, which can puff out considerably when pressure is applied from within.
Glad, a subsidiary of the Clorox Company of Oakland, Calif., spent several years adjusting ForceFlex's diamonds for design and maximum strength. They could have chosen bigger diamonds, which would have allowed the bags to better withstand errant chopsticks or cereal-box corners. But consumers who tested early ForceFlex prototypes were wary of too much of a departure from unadorned bags.
"When the diamonds get too big, that's a real problem for us," said Eric Reynolds, a marketing manager at Glad. "We can't push consumers too far."
No wonder this country has such trouble dealing with the impact of consumption on the environment. Not only do we have no problem with generating enormous amounts of trash -- but we've got an aesthetic for it.
Posted by Clive Thompson at January 23, 2005 03:13 PM
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Once again engineering principles take a back seat to marketing. Style--the pointless subordination of functionality to whim. Fie!
IGNORE THIS POST:
Recently, commenters have been unable to post anything with "ous.com" as a string in it, since it was being blocked by MT-Blacklist. I just reinstalled a fresh blacklist, and I want to see if it'll work, so let's see if this URL -- Electrolicious works!
So, why was ous.com blacklisted? Whats MT-blacklist?
I bought a box of these a few weeks ago. They aren't too shabby. I got the black ones. The weird part is when you have heavy stuff the bag will take on strange shaps.
Stretch, my butt.
I bought a box of them, and while they do stretch, they ripped worse than the regular bags I've bought from them in the past.
I wasn't impressed, and I won't be buying them again.
User reviews! Excellent.
By the way, MT-Blacklist is a little web app for blocking spambots from posting spam-comments on blogs; I use it myself to try and curtail spam-comments here. The Blacklist includes URLs and parts of URLs that are known to be used by spammers. For some reason, I must have input "ous.com" as a suggestive or dangerous string, and it started blocking legitimate sites.
I bought the bags when they came out. They actually work really wel in my experience. I mean, there are limits to their functionality - you cannot put a jungle gym inside of one. Is this bad for the environment? I'm not really sure how it makes things any *worse* People will be putting garbage in plastic bags. There is no way around that for the foreseeable future (at least in reality and not in a wonderful world where everyone wakes up overnight and realises the shit that they are in) so its probably important to use the most sound products available. In terms of these bags they seem like an improvement because if bags break less then it seems likely that less loose trash will enter the environment due to broken bags.
Now, does it matter if they break once they are at the dump? Probably not because they'll be buried deeply in a few days and there will be a great slow down in the rate of decomposition after that point. Stupid anerobic bacteria isn't down with the game plan! So plastic or not it doesn't seem to matter that much at that time.
Do bags that don't break increase the amount of crap people through away? I really don't think so.
The real problem is that we don't face the true long-term costs of our ForceFlex usage. I'm all for crazy carbon-fiber bags as long as we make sure they cost as much as they should. Given that they will be what remains after the earth explodes.
In other news, I wonder if these would make cooler rain ponchos (oh come on -- you've worn a garbage bag before) with these than w/ normal bags? I'm diggin' the texture...
