collision detection: The Platonic bag

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

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt3/mt-tb.cgi/1090

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference The Platonic bag:

» Glad ForceFlex from Gizmodo
Part-time Gizmodo operative and full-time ladykiller Brendon "I," Koerner talks about the "Mercedes of Trash Bags," the Glad ForceFlex. Each of the new, stronger bags is comprised of ribber diamond patterns, each of which can expand out when internal p... [Read More]

Tracked on January 25, 2005 9:36 AM

» 2fe94efce6c from 2fe94efce6c
6ae85869991b7b8f24fb430a81006d95 cacbd5289b4ac9d97e85e76c8. [Read More]

Tracked on March 16, 2005 11:26 AM

Comments

Once again engineering principles take a back seat to marketing. Style--the pointless subordination of functionality to whim. Fie!

Posted by: Mentat at January 24, 2005 1:52 PM

Heh.

Posted by: Clive at January 24, 2005 4:24 PM

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!

Posted by: Clive at January 24, 2005 4:26 PM

It worked. Cool.

Posted by: Clive at January 24, 2005 4:28 PM

So, why was ous.com blacklisted? Whats MT-blacklist?

Posted by: J. Wallace at January 24, 2005 6:27 PM

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.

Posted by: kirk at January 25, 2005 9:42 AM

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.

Posted by: Onie at January 25, 2005 11:20 AM

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.

Posted by: Clive at January 25, 2005 11:27 AM

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.

Posted by: Chris at January 26, 2005 11:43 AM

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...

Posted by: Robin at January 27, 2005 6:21 PM

3246 want to play online poker mate?

Posted by: http://www.online-poker-i.com at January 30, 2005 4:03 AM

8378 want to play online poker mate?

Posted by: online poker at February 1, 2005 9:02 AM

1018 want to play online poker mate?

Posted by: online poker at February 1, 2005 9:02 AM

1534 want to play online poker mate?

Posted by: online poker at February 1, 2005 6:41 PM

8785 http://www.online-poker-e.com
online poker

Posted by: payday loans at February 8, 2005 3:06 PM

8994 http://www.online-poker-web.net
online poker