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Sometimes I feel like these are the “plastic-free bag” solution[0] designed to make the market embrace the “tried and true” old way. [0] There was this chip ba
by joshspankit 3y ago
Sometimes I feel like these are the “plastic-free bag” solution[0] designed to make the market embrace the “tried and true” old way.
[0] There was this chip bag from a major chip manufacturer and it proudly claimed the bag was plastic free (might even have been compostable), but it was the thinnest, loudest, crinkliest bag you’d ever heard. It seemed like the chip manufacturer board meeting went like this: “The people want us to cut out plastic! For the environment or something. Don’t they know how much easier and more profitable plastic bags are?? You know what? If they want plastic-free we’ll give them plastic-free... We’ll make them regret even asking...”
That bag didn’t last long before it vanished never to be seen again.
- mholm 3y agoHonestly, this seems like the sort of thing that they just didn't consider when testing. Maybe they even saw some 'Bag is unusually loud' notes and thought 'How bad could it possibly be?' and greenlit it. Feels more like incompetent bureaucracy (which I'm sure we all understand) than something malicious.
- maxwell 3y agoAny sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
- joshspankit 3y agoI’m not trying to prove that there was malice in the case of the chip bag, I’m just using it as a way to explain the tactic.
- hwillis 3y agoMuch more likely they had a strict time limit (internally or externally imposed) on what they considered biodegradable. If you make it stronger but thinner, bacteria can break it up much faster which leads to faster breakdown. By comparison the bag being loud seems pretty irrelevant if it's just not possible to make a thicker bag degrade faster. Also, many biodegradable plastics are more brittle than more common plastics. They only way to keep the bag flexible in that case is to make it thinner.