Museum of the Plastic Bag saves item banned from shops

Most see the disappearance of the plastic bag as a good news story from last year. Our beaches don't miss them. Neither do the turtles, who mistook them for jellyfish.

However as the era of the plastic bag wraps up, there's one museum curator who viewed the disappearance of this once ubiquitous item with mixed emotion.

The Plastic Bag Museum is Glasgow's newest institution preserving old tat. It describes itself imaginatively as "a museum solely dedicated to bags made of plastic" and its collections are focused on polymer sacs circa 1970 to present day.

You might scoff. But curator Katrina Cobain refers to them as "a piece of social history".
Explaining the origins of her collection Cobain says the inspiration came to her in a "fever dream", she told Vice magazine.

"I looked in my phone notes because they always contain whatever's going on in my head, and found this manifesto for a plastic bag museum I came up with when I was really unwell. Apparently I'd started ordering bags from eBay," she said.

The bags now number almost 100. Most have been bought or "kindly donated" by fellow collectors.

First engineered by Swedish engineer Gustaf Thulin, the lightweight plastic shopping bag of the 1960s was a humble statement of who you were – and where you shopped.

Celebrated for their cost effectiveness, the bags became a canvas for various motifs, shops products and even political parties. One of the prize exhibits is a Soviet sack exclaiming '40 years of the future', which has outlasted the country that printed it. However, the decline of the bag came with a rise in environmental awareness.

Since the 2010s fewer shoppers would be seen holding a plastic bag though, in Scotland, Cobain thinks it's the 5p cost supermarkets began charging that killed of the bag.

It's now just over a year since New Zealand "banned the bag" and they've virtually disappeared off the high street.

Although the World Economic Forum has said that plastic can remain in the oceans for almost 1000 years, the delicate designs of the bags are not so long-lasting and need careful conservation. To do this the bags are stored in darkness, lying flat on acid-free tissue paper.

Cobain says she welcomes new donations of local and 'exotic' bags, the ultimate goal of the museum is "a large scale exhibition of our bags here in Scotland".

For more momories captured in polyethene visit plasticbagmuseum.com.

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