TOUCHDOWN: PLASTICS INDUSTRY BAGS A WINNER

“Plastics” – the “one word” of advice a young Dustin Hoffman was offered in The Graduate. And plastics – and plastic bags in particular – are the focus of this particular Touchdown, awarded to the Canadian Plastics Industry Association. The plastic grocery bag is the latest target of environmental organizations, and various jurisdictions and retailers have been getting lots of media coverage for announcing measures to curtail their use (through new per-bag charges or banning them altogether). So what’s the industry to do, when one of its major products is being demonized as a major problem for the environment? The answer, it seems, is to identify a new problem – specifically, one linked to the purported environmental solution to plastic bags, namely re-useable cloth bags. The Canadian Plastics Industry Association had two different labs run tests on a couple of dozen cloth grocery bags, and what they found was a frightening mix of nasty stuff including mould, yeast and “intestinal fecal bacteria.” The industry’s message was that plastic bags are much more sanitary than cloth. Critics were quick to label the communications initiative as a “desperate attempt to scare people from reusable bags,” but whatever: the industry succeeded in getting its message heard with a clever strategy anchored in scientific evidence in the form of the independent lab tests.