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Q&A with Katrina Cobain, Curator of The Plastic Bag Museum
Thrift podcast: How did you start collecting bags, and how did the idea of creating a museum come about?
Katrina: My name’s Katrina Cobain, [and] I am an artist that works in Glasgow. I created The Plastic Bag Museum, which is currently an online-only museum for plastic bags. It only went online back in May of 2020, because the whole idea in my head has been rattling around for a year or 2, and I’ve been collecting bags for about 2 years, but I only really got the time during the lockdown here to really create the site and photograph all the bags, which was quite a good project for quarantine.
I guess it was a very random idea to begin with. I started to receive all these bags through my door in the post in envelopes, and I thought, “Where are all these coming from?” They’re all handwritten and addressed to me and, about a week or so before that, I’d had the flu, so I had a really bad fever. And then I looked in my phone notes and discovered this manifesto for the plastic bag museum, and how plastic bags were these great things that would tell us so much about the future.
Then, the more I thought about it, I was thinking a lot about Egyptian objects, because in a lot of museums around the world people love to look at Egyptian objects cuz it’s this kind of civilization that was lost and we have sort of unpacked all this information about their lives and their society from the interesting objects.
I was thinking a little bit about, “Well, if something were to happen to us”—this was before the pandemic, so it’s not as dark— “what would be left to learn about us?” And then I was thinking a lot about landfill sites and how the only things that would be surviving in the landfill site would be made of plastic cuz they will outlast everything else. And I was thinking about digging up all this plastic and what it would mean, and there are so many interesting ways to spin off on that. Like there’s a whole section of archaeology called gamer archaeology where they dig up old games that were mass buried in 1980s LA because they weren’t very successful.
So the bag museum has just been kind of developing from there with other people getting involved sending bags. A lot of it was started just from my own collection, which I kind of gathered from a range of places: some of them are bags I’ve purchased on eBay from other collectors, some of them are bags that I sort of happened upon or that friends have given me. And then since the site’s gone live, we’ve received a lot more posted donations, which has been fantastic, cuz then I can get bags from much further afield, which is obviously very difficult in the current pandemic context. So, it’s been really wonderful just people’s response to it and wanting to engage with it.
Thrift: You say on the museum website that single-use plastic bags can tell us a lot about ourselves and our social history. Can you expand on that?
Katrina: Yeah, so, plastic bags, definitely from the 1960s onwards, are amazing items just to tell us a little bit more about the development of capitalism and consumption in the Western world. We can really see this kind of steep incline in use and, also, a variation in plastic bags, which really kind of mirrors consumption in our society. We can also see, hand-in-hand with that, how brands and franchises develop and become huge players in, not only on our high streets, but also as icons that people know and recognize from advertising.
A good way to look at plastic bags is that they can really chart our spending habits, what types of bags people have kept over the years, cuz not all of them have survived, obviously. And, also, they do document businesses that don’t exist anymore that maybe have been lost due to recessions; the kind of boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism. But then, as well as the obvious kind of links to business, they really chart public opinion about certain items.
For example, a really good one is tobacco use, which has just completely taken a u-turn in the last 20 years. So we’ve got a collection on the site which is solely dedicated to tobacco and tobacco marketing and the plastic bags that are linked to that.
As a 24-year-old who didn’t grow up around much tobacco advertising, cuz it was really clamped down upon in the U.K. and in Europe, it’s mental to think that there were all these different brands with all this really powerful advertising, like the Marlboro cowboy. So it’s really interesting to chart that huge shift in public opinion around cigarettes and tobacco.
Then, also, another good thing that it charts is, of course, the public perception of the climate crisis and the environment. On all the bags throughout the 80s and 90s there’s nothing at all about ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.’
Since the year 2000, there have been big shifts in public opinion about looking after the environment and threats of climate change. You can see this creeping into plastic bags and onto their designs, because they’ll have these kind of, you know, half-assed sentences like, “Oh, you can recycle this bag!” Even the bags that you can get today here in Scotland, you would be very hard-pressed to find a bag that doesn’t have that kind of statement on it. It’s really remarkable how [plastic bags] chart that shift as well, and, eventually, the final charting of that will be their complete disappearance from our day-to-day.
Thrift: Is there a psychological aspect to how a business chooses their bag? A Disney one, for example, I imagine would be bigger because they want you to buy more stuff.
Katrina: Throughout the whole collection there’s a real marked difference in types of plastic. It’s interesting that you mention the Disney bags. We do have some Disney bags in the collection from about as early as the 1980s, and whenever you go to a place like Disney World everything becomes a souvenir.
[This is] because of the branding, because, you know, you went there and you wanna remember all the stuff from your trip. So that’s why people collect things like napkins, or plastic bags will often fall into this category. You don’t really see this so much now, but definitely when I was growing up people would reuse plastic bags as a kind of souvenir status thing. So it would be like, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna bring my Disney World bag, just so everyone knows that I went to Disney World.”
You can actually see this reflected in the plastic bags you get from Disney World, because some of them actually have hard plastic handles and then a bag attached underneath, which obviously indicates reuse but not from a sustainability standpoint. It’s more like, “You want everyone to know you went to Disney World and so do we, so we’re gonna make sure this bag is fit for the job.”
A lot of the bags that have been donated in recent months since the site has gained a bit of exposure have been bags that have been kept as souvenirs, which is another thing that’s interesting about human beings in general. We would never keep a flimsy plastic bag from the corner shop around the corner, but if I was to visit the bodega around the corner from your apartment I would keep that plastic bag because I’d be like, “Oh, it’s from New York! It’s amazing!” You might say the same about a random shop here in Glasgow and Scotland. And that obviously is reflected in the collection, as well. Those are the bags that survive, which ultimately can be collected into something like this.
Thrift: Tell me about eBay. Are there a lot of plastic bags for sale on eBay?
Katrina: eBay is one of my favorite things. If I could just have a job where I’m just on eBay all day long, I think I would just—I’d be happy. I think eBay is the ultimate rummage sale and anything, even the most random thing, you can find it on eBay. It’s just brilliant. But, yeah, there is a plastic bag scene on eBay.
There are bags that are on my watchlist in the US actually, so there are definitely US sellers. I’ve never committed to buying one because postage is so expensive, but maybe someday. I think there are a lot of people who collect plastic bags out there, it’s definitely not just me. They’re quite fun things to collect because [they’re] very accessible. It’s not like collecting art or even some records that are very expensive. The most I’ve ever paid for a bag is about 5 GBP, and other ones you can get for about 2GBP, and they can still be very interesting and could be like 30 years old.
Thrift: What is Scotland’s relationship to plastic bags?
Katrina: I think that the relationship to plastic bags here is changing slowly, and it kind of goes hand-in-hand with things like plastic water bottles. Maybe 5 or 7 years ago people wouldn’t think twice about buying a bottle of water with their lunch every day, whereas now people are much more likely to carry a proper water bottle to fill up and reuse. But obviously the biggest change to all of that is the pandemic, which has really increased people’s plastic use here and around the world.
But I think after this once-in-a-lifetime event, we’re on the road to phasing them out and they’re definitely used much, much, much less than they were. And I think a lot of people really do make a conscious effort to carry their reusable tote bag.
Also some shops here have started to use paper bags, which I know is common in the US, but it’s never really been a thing here. But there are some grocery stores that are now using paper bags, which people are very up for using, so that’s good as well. Once the COVID-19 impact is over, it would probably be good to take some more steps in reducing the use of them.
Thrift: Where are most of the bags in the collection from? And how can people submit a bag to you?
Katrina: Most of the bags are from the UK, because they’ve been the easiest to get a hold of. But, recently, I’ve been receiving a lot more bags from abroad through the post, which has been absolutely fantastic.
In recent weeks, there have been a lot more bags from across Europe. I think we’ve got a bag from nearly every European country now, and we do have some bags from the United States. We are starting to get a little bit more from East Asia. We’ve got a few from Japan, a few from New Zealand. A lovely lady in New Zealand sent me some bags that she had collected as souvenirs from her own travels, so they were from very interesting places like Mongolia, Iran.
I don’t think there are any bags currently from South America, which is interesting. I don’t think there are any bags from Africa, there might be one from South Africa, but I’m not entirely sure. Ideally it would be great to have bags from really different places on a global scale.
The way to get in touch is on the website.
Thrift: What do you see as the mission of The Plastic Bag Museum?
Katrina: I think that the Plastic Bag Museum and the project is really about a positive outlook about something which can seem like a very overwhelming environmental crisis.
Thinking about how placing these items in the past can be, with a bit of care and attention, something that actually is an asset to our lives in getting rid of them. And changing people’s perceptions about them in a fun way, rather than a very bleak way, I think often changing people’s minds is about a combination of both.
If you think of a plastic bag as a museum object, as well as thinking of it as something that really harms the environment for animals or coral reefs, you’ll eventually get there in not using them anymore. I think participation is something that is embedded within that, because it makes it accessible to people. Museums are sometimes seen as places which can be unwelcoming and inaccessible to all different types of people, whereas with the Plastic Bag Museum it’s literally trash. Anyone’s trash can be exhibited and be part of the collection with absolute pride of place.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and I am that man.
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