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Episode show notes
Credits
Host: Maggie Blaha
Theme music: “Thanks for the Memory” written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, performed by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross in the 1938 film of the same name
Have you ever considered the plastic bag? That’s OK, Maggie hadn’t either. At least she’d never considered or really noticed how they tend to get stuck in trees around the city. But some people, like the Carroll Gardens Plastic Bagman, make it their mission to rid NYC trees of bags and other debris.
Maggie’s also never thought of plastic bags as artifacts that can tell us a lot about our social history. At least she hadn’t until she spoke with Glasgow-based artist Katrina Cobain about the online plastic bag museum she started earlier this year.
In this episode, Maggie considers plastic bags from a few different angles to help us think about how we might, one day, rid the world of them.
Want to check out the Plastic Bag Museum or donate a bag to the collection? You can do that, here. You can also follow them on Instagram @plasticbagmuseum.
To see what the Plastic Bagman is up to or report a bag in the tree in the Carroll Gardens area, follow @plastic_bagman on Instagram.
Want to consider plastic bags some more? Here are some resources I used for this episode:
From Birth to Ban: A History of the Plastic Shopping Bag
Plastic Pollution Reaching Historic Levels in the Arctic
Plastic waste building up in the arctic
eBay vintage plastic shopping bag search
Single-use plastic bag ban might be tougher for men
YouTube video about bag snaggers
Tweet of an add from grocery store owners upset by plastic bag ban
Plastic ban critics fear chaos
Reduction law details on state website
Trash and overcrowding on Mt. Everest
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Episode transcript
*Note about the transcript: Em dashes (‘—’) have been used to indicate when a speaker doesn’t finish a thought or when the conversation between 2 speakers overlaps. [Punctuation decision inspired by Greta Gerwig.]
[OPENING - CLIP BEGINS]
Taylor: I’m going to have a QR code made that goes directly to the Google form—
Maggie: Oh, that’s a good idea—
Taylor: And then have those made out as stickers that say, “See a bag in a tree in this neighborhood, I’ll get it,” and then just the QR code. I can stick them everywhere, I can vandalize the neighborhood in the service of a greater cause.
[CLIP ENDS]
[INTRODUCTION]
Maggie: You’re listening to Thrift: What Your Garage Sale Says About You, a podcast that explores how we can all be more community-minded citizens through thrifting.
[THEME MUSIC, 30 SECONDS]
Maggie: I’m Maggie Blaha, and in this episode I ask you to consider the plastic bag. I ask this even though I’ve never really considered the plastic bag. That is not until I met the Plastic Bagman, who you heard in the opening clip of this episode. Taylor Mali is a 10th-generation New Yorker, a husband, father, slam poet, humorist, teacher, voiceover artist. But he also renders a service to the Carroll Gardens area that likely doesn’t get the full appreciation or notice that it should: He removes the plastic bags, shredded mylar balloons, and other debris that get lodged in neighborhood trees with the help of a very interesting tool.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Taylor: So in a second we’re going to see the bag; it might be a mylar thing, I have no idea whether we’ll get it, but I’m holding— I’ve got the snatchelator with me right here—
Maggie: OK, and this is what—
Taylor: Imagine if you were painting the ceiling of a room, you would have this, which is a painter’s hook, I mean a paint roll, it’s just a short one. And then I’ve jerry-rigged it with a couple of L braces and thumbscrews, so this just is— This’ll get up in the business of a plastic bag and literally nothing else.
Maggie: To get this design right, did it take a few failed tries?
Taylor: Yes, sure, I used a sort of a bundle of hangers all tied together in a snarly nest, but that didn’t really hook the bag and I used some other things. And then it got, it was loose when I was out in the field, so then I thought, “Oh, wingnuts and thumbscrews are the way that I can tighten it by hand when I’m doing it.”
Maggie: And this can reach pretty high? I think I saw that you had gotten one as high as 27 feet?
Taylor: Well, this is a telescoping pole that I bought at Home Depot, and it says it’s from 8 to 23 feet, and I’m 6 feet, so if I put my hand over my head and hold the thing that is then hard to twist— and twisting is necessary to snag the bag—I can get close to something 30-feet high. I don’t have a whole lot of control then. Sometimes branches come down in addition to the bag, but I always feel like the tree doesn’t mind.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: Turns out that Taylor isn’t the first plastic bag vigilante. In the 90s, writer Ian Frazier and his friends Tim and Bill McClelland started snagging bags from trees in NYC and around the country. In 1993, they traveled to the Mississippi River after some devastating floods to help clean debris out of trees. The tool they invented, similar in size and shape to Taylor’s Snatchelator, is called the Bag Snagger, and until fairly recently they were available to order online. Volunteers for Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project even use Bag Snaggers to clean up some of the city’s neglected parks.
I feel a little guilty that I’ve never really thought of plastic bags in trees as a problem. It certainly didn’t make me angry the way it makes Taylor and Ian Frazier angry. But now I can’t help noticing when a bag or Mylar balloon are flapping around in a tree. As Frazier wrote in a Mother Jones article, “Once you begin seeing the bags, you become aware of all the other stuff that’s stuck in trees.”
Once I found Taylor’s Instagram account, I couldn’t stop seeing stuff in trees, like the plastic bag in the tree outside my bedroom window. I didn’t fill out the Google Form on Taylor’s page to notify him about the bag right away. I let a few weeks go by, allowing the bag to make itself at home in the tree’s limbs. I watched it grow heavier as it filled with rainwater, turn brown from city dust and dirt. By the time Taylor came to snatch it, it didn’t even resemble a bag anymore.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Maggie: So how does it work? Do you just get a notification on your phone when someone fills out the form? And how long does it take you to respond?
Taylor: My record is less than an hour. There’s a bag in a tree on Nevins Street that might be slightly beyond your territory, and it’s driving me crazy. And I’ve had it in less than an hour, just because I happened to be going out that way.
But it’s easier to let the Google form collect about 10 and then sort of organize them, so you can hit 3 one day and 7 the next day.
Maggie: So on the form I know you ask people to make the distinction between a bag or a balloon, does that make a difference in how difficult it is to get out?
Taylor: No, and I should probably take that off the form. I was just playing around, new to Google Forms and thought, “Ooh, how about we start with this little button that says bag or balloon?” No it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever, so it should be— As I told you, I just added a question to the form that says, “Would you mind if a blogger or podcaster or journalist contacted you in the future?” So that’s more important to know than whether it’s a balloon or a— I also said “Leave a name,” but it doesn’t have to be your name. Which is not necessary, actually, so maybe I should take that off. I rewrote the number asking for a textable cell phone number, because that’s actually very useful. I’ll get to a place and I can’t find the bag…
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: The day I interviewed Taylor as he removed the plastic bag from my tree and a Mylar balloon from another, it was gray and drizzling. Taylor was a sight to behold in his raincoat and boots, standing with the snatchelator in hand like a farmer with a pitchfork.
There’s something whimsical, even romantic, about the Plastic Bagman’s work. I think that’s a big part of the appeal.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Taylor: People stop me all the time. Once or twice a police officer just to say, “What are you doing? Do you work for the city?” “No.” “You mean you’re just a guy, a private citizen, who removes bags from trees?” “Yes!” “OK, carry on.” You know, and then a journalist will say, “Oh my god, I’ve got to get your name, I’ve got to do a story about this. It’s usually also somebody else who hates bags.
But when people know that I’m coming, I get knocks on the window, so I often take 1 assistant with me who’s 3 or 5, depending on who’s awake. But sometimes it’s 7:30 or 8 o’clock in the morning on a weekend. So people aren’t up but they see the snatchelator getting the bag in the tree, they bang on the window, they open the windows, they cheer.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: We’re all aware that plastic bags are bad for the environment. They’re notorious for collecting at natural landmarks where tourists frequent, like the top of Mt. Everest. In 1997, researcher Charles Moore discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of the largest gyres in the ocean where large amounts of garbage have accumulated. And this large-scale pollution has led to the death of lots of wildlife.
On March 1 of this year, New York became the 8th state to enforce a ban on single-use plastic bags. The new law forbids retailers from handing out plastic shopping bags to customers and requires a 5-cent fee for the use of paper ones.
In New York City alone, residents use more than 10 billion carryout bags every year, and it costs more than $12 million annually for the city to dispose of them. Nonetheless, the ban comes with a fair number of critics, particularly shop owners who are concerned that forcing people to carry their own bags will impact business. One blog post in an online publication called West Side Rag even hinted that getting used to carrying around a reusable shopping bag might be tougher for men, since they don’t always have a place to carry it.
But most New Yorkers, I think, welcome the opportunity to carry around a reusable shopping tote as a status symbol.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Maggie: That’s interesting what you say about plastic bags being a status symbol. It makes me think of tote bags that are sold here in New York for places like The Strand or The New Yorker. These bags have a functional purpose, but they also indicate that the people carrying them either shop at The Strand or subscribe to The New Yorker.
Katrina: That’s such a thing here, and even The New Yorker tote bags I see them everywhere here, and I live in Scotland for goodness sake. But the tote bag thing is really interesting and quite funny. It’s almost as well as being a “oh, look where I went,” it also becomes this thing of like— It’s taboo to be seen without your organic cotton tote cuz, you know, God forbid you forgot it one day and you have to use a plastic bag. So, as well as being status symbols of where you’ve been and the life you lead, they also are symbols of having a more environmentalist attitude, which people want at the minute.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: That’s Katrina Cobain, the creator of the Plastic Bag Museum, an art project she started back when Glasgow first went into lockdown.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Maggie: Have you noticed from different bags that you’ve either collected or seen, are there different categories— Does the quality of the plastic bag fit like a certain brand, while others are flimsier? Or even the size, like a Disney one, for example, I imagine would be bigger because they want you to buy more stuff. Is there like a psychological aspect to how a business chooses their bag?
Katrina: Well, yeah, definitely. Throughout the whole collection there’s a real marked difference in types of plastic, so it will be really thick plastic. It’s interesting that you mention the Disney bags because I think the plastic bag— 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 or somewhere like that 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, and it’s built to be reused, but not from an environmental and 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.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: When I found The Plastic Bag Museum, which is currently an online exhibit of all the bags Katrina has collected or received from followers through the mail, I was intrigued because it was presenting these bags as pieces of social history, as artifacts of the past 40 years or so.
A timeline put together by the UN Environment Programme dates the appearance of the plastic shopping bags we know and feel morally conflicted about to 1965. It was patented by the Swedish company Celloplast and designed by Sten Gustaf Thulin, who actually improved on the company’s original design by suggesting that the opening of the bag should have handles to make them easier to carry. Without Thulin, we would have had to carry full bags of groceries in our arms.
By 1979, single-use shopping bags controlled 80% of the bag market in Europe, and throughout the 80s more and more US grocery chains switched to plastic. And Katrina believes that these plastic bags can tell us a lot about this very recent past.
[CLIP BEGINS]
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. And, you know, 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.
Plastic bags seem to have this amazing ability to chart these changes in multiple pockets of our society, because they’re so intrinsically linked with multiple aspects of our lives. And also they do document businesses that don’t exist anymore, like maybe have been lost due to recessions, the kind of boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism. But then also, 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 these really powerful advertising, like the Marlboro cowboy. So it’s really interesting to chart that huge shift in public opinion around cigarettes and tobacco.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: That’s another thing I didn’t consider about plastic bags: how they’re essentially walking billboards for businesses. But, also, during their very brief existence they’ve inadvertently documented just how quickly public opinion about different things can change. Ironically, they show how the public opinion about plastic bags has shifted.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Katrina: On all the bags throughout the 80s and 90s there’s nothing at all about ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,’ there’s nothing about plastic but obviously we know— 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!” And then you kind of see in some of the bags that they’re literally used by their businesses as ways to communicate with their customers, to say, “Listen, we’re doing all we can; this bag was made out of such-and-such percentage of plastic.” 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. Or it says that they’re donating to an organization that has something to do with forests or the ocean or something. 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.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: It feels very human that even though public opinion can change quickly, it takes us ages to act. This isn’t the first time a ban on plastic bags has been proposed for New York, but the law has only gone into effect earlier this year. I do wonder if this will have an impact on the number of bags that end up in landfills, that end up in trees.
In a 2004 New Yorker article written by Ian Frazier about his work as a bag snagger, he writes that a lot of what ends up in the city’s trees doesn’t land there accidentally or with the help of the wind and animals; it’s thrown in.
“People get mad and chuck other people’s stuff out the window,” Frazier writes. “Sometimes as we removed a series of objects—walkman, t-shirt, sneakers, underpants, pajama bottoms—we understood that they had all once been the possessions of the same unfortunate guy.”
Even with a plastic bag ban, I guess the question really is, “Can we trust that humans won’t throw shit in trees, anymore? Can we trust that humans will do the right thing?”
[CLIP BEGINS]
Katrina: 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.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: That’s Katrina again, talking about her inspiration for the museum. If you check out the collections, which I highly recommend, you’ll be able to dig into the database and see the different bags she’s been collecting from around the world.
I think there’s something about being an artist that makes Katrina optimistic about the future of plastic bags: that one day we’ll stop using them.
[CLIP BEGINS]
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, can be 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.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: I feel like art, poetry, is also part of what compels Taylor Mali to snatch bags from trees in his neighborhood. You have to admit that there is something poetic about it. Though wouldn’t it be great if it didn’t seem poetic? If ridding the world of environmentally harmful substances didn’t have to rest solely on the shoulders of artists?
[CLIP BEGINS]
Taylor: I haven’t written a poem about it yet, but I think you’re absolutely right. I think it is a literal extension of a kind of desire to bring order and beauty to the world, which is the job of a poet, I think. So, I never thought about it that way, but yes, of course.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: You can check out the podcast, store, and newsletter a few places on the internet, which you can learn more about in the show notes for this episode. You’ll also find links to different resources I read and discovered, like The Plastic Bag Museum.
You can even donate a bag to Katrina’s collections by getting in touch through the contact info on the museum site, or on Instagram.
I’d like to end this episode with Taylor reading his poem about giving stuff away after a divorce.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Taylor: For Maggie Blaha on a drizzly Tuesday, on the drizzly Tuesday, we decided to go take plastic bags out of trees. And there’s that poem.
This is a poem from the book of mine Bouquet of Red Flags. It’s called “Give It Away, Or Put It Away, Or Throw It Away.”
At the end of the marriage,
whatever stuff is left—
like crutches or rustic tools
you rarely used, tight shoes,
dusty books, or even love—
whatever lies pile on the floor
you have to find a way to store
after the divorce. Unless
of course before that day
you took the time to give away
or sell (at a tag sale or on eBay)
all that did not break apart
in the course of breaking up
your home and heart,
some of it, no doubt, cracked
from the start, or else
abandoned in the name
of moving on and living;
everything must be given away,
or in some other way forgiven.
What’s left must be stored somewhere,
be it in the flood-cursed basement
of a friend, or worse, the rented
metal room where love, like wine,
goes to improve but never does.
Or, at least, the body, let loose
in memory’s uncharted attic,
or left undressed in some empty
chamber, say, the 5 by 10 container
in the middle of your chest.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: Thanks for listening.
[OUTRO 30 SECONDS]
Episode 19: Consider the Plastic Bag