Plastic bags became common in Europe by the late 1970s and in the United States by the mid-1980s. The modern plastic shopping bag was invented in 1965, but it took nearly two decades for the bag to cross the Atlantic and replace paper in American grocery stores.
The 1965 Invention
The one-piece polyethylene shopping bag was patented in 1965 by Celloplast, a Swedish company. Engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin designed it, and the bag quickly began replacing cloth and older plastic carriers across Europe. The design was simple, lightweight, and waterproof, giving it immediate advantages over what shoppers were already using.
The material that made this possible, high-density polyethylene (HDPE), had been commercially available since 1954, when Phillips Petroleum introduced it under the brand name Marlex. Polyethylene itself had been invented in the 1930s by Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries, but early production required extreme pressures of 20,000 to 30,000 pounds per square inch, making it expensive and impractical for disposable products. Phillips researchers developed a new process that needed only a few hundred psi and produced a stiffer, harder, more heat-resistant plastic. That breakthrough made cheap, thin-film bags realistic for the first time.
Europe Adopted Them First
By 1979, plastic bags controlled 80 percent of the bag market in Europe. That dominance happened in roughly 14 years, a fast rollout driven by low manufacturing costs and the bags’ obvious convenience for shoppers walking or using public transit. European cities, where people carried groceries by hand more often than loading them into car trunks, were a natural fit for a lightweight bag with handles.
The American Shift in the 1980s
Plastic bags didn’t arrive in force in the United States until around 1979, and the real turning point came in 1982. That year, Safeway and Kroger, two of the country’s largest supermarket chains, switched to plastic bags. Once those retailers made the move, the rest of the industry followed quickly.
Cost was the main driver. Plastic bags averaged about 3.25 cents each, while paper bags cost around 7 cents. For a supermarket handing out thousands of bags a day, that difference added up fast. The plastic bag industry was also aggressive in marketing. By the mid-1980s, plastic bag makers had launched campaigns to grow their share of what the Los Angeles Times described in 1986 as a $600-million grocery sack market. Mobil Chemical Co. was the leading plastic grocery bag manufacturer at the time, and the industry promoted not just the bags’ convenience but creative secondary uses to win over skeptical shoppers.
The famous “paper or plastic?” question at checkout became a fixture of American grocery shopping during this period. Urban shoppers tended to prefer plastic because the bags were easier to carry, while some customers held onto paper out of habit or because paper bags stood upright in car trunks. By the end of the 1980s, plastic had largely won.
Why the Transition Happened So Fast
Several factors lined up at once. Plastic bags weighed a fraction of what paper bags did, which cut shipping costs for retailers. They took up less storage space in the back of a store. They were waterproof, so groceries survived a rainy parking lot. And they could be produced at roughly half the cost per unit.
For consumers, the handles were a genuine upgrade. Paper grocery bags had no handles, which meant shoppers either bear-hugged them or used a cart to the car. Plastic bags could be looped over fingers and carried several at a time. The shift mirrored an earlier transition inside stores: meat trays had already moved from paper to plastic wrapping because plastic didn’t stick to meat when frozen, showing retailers that customers would accept plastic packaging without complaint.
From Ubiquity to Pushback
By the 1990s, plastic bags were the global default. Stores in the United States alone were distributing an estimated 100 billion plastic bags per year by the early 2000s. The same qualities that made them popular, their lightness and durability, made them an environmental problem. They blew out of landfills, clogged waterways, and persisted in the environment for hundreds of years.
Countries began restricting them within a few decades of their peak adoption. Bangladesh became one of the first nations to ban thin plastic bags in 2002 after they were found blocking drainage systems during severe flooding. Ireland introduced a tax on plastic bags in 2002, cutting usage by over 90 percent almost immediately. Since then, dozens of countries across Africa, Asia, and Europe have enacted bans or fees. In the United States, regulation has been slower and mostly driven at the state and city level, with California becoming the first state to pass a statewide ban in 2014.
The plastic bag went from nonexistent to dominant in about 20 years, a remarkably fast adoption curve for a product that is now being phased out in much of the world barely 40 years after it peaked.