Plastic bags are used for containing and transporting goods such as foods, produce, powders, ice, magazines, chemicals, and waste.

Some bags have gussets to allow a higher volume of contents, special stand-up pouches have the ability to stand up on a shelf or a refrigerator, and some have easy-opening or reclosable options.

Plastic bags usually use less material than comparable to boxes, cartons, or jars, thus are often considered as "reduced or minimized packaging".

They added that "The current bags made from bioplastics have less favourable environmental impact profiles than the other materials examined" and that this is due to the process of raw-material production.

[3] If disposed of improperly, however, plastic bags can create unsightly litter and harm some types of wildlife.

Moderate quality evidence from a 2018 systematic review showed that plastic wraps or bags prevented hypothermia compared to routine care, especially in extremely preterm infants.

The modern lightweight shopping bag is the invention of Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin.

[7] In the early 1960s, Thulin developed a method of forming a simple one-piece bag by folding, welding and die-cutting a flat tube of plastic for the packaging company Celloplast of Norrköping, Sweden.

Thulin's design produced a simple, strong bag with a high load-carrying capacity, and was patented worldwide by Celloplast in 1965.

From the mid-1980s onwards, plastic bags became common for carrying daily groceries from the store to vehicles and homes throughout the developed world.

In 1992, Sonoco Products Company of Hartsville, SC patented[8] the "self-opening polyethylene bag stack".

While the average consumer in China uses only two or three plastic bags a year, the numbers are much higher in most other countries: Denmark: four; Ireland: 20;[10] Germany: 65; Poland, Hungary, Slovakia: more than 400.

[citation needed] A large number of cities and counties have banned the use of plastic bags by grocery stores or introduced a minimum charge.

8% of the world's petroleum resources are used for creating plastic bags at 12 million barrels of oil a day.

In the 2000s, many stores and companies began to use different types of biodegradable bags to comply with perceived environmental benefits.

[19] The way in which the bags float in open water can resemble a jellyfish, posing significant dangers to marine mammals and Leatherback sea turtles, when they are eaten by mistake and enter the animals' digestive tracts.

Once death occurs and the animal body decomposes, the plastic reenters the environment, posing more potential problems.

According to the Recyc-Quebec, a Canadian recycling agency, "The conventional plastic bag has several environmental and economic advantages.

Because of this, about 25 children in the United States suffocate each year due to plastic bags, almost nine-tenths of whom are under the age of one.