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

[1] 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.

However, other companies saw the attraction of the bag, too, and the US petrochemicals group Mobil overturned Celloplast's US patent in 1977.

[14] 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[15] the "self-opening polyethylene bag stack."

[18] Traditional plastic bags are usually made from polyethylene, which consists of long chains of ethylene monomers.

[20] However, most degradable bags do not readily decompose in a sealed landfill,[21] and represent a possible contaminant to plastic recycling operations.

[22] The same properties that have made plastic bags so commercially successful and ubiquitous—namely their low weight and resistance to degradation—have also contributed to their proliferation in the environment.

Large buildups of plastic bags can clog drainage systems and contribute to flooding, as occurred in Bangladesh in 1988 and 1998[24] and almost annually in Manila.

[27] According to Sharma, Moser, Vermillion, Doll, and Rajagopalan (2014), they have noted that in the year 2009 only 13% of one trillion single-use plastic bags produced were recycled, the rest were thrown away, which means they end up in landfills and because they are so lightweight end up in the atmosphere blown into the environment.

Phasing out plastic bags is a viable option, however, there are many that argue that this puts a strain on businesses and makes it more difficult for the customer to take goods home.

Plastic bags were found to constitute a significant portion of the floating marine debris in the waters around southern Chile in a study conducted between 2002 and 2005.

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

They need to be taken to a location that recycles plastic film, usually a grocery store or major retail chain.