Battle of the Bags: Paper Bags and the Incredible Story of their Female Pioneer and Innovator!
By: Simon Trevarthen
Tags: Business, Women In Business, Women, Environment, Innovation

World wide consumers use one to five trillion bags per year!

Our generation will see the more discarded plastic in our oceans than the weight of fish in the seas. Our addiction to plastic is literarily clogging up our globe’s oceans.

Plastic is poisoning marine life. Turtles, dolphins, and whales have all been found with stomachs stuffed full plastics, often leading to painful deaths caused by starvation.

The biggest culprit is seemingly the most benign: the plastic bag.

Invented by the Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin in 1959. Remember, the movie “The Graduate” and the young Dustin Hoffman, Sten thought, plastic — the wonder material of the postwar world — would be the answer. A plastic bag, he thought would mean fewer trees felled to make paper ones. Clean, glossy, modern, and cheap to make, the consumer society had found its disposable carry-all: the plastic bag.

Spin the wheel of time forward and today, the United Nations believes that shoppers worldwide use — and throw aside — of between one to five trillion bags per year. According to the Earth Policy Institute, that means about two million plastic bags are made every minute or the weight of 10 elephants every 60 seconds.

But it is not just the waste but the energy used to make them. A dozen plastic bags use more energy, including oil, than could power a car for one mile. The average American household goes 1,500 plastic bags a year. Our global thirst for plastic seems unquenchable and is estimated to double by 2040, making up 20 percent of oil production, much of it ending up in landfills and our oceans.

Our solution and perhaps redemption might come in knowing the story of an inventor and pioneer who faced prejudice, suspicion and prevalent belief that she was not capable.

Margaret Eloise Knight (1838–1905): inventor, entrepreneur & pioneer

Margaret Eloise Knight is a trailblazer when the phrase actually was literal. Born in 1838, to a humble family, she left school with basic education. However, she was curious, passionate, and driven.

Growing up in Maine, she was an inveterate tinkerer determined to build the best and fastest sled. By slowly improving every aspect of the sled — rope, runners, bush bow, and sides - she achieved her goal, building a sled that was the envy of all the other kids in town.

Forced through poverty to leave school, Margaret went to work in a cotton mill, aged 12. Cotton mills in the 19th Century were vile places. The discipline was severe with frequent beating and injuries commonplace. Even young children were not spared. They were forced to crawl, under the working looms to unsnag threads as fast shuttles flew overhead. The result was that many lost hands, limbs, or their lives.

Margaret witnessed one such tragedy. A young woman’s blouse caught in the huge machine, dragged her in, and mangled her arm. Margaret was horrified but determined to do something about it. She sat up late, designed, and built a safety guard for the machine. It worked. In fact, it was such as success that her invention was soon adopted by other millwrights.

But Margaret was only getting going. She designed shoemaking devices, rotary machines, and paper feeding devices. If you have ever waited by a photocopier for it to feed out paper, it is a distant descendent of Margaret’s work.

Finally, in 1867 she moved to Springfield, Massachusetts: an industrial hub in the Civil War era. There she was hired by the Columbia Paper Bag Company. Paper bags at the time were flimsy, weak, and expensive. Margaret saw the need for a cheap, strong, and foldable bag that could safely carry groceries home.

After many prototypes, she struck on a glued paper bag with fluted sides and a rectangular, reinforced bottom. However, the bag was only half the solution. Her genius was to design a machine that made the bag. The patented machine would cut, fold and glue a paper with precision. She also made sure the machine was safe to operate.

Later, Margaret would found her own the Eastern Paper Bag Co. to manufacture her new bags. When Margaret died in 1905, her obituary read she was “The Lady Edison!” with 27 US patents to her name. Though she never became rich from her inventions, Margaret broke the mould and proved great innovators come from anywhere. Although not the first woman to have a US patent, her paper bag machine still exists and is now proudly displayed in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

150 years on and her paper bag is going strong, helping to save your groceries from the spilling out on the floor ever since. However, her lasting legacy remains the simple choice we can all make to avoid non-biodegradable plastic and choose the Knight invention: the humble paper bag.

About the Author

Simon Trevarthen is Founder and Chief Inspiration Officer of Elevate Your Greatness (EYG). EYG helps individuals, teams, and organizations unpack the secrets of success by becoming even better versions of themselves through dynamic keynotes, seminars, and workshops on innovation, inspiration and presentation excellence.