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Sunday 15 January 2012

Bag

Duffel bags are named after a town of Duffel, Belgium, where they were first made.

Luther Crowell patented a machine to make paper bags in 1867, and five years later, a machine to make square-bottomed paper bags as we know them today. He also made numerous other improvements in terms of design. The Cape Cod inventor, held over 280 patents in his lifetime. 


Walter Deubener and his wife, Lydia, owned and operated the S. S. Kruesge grocery store on Seventh Street in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. After noticing that his customers were having a difficult time carrying their groceries by hand, Deubener came up with the first shopping bag with handles. The package consisted of a paper bag with string reinforcing the bottom and running up the sides through holes and over the top to create handles. Deubner named his new product after himself, calling it the "Deubner Shopping Bag," and sold it for five cents.

The Deubener couple were issued a patent for their bag on May 21, 1929, sold their store and went into the shopping bag business full-time.


During the Depression, people used cotton flour bags and feed sacks to make clothes and household items. Manufacturers got wind of their bags’ other uses and began decorating them. Color and patterns added a little style and joy to the common sack dress.

Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin developed a method of forming a simple one-piece bag by folding, welding and die-cutting a flat tube of plastic in the early 1960s. Swedish packaging company Celloplast patented Thulin's plastic bag worldwide in 1965.

In 2018 Spalding Grammar School in England banned students from bringing bags into classes. 17-year-old student Jacob Ford, protested his school's ban by bringing his books to class inside of a microwave oven. His mother supported his peaceful protest, but the school suspended him and chastised the mother for supporting him.

To cancel out the negative environmental impact of one plastic bag, a cotton bag would need to be reused 131 times. (While plastic bags can also be reused but people just don't).

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