In its hometown, the world’s second most consumed beer, China’s Tsingtao, is sipped out of large plastic bags. Like any good beer bottle, the bags are emblazoned with the company’s logo: the Huilan Pavilion underscored with some waves, an homage to Qingdao’s Zhanqiao Pier and maritime culture. Beer drinkers can fill a bag with the light brew and suck it up through straws. In a world of steins, mugs, and bottles, the Tsingtao bag is a novelty. But the bag is a far more common beverage vessel than the world would like to admit. 

The plastic bag is perhaps the cheapest, most bountiful mass-manufactured container in the world. In many countries around the world, the cheapest bottled water to be found is not actually bottled, it is bagged. In fact, in Latin America, Africa, and parts of central and southern Asia, plastic bags are an extremely common and cheap container for a wide variety of beverages. 

On the east coast of Madagascar, where I lived for nearly 2 years, the largest social events of the month were invariably soccer games. The town would parade down a winding dirt road that roughly followed the course of the slow and muddy Rongorongo River, eventually reaching a vast clearing in the forest—a field with bamboo-framed goals. Typically, young children would play the first games, but the town came out in force for the young men’s matches. Obviously a thirst-inducing activity, some entrepreneurial townsfolk would make the hike with bags of water and frozen bags of juice in plastic basins carried on the hip or head.  

I would lug my 1 liter metal water bottle to these sporting events, but reusable water bottles are not a well known commodity in rural Madagascar. When players and spectators did eventually get thirsty, they would pay 100 Ariary to these vendors for a bag of water or a frozen sachet of juice. In Madagascar, these containers are sealed off by heat. The experienced bag drinker uses the teeth to pinch off a corner and pipe the refreshing contents into their mouth. 

After these events, as the flood of activity subsided back down the road, exhausted plastic pouches would remain, tangled in the reeds on the boundaries of the clearing. Just as plastic bottles are a scourge to our environments, the plastic bag is no less insidious.