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Brian Ojanpa

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July 24, 2009

Trash bags make no scents

I bought some kitchen trash bags the other day, drawn to the product by the words “new” and “unscented” on the package.

This was one of those mini mind-boggling moments in life that gives one pause. How did the human race get to a point where the unscenting of garbage bags becomes a marketing move?

This can only mean, of course, that the bags formerly carried a scent — lilac perhaps, or forest mist — under the assumption it would help sell these mundane receptacles of a family’s litter.

But people must have grown weary of garbage bags that smelled like a bimbo. Hence the move to new, unscented bags, which are really not new at all, because trash bags since the dawn of dirt got by quite nicely, thank you, by simply smelling of nothing.

Which is what a garbage bag should smell like. If we lived in a rational world, that is.

All of which made me think of my immigrant grandfather, a man who avoided aromatics like Michael Jackson’s dad avoids class.

“A man should smell like whiskey, tobacco and sweat,” he’d say.

He even thought shampoo was for sissies. He was partial to pine tar soap, which could take the hide off cattle.

He went to his grave convinced a man should smell like a man. Good thing he wasn’t around to see what happened to garbage.

By recollection, scented “deodorant” garbage bags came out in the early 1990s. The first time I unwittingly bought some I pulled one from a kitchen drawer and it sent me reeling.

The smell was remindful of those cheap colognes that show up each year under Christmas trees and are promptly shoved to the backs of medicine cabinets.

This is what the garbage bag package label actually said: “Clean, fresh scent for long-lasting deodorant protection.”

Which, of course, begged the question: Who, or what, requires protection from garbage odor? The garbage man? The crisply pressed dress shirt my garbage likes to wear?

Why should trash require long-lasting deodorant protection? One doesn’t wear trash, display trash, or date trash. (OK. Once. In college. I admit it.)

That garbage bags have come full circle and now are touted for their unscentedness is progress of a sort, I suppose. Never mind the needless perfumy path it took to get there.



Brian Ojanpa is a Free Press staff writer. Call him at 344-6316 or e-mail bojanpa@mankatofreepress.com .

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