It’s true that plastic pollution is a
huge problem, of planetary proportions.
And it’s true we could all do more to reduce our plastic footprint.
The lie is that blame for the plastic problem is wasteful consumers and that changing our individual habits will fix it.
The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of producing plastic items like grocery bags, which
we use for an average of 12 minutes but can persist in the environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of technology.
Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place.
Scientists have long recognized that plastics biodegrade slowly, if at all, and pose multiple threats to wildlife through entanglement and consumption.
Beginning in the 1950s, big beverage companies like Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, along with Phillip Morris and others, formed a non-profit called Keep America Beautiful. Its mission is/was to educate and encourage environmental stewardship in the public by bringing ...
“litterbug” into the American lexicon through their marketing campaigns against thoughtless individuals.
Two decades later, their
“Crying Indian” PSA, would become hugely influential for the U.S. environmental movement.
More recently, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful teams produced the “
I Want to Be Recycled” campaign.
These efforts seem benevolent, but obscure the real problem, the role that corporate polluters play in the plastic problem.
Keep America Beautiful as
the first corporate greenwashing front, has helped shift the public focus to consumer recycling behavior and
actively thwarted legislation that would increase extended producer responsibility for waste management.
Back in 1953, Vermont passed a piece of legislation called the
Beverage Container Law, which outlawed the sale of beverages in non-refillable containers.
Single-use packaging was just being developed, and manufacturers were excited about the much higher profit margins associated with selling containers along with their products, rather than having to be in charge of recycling or cleaning and reusing them.
Keep America Beautiful was founded that year and began working to thwart such legislation.
Vermont lawmakers allowed the measure to lapse after 4 years.
Single-use container industry expanded, unfettered, for almost 20 years.
In 1971 Oregon reacted to a growing trash problem by becoming the first U.S. state to pass a “bottle bill,” requiring a five-cent deposit on beverage containers that would be refunded upon the container’s return.
Bottle bills provide a strong incentive for container reuse and recycling, and the 10 states with bottle deposit laws have around 60 percent container recovery rates
compared to 24 percent in states without them.
Yet Keep America Beautiful and other industrial lobbying groups have publicly opposed or marketed against bottle deposit legislation for decades, as it threatens their bottom line.
Between 1989 and 1994 the beverage industry spent $14 million to defeat the
National Bottle Bill.
The greatest success of
Keep America Beautiful has been to shift the onus of environmental responsibility onto the public while simultaneously becoming a trusted name in the environmental movement.
This psychological misdirect has built public support for a legal framework that punishes individual litterers with hefty fines or jail time, while imposing almost no responsibility on plastic manufacturers for the numerous environmental, economic and health hazards imposed by their products.
Effectively, we have accepted individual responsibility for a problem we have little control over.
We can swim against this plastic stream with all our might and fail to make much headway.
At some point we need to address the source ...
Plastic producers that continue to oppose legislation that would eat into their profit margins.
Though California and Hawaii have banned the free distribution of plastic bags at checkout, a result of lobbying is that
10 U.S. states now have preemption laws preventing municipalities from regulating plastic at the local level.
Plastic producers see their profits threatened and have taken a familiar tactic, forming the
Save the Plastic Bag Coalition and the American Progressive Bag Alliance to fight bag bans under the guise of defending customers’ finances and freedom to choose.
Litterbugs are not responsible for the global ecological disaster of plastic.
Humans can only function to the best of their abilities, given time, mental bandwidth and systemic constraints.
Our huge problem with plastic is the result of a permissive legal framework that has allowed the uncontrolled rise of plastic pollution, despite clear evidence of the harm it causes to local communities and the world’s oceans.
Recycling is also too hard in most parts of North America and lacks the proper incentives to make it work well.
A zero waste lifestyle will be impractical or impossible for most of us within current economic systems.
Groups like the
Ellen MacArthur Foundation are partnering with industry to incorporate “cradle-to-cradle” (i.e., circular economic) design into their products.
It’s time to stop blaming consumers for our plastic crisis and demand a better system.
It’s a lie that wasteful consumers cause the problem and that changing our individual habits can fix it
blogs.scientificamerican.com
