The September 4, 2020, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview with the Intercept’s Sharon Lerner about plastics recycling and PR, which originally aired December 13, 2019. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: You may have heard that big oil companies are lobbying the US to put pressure on Kenya to weaken its stance against plastic waste. While publicly claiming to strive for a world free of plastic waste, usual suspects like Shell and Exxon are seeking to use trade negotiations to circumvent rules limiting the so-called waste trade, which environmentalists say will mean turning Kenya, and eventually other places in Sub-Saharan Africa, into dumping grounds. It’s just the latest machination from a plastics industry that is almost as vigorous in their PR as in their despoiling of the planet.
In December of 2019, we got some history from Sharon Lerner, who covers health and the environment for the Intercept.
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Image from Keep America Beautiful ad, 1971
JJ: I have to start with the “Crying Indian,” not just because I’m a child of the ’70s, but I didn’t realize how emblematic it was of what’s been a continued strategy of plastic industries around the question of waste. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the backstory on that ad, and the context in which it appeared?
SL: So that ad ran in 1971, and it was put out by Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council. Keep America Beautiful is the group we think of as sort of a do-gooder group. Their mission, what they talk about, is keeping our public spaces clean and free of litter. But it turns out that the group itself was begun by the beverage industry, several soda companies, National Soft Drink Association, and it came at a time when there was the beginning of an awareness of the plastic pollution crisis on the part of the public. And it should be noted that the big plastics producers and users were actually aware of the fact that plastic was already accumulating in the ocean, and was quite an ecological hazard.
So that growing awareness helped spawn some protests in 1970 on the first Earth Day, and the folks who were concerned about growing waste—it wasn’t quite so much plastic at that time, it was mostly cans that were being used—but the whole idea of using disposable packaging, that you could have one drink of soda and then just throw out the thing that it came in, was really new. And already activists were becoming aware that, Wow, this crisis is going to affect us deeply. And they had a protest on the Coca-Cola Company, and staged “ecology treks,” they called it, when they went to Coca-Cola’s headquarters with these non-returnable bottles, some of which were plastic, I think, and some, again, cans.
So here’s this growing awareness of this problem, and in 1971, that comes out and really flips the whole frame, right. So what they do with that ad, and others before and after that really hit the same note, is they really squarely put the blame of waste on individuals, as opposed to the companies who produce the waste and profit from the products, and, not coincidentally, the same companies that are funding Keep America Beautiful, and funding the ads that are doing the shaming.
JJ: Yeah, it’s interesting, because, first of all, it shows that there’s been an awareness of the problem of plastic waste since there’s been plastics; it’s not something that snuck up on the industry—which I found kind of interesting. And then the idea that this ad, that I think many people thought of as, Golly, here’s the industry proactively engaging one of the downsides, potentially, of what they do, and the idea that it was in fact a very targeted intervention, was news, to me at least.
SL: But beyond that, I would say that most people had no idea that it was coming from industry at all.
JJ: Right.
SL: That message gives you this sense that, Oh, we’re just concerned citizens who really care about stopping trash. Well, in fact, it was coming from the companies that made that trash, and nobody had any idea, there was no reason to suspect, that it came from them at all. It very effectively makes people upset about the fact that we are littering and destroying our Earth. But what it does is leave the viewer thinking, I feel terrible about my role in that.
What it doesn’t do—and what was going on in the background, at the same time, the beverage industry was actively fighting these proposals: one, to ban the production of single-use containers back then, but also bottle bills, which was basically this effort to put some of the responsibility for recycling the containers back on to the companies that make them. And, generally speaking, these companies don’t want that responsibility, both because of the expense of it and because of the hassle of it.
So very consistently, over the decades, they have fought these bottle bills, and very successfully. And right around this 1971 ad, the lobbyists for the industry had effectively swatted down national legislation, or a proposal that would have banned, again, disposable containers, and would have put forward a bottle bill on a federal level.
GAIA (4/19)
JJ: Yeah, I almost skip over the fact that, of course, it was “Keep America Beautiful,” which no one was thinking of, really, as a front group, or thinking about front groups at all, for industries. We saw it as just kind of consumers and concerned citizens, taking up the effort.
Well, we think of recycling as local, in some ways. I feel like that’s the association, when in fact it’s a big business, which is of course international. And some of the realities that you and others have reported on, about the business of recycling, which is being presented to us as the answer—but the realities of the business of plastics recycling are heartbreaking, like the Indonesian islands where Coca-Cola has pushed their products, and they now are littering the ground. And then villagers burn that waste, literally poisoning themselves and the food chain, right?
SL: Right. Yeah, and another very upsetting point here is that in many cases, especially when you’re talking about Coca-Cola in these remote islands, it is sometimes Coke itself, but it’s also sometimes bottled water. And many places don’t have potable water, and thus are literally forced to survive on this bottled water, which, in many cases, we’re talking about bottles that they very successfully get to these remote places, but then don’t successfully remove from these places. And then there’s also a lot of really good reporting on the fact that these companies actually drain aquifers, and then sell what ought to be a very public human resource back to people in plastic bottles, at expense, and sometimes expense that they can’t afford.
JJ: It’s very dystopian, and I wanted to say, there’s no hyperbole here: You wrote, “Plastic waste is now widely understood to be a cause of species extinction, ecological devastation and human health problems.” And given that it’s virtually all from oil and natural gas and coal, it also contributes to climate change, and it’s in that context that we’re talking about industry PR to convince people that recycling is sufficient.
SL: I agree.
JJ: One of many things that I found upsetting in your piece from July was the way that the plastics industry is “gearing up for,” as you put it, “the fight of its life.” And, in fact, you were at an association conference in which the keynote came from an expert in actual warfare. What is that telling us?
Sharon Lerner: “It’s a health problem, it’s an environmental problem, it’s a racial justice problem at this point, because of the way it’s distributed throughout the country and the world.”
SL: Yes, I thought that was an interesting choice. No one explicitly explained why they made this choice. I mean, this was someone who had been the captain of a boat that was under attack. And he told the details of this brutal attack, about the USS Cole,and then talked about, basically, his success despite the adversity that he faced. He talked about, in the end, piloting his ship away, with the national anthem blaring, and going on to victory—basically a “hard-fought victory,” is the way he described it.
And I think that the plastic industry very much does feel under assault right now. Really, there’s a growing awareness of how immense and terrible this problem is we’re all facing. And as you just laid out, it’s a health problem, it’s an environmental problem, it’s a racial justice problem at this point, because of the way it’s distributed throughout the country and the world.
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CounterSpin | Radio Free (2020-09-11T23:12:06+00:00) ‘They Put the Blame of Waste on Individuals as Opposed to Companies’. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/09/11/they-put-the-blame-of-waste-on-individuals-as-opposed-to-companies/
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