Litter as strawman?
Brad Plumer has a fascinating post up about litter as cultural-political phenomenon:
I've never known anyone who was objectively pro-litter. Litter's awful. It's disgusting. We're all agreed. But it seems that the nationwide anti-litter campaign, which began in the 1950s, was a bit less pure in its origins. According to Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, the entire anti-litter movement was initiated by a consortium of industry groups who wanted to divert the nation's attention away from even more radical legislation to control the amount of waste these companies were putting out. It's a good story worth retelling.
...In 1953, the packaging industry—led by American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, inventors of the one-way can and bottle, respectively—joined up with other industry leaders, including Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Company to form Keep America Beautiful (KAB), which still exists today. KAB was well-funded and started a massive media campaign to rail against bad environmental habits on the part of individuals rather than businesses. And that meant cracking down on litter. Within the first few years, KAB had statewide antilitter campaigns planned or running in thirty-two states.
In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America's garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the "litterbug" became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, "littering" is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn't realize what was happening until years later.
Nobody compares to Brad at making me think about issues in totally unintuitive ways, and I certainly don't dispute the point. But isn't industry's anti-litter campaign also sort of compatable with the mid-century heyday of welfare capitalism? I've always thought of littering as the ultimate statement of social nihilism -- a spooky, sort of passive-aggressive unwillingness to endure any personal inconvenience at all in deference to the public interest. Littering is the sort of thing my classmates in junior high school did to rebel against all those dumb Woodsy Owl movies we'd had to watch in elementary school. (The littering and the endless casual gay-bashing are actually the two things I remember most about the junior high zeitgeist.) Now it's something we strongly associate not so much with poverty per se as with economic hopelessness, estrangement from the economic community. In my privileged world it was something most of us -- and all people you'd want to spend time with -- simply grew out of. And that the community, of which employers and merchants were part, encouraged us to grow out of...more or less as part of joining the responsible adult community.
Business-based public-interest campaigns and demands on individuals on behalf of the community still exist, and may even be coming back in different forms. But Keep America Beautiful sounds pretty anacronistic. There may have been a dark underbelly (there always is. Think of how ominous "ask what you can do for your country" sounds now coming just a few years before the ramp-up to Vietnam). On the other hand, aren't appeals to the greater interest more likely to eminate from a business community whose employer practices reflect, and are expected to reflect, some kind of economic solidarity? And isn't a community that flat-out rejects paternalistic gestures from business as cynical more likely to reject them from government as well? That includes things like packaging laws that even the most socially interested commercial goods industry is unlikely to provide for itself. I expect there's more than a straight substitution effect at work here. Brad points out how much more effective Finland's refillable bottle laws are at reducing waste. I couldn't find a good source on Finnish litter laws (just that littering is subject to a 50 Euro fine under Finland's Waste Act), but I would guess that they're pretty strong too.
I've never known anyone who was objectively pro-litter. Litter's awful. It's disgusting. We're all agreed. But it seems that the nationwide anti-litter campaign, which began in the 1950s, was a bit less pure in its origins. According to Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, the entire anti-litter movement was initiated by a consortium of industry groups who wanted to divert the nation's attention away from even more radical legislation to control the amount of waste these companies were putting out. It's a good story worth retelling.
...In 1953, the packaging industry—led by American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, inventors of the one-way can and bottle, respectively—joined up with other industry leaders, including Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Company to form Keep America Beautiful (KAB), which still exists today. KAB was well-funded and started a massive media campaign to rail against bad environmental habits on the part of individuals rather than businesses. And that meant cracking down on litter. Within the first few years, KAB had statewide antilitter campaigns planned or running in thirty-two states.
In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America's garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the "litterbug" became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, "littering" is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn't realize what was happening until years later.
Nobody compares to Brad at making me think about issues in totally unintuitive ways, and I certainly don't dispute the point. But isn't industry's anti-litter campaign also sort of compatable with the mid-century heyday of welfare capitalism? I've always thought of littering as the ultimate statement of social nihilism -- a spooky, sort of passive-aggressive unwillingness to endure any personal inconvenience at all in deference to the public interest. Littering is the sort of thing my classmates in junior high school did to rebel against all those dumb Woodsy Owl movies we'd had to watch in elementary school. (The littering and the endless casual gay-bashing are actually the two things I remember most about the junior high zeitgeist.) Now it's something we strongly associate not so much with poverty per se as with economic hopelessness, estrangement from the economic community. In my privileged world it was something most of us -- and all people you'd want to spend time with -- simply grew out of. And that the community, of which employers and merchants were part, encouraged us to grow out of...more or less as part of joining the responsible adult community.
Business-based public-interest campaigns and demands on individuals on behalf of the community still exist, and may even be coming back in different forms. But Keep America Beautiful sounds pretty anacronistic. There may have been a dark underbelly (there always is. Think of how ominous "ask what you can do for your country" sounds now coming just a few years before the ramp-up to Vietnam). On the other hand, aren't appeals to the greater interest more likely to eminate from a business community whose employer practices reflect, and are expected to reflect, some kind of economic solidarity? And isn't a community that flat-out rejects paternalistic gestures from business as cynical more likely to reject them from government as well? That includes things like packaging laws that even the most socially interested commercial goods industry is unlikely to provide for itself. I expect there's more than a straight substitution effect at work here. Brad points out how much more effective Finland's refillable bottle laws are at reducing waste. I couldn't find a good source on Finnish litter laws (just that littering is subject to a 50 Euro fine under Finland's Waste Act), but I would guess that they're pretty strong too.
1 Comments:
In my semi-industrialized developing nation city (Ica, Peru) the large factories contribute to the problem, but personal waste is by far the largest source (and stretches the entire length of the river as it passes the city). I would give a lot to see a KAB type campaign (industry-sponsored or not) here.
Did the large companies keep dumping their waste indefinitely or as people got richer did they start to really value clean living space/water/air? No. The movement they paid for, contributed to their future regulation.
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