By: Benjamin Grubert
I35, 2020. Cars roar through the highway, sending the mounds of trash into a whirl. Grackles and other birds soar down hoping to get a few bites.
“Litter is a local and national concern that is the result of many contributing factors. Locally, Austin Resource Recovery aims to educate consumers on how they can dispose of unwanted items responsibly and safely. In most instances, items that we traditionally consider “trash” can be used as a resource, whether through recycling, composting or reusing the material.” says Bailey Grimmet in an interview. Many people have known that litter, and trash misuse has been a problem in Austin, and other large cities with rapidly growing populations. “Even after more than 30 years of the Don't Mess with Texas® campaign, litterbugs still roam the roadways, tossing trash from their car windows and letting litter fly out of their truck beds,” writes Don't Mess with Texas in their “Report a Litterer” form.
Don't Mess with Texas is a company that started in 1985 which aims at preventing litter. The majority of people assume that organizations such as Don't Mess with Texas and Keep Austin beautiful are companies aimed simply at preventing litter, but the actual story is much different and very important to know.
Before the 1950s, everything was reusable in some way. For example, you could return empty milk bottles back to the store or leave them on your doorstep to be picked up by a milkman where they would be refilled and reused.
This was the working way of things until some plastic makers thought differently. Picture this: You’re a beverage maker and you sell drinks such as milk and soda. Because of all the new buying after World War Two, you want to maximize your profits. And then you realize that reusing everything simply won’t make you the most money(1). “It doesn't get more clear than that. There's this real consciousness of, like, if we can get people to throw things away, they will buy more stuff. And if you think about it, it's brilliant,” says Heather Rogers, a journalist, and filmmaker. Her documentary, “Gone Tomorrow,” has screened in festivals around the globe. Plastics were already being used, but now plastic wanted to deliberately make them disposable. On top of more people buying more products, disposable products also had the perk of less cleaning up dishes and more just throwing away the products never to be seen again. This meant better advertising for the company and thus more customers for the company making disposable products even more profitable.
“Think about that for a second. There’s a group of plastic makers sitting in a room, who are trying to get in this, to break into the bottling industry. And they’re being told that, for them to make it rich, their products needed to be actual trash,” says Ramtin Arablouei in an NPR podcast, “The Litter Myth”. People were realizing that they needed to teach people how to throw things away.
Soon, word spread and companies such as Dixie cup were taking advantage of this with advertising. “You ask your mother; she knows. She knows that Dixie Cups save her a lot of extra glasses to wash.” Soon, of the United States was(and still is) using disposable products. Their advertisements influenced people around the country to buy trash, literally. Soon, people started acting irresponsibly with their trash leaving it in parks.
In Vermont, people would throw glass bottles out of their cars on the highway and they would end up in fields. Next, cows would end up digesting them and dying. Because of this, the Vermont State Legislature decided to pass a ban on disposable glass bottles. This was shortly followed by the creation of a litter preventing organization called “Keep America Beautiful.”
The name sounds great, right? Well actually, Keep America Beautiful’s intentions were rooted in shifting the focus from the manufacturers creating disposable products, to the people not knowing what to do with them. Keep America Beautiful was an organization dedicated to shifting the blame from the manufacturers to the consumers.
First, just after the creation of Keep America Beautiful, other environmental groups realized that garbage was a problem and started creating brochures and pamphlets illustrating parks before and after people came to them.
Next, the litter prevention organizations would expand. In 1964, Susan Spotless was announced. Susan Spotless was a white girl with completely white clothes—which were spotless of course. Susan Spotless would warn irresponsible adults who were littering with phrases such as “Daddy, you forgot—every litter bit hurts.” Susan Spotless was effective, but not as much as the phony “Crying Indian” ad. That came seven years later when Keep America Beautiful decided that they needed to take their advertising to the next level. Partnering with Add Council who decided that Keep America Beautiful’s ads didn’t make the cut, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful, who now had over 70 million followers, boiled up the “Crying Indian” advertisement.
Later, in 1971, Keep America Beautiful went so far as to make a phony advertisement called the “Crying Indian” about an “Indian” canoeing down a stream with lots of litter passing by him. Next, he passes by some factories with black smoke coming out of the smokestacks. After this, he docks his canoe on the litter-covered beach and a person throws a trash bag out their window and it lands on his foot. Finally, a single tear rolls down his face and the ad finishes with a narrator talking about Keep America Beautiful.
This dramatic advertisement caused millions of people to stop littering and start recycling and was one of the great rises in Keep America Beautiful’s fame and popularity across the country. Later, new organizations such as Keep Austin Beautiful and Don't Mess with Texas formed to do similar things to Keep America Beautiful. While these organizations may be shifting the focus from the companies to the people, it is important to note that supply and demand may be part of the reason that these disposable products kept on. People wanted products that they didn’t have to clean up after once they were done; they wanted to just be able to get rid of products after they were done using them, but the heart of the problem is still at the companies who decided to make disposable products for money. One thing to note about this advertisement is that the “Indian” is Italian, and the tear is fake. This makes the ad even worse because of how many people were totally brainwashed by it.
Now, Keep America Beautiful has reached the point where if most people see somebody throw a candy wrapper on to the ground, they will assume that the litterer is at fault(which is partly true) but not think about the idea that the company is at fault for making the trash in the first place. According to a study by the Austin Resource Recovery, 50 percent of trash in Austin’s landfills could be recycled. Although this may be bad, it is important to know what actually happens after you recycle something.
There is a common misconception among people that is the myth that recycling prevents products from ending up in the ocean, but as it turns out, this is not at all true. Originally, after you recycle something, it would be picked up by a recycling truck. In a perfect world, your products would be recycled into new products, but that isn’t the case. Instead, the United States would ship off its recycling to countries in Asia, such as China, until 2013 when China created the “Operation Green Fence'' policy which banned the United States from shipping any more “recycling” to them. Now, the United States resorts to sending their recycling to other countries, and while some of the recycling still gets recycled, due to the cost of recycling plastics, most of it is sent off to countries which do not do a good job of managing waste. This means that a lot of the products you feel good about recycling actually end up in the ocean.
This is important to note when it comes to Keep America Beautiful and Don't Mess with Texas. Although these organizations are legitimately trying to prevent the mismanagement of waste, they also encourage recycling without actually mentioning the effects of doing it. “According to Waste Management, an American trash collecting company, the average recycling contamination rate — or disposal of trash or recyclables in the wrong recycling bin — is 25%, meaning 1 in 4 items thrown in a recycling bin isn’t recyclable,” writes Josh Ocampo, a Mic.com journalist in the article “Americans are terrible at recycling — this is what happens when you put something in the wrong bin.” This means that the average person recycles something that can’t be recycled a quarter of the time.
Recycling something that can’t be recycled is worse than throwing away something that can be recycled, just like eating something poisonous is much worse than not eating something harmless. This is because if you recycled something that can’t be recycled, it contaminates the rest of the items in the recycling facility leading to them all ending up in the landfill. While plastic is harmful to the environment if dealt with correctly, it can take up little room in a landfill contrary to some thicker substitutes which leave a much larger carbon footprint, and take up much more space in the landfill(2). As written by John Tierney in the article “Plastic Bags Help the Environment,” “Plastic bans are a modern version of medieval sumptuary laws, which forbade merchants and other commoners to wear clothes or use products that offended the sensibilities of aristocrats and clergymen”. This quote shows that people ban plastic because either people are misusing it, or because they simply don’t like the idea of harming the environment because it’s cheaper.
“High-density polyethylene bags are a marvel of economic, engineering and environmental efficiency. They’re cheap, convenient, waterproof, strong enough to hold groceries but thin and light enough to make transport using scant energy, water or other resources” writes John Tierney in the same article. Meaning that it is okay not to recycle plastics if you don’t want them to end up in the ocean.
It is important to know that companies such as Keep America Beautiful are not only solely blaming the citizens instead of also blaming the companies of litter and trash, but also making recycling seem better than it actually is, leading people to believe that recycling is great for the environment, instead of teaching them what actually happens after you recycle something. If you want to help reduce the misuse of trash, you can reduce the number of disposable products you use, and make sure to put it in the right bin.
Bibliography
“The Litter Myth” NPR podcast. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757539617/the-litter-myth
“Plastic Bags Help the Environment” by John Tierney. Retrieved from Wall Street Journal
“Americans are terrible at recycling — this is what happens when you put something in the wrong bin” by Josh Ocampo. Retrieved from https://www.mic.com/articles/190974/americans-are-terrible-at-recycling-this-is-what-happens-when-you-put-something-in-the-wrong-bin
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