Creating a throw-away culture: How

companies ingrained plastics in modern

life
JUNE 9, 2024

Transcript
A trash can overflows as people sit outside of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in
Washington, D.C.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP/AP
Just for a minute, think about how much of the plastic you use today will end
up as trash. Drink bottles? Grocery bags? Food wrappers? If you live in the
United States, it’ll probably add up to about a pound of stuff — just today.
Most plastic is dumped in landfills or becomes pollution in places like rivers
and oceans, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development. Along the way, it sheds microplastics that can make their way
into animals and people . Just 4% of plastic in the U.S. is recycled.
It wasn’t always this way. But over the past 70 years, plastic has become
embedded in nearly every aspect of human life. The world produces around 230
times more plastic now than it did in 1950, according to Our World in Data.
Sponsor Message
As production soared, so did pollution. Many scientists and activists say
chemical and fossil fuel companies make too much plastic now for society to
manage sustainably. The United Nations says the problem is also being fueled
by a “worrying shift” toward single-use products and packaging , which are
designed to be used once and thrown away.
Plastic became ingrained in modern life in large part because the plastics
industry started working in the 1950s to convince people to embrace the
material as cheap, abundant and disposable.

The marketing campaign worked so well that litter soon became a problem
across the U.S., and there was a public backlash. The industry responded by
pitching recycling. But almost from the outset, corporations knew that
recycling probably wouldn’t work to rein in waste, multiple investigations have
shown.
Now, faced with spiraling plastic pollution, the U.N has set out to write a
legally-binding agreement to deal with the problem. But the negotiations are
fraught.
And even if nations can broker a deal, it’ll be a daunting task to actually reduce
the world’s consumption of plastic, which is in almost everything, from
clothing and diapers to medical devices.

“We’ll continue to need plastic for specific uses,” Inger Andersen, executive
director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said at the latest round
of U.N. negotiations in Canada in April. “But there’s a growing agreement,”
she said, that a lot of single-use plastic “can probably go.”
Vintage Bakelite and other plastic objects at a museum in England.
Matt Cardy/Getty Images/Getty Images Europe

The plastics industry pitched disposability to make more money

As part of the treaty talks, some countries want to cap production of new
plastic, which is made from oil and gas. However, those efforts are opposed by
big fossil fuel producers that are determined to keep plastic demand growing.
State and local governments in the U.S. have tried to limit pollution by passing
laws that ban plastic shopping bags or single-use plastic bottles .
Sponsor Message
The industry has responded by fighting regulations that could hurt demand for
its products. It says the solution to environmental problems is better recycling,
not using less plastic.
Matt Seaholm, chief executive of the Plastics Industry Association, says his
group is advocating on behalf of plastic producers and consumers alike, since
“it is an essential part of society at this point.”

Synthetic plastic was patented in the early 1900s. It was known as Bakelite, and
it sparked a boom in durable and affordable consumer goods. Soon, companies
started selling different kinds of plastic. At first, most of it was marketed as
sturdy and reusable. One television ad from 1955 — about a made-up
homemaker named Jane in a made-up place called Plasticstown, USA — touts
how plastic containers are ideal for families because they won’t break if kids
accidentally drop them.
But soon, the messaging started to change. In 1956, the industry learned about a
new way to boost sales — and profits. At the plastics industry’s annual
conference in New York, Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of an influential trade
magazine, urged executives to stop emphasizing plastics’ durability. Stouffer
told the companies to focus instead on making a lot of inexpensive, expendable
material. Their future, he said, was in the trash can.

Companies got the message. They realized they could sell more plastic if
people threw more of it away. “Those corporations were doing what they’re
supposed to do, which is make a lot of money,” says Heather Davis, an
assistant professor at The New School in New York who’s written about the
plastics industry.
Garbage is dumped at the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, New York, in 1989.
David Cantor/AP/AP

Throw-away living was a foreign concept in 1950s America

But getting people to throw away items after a single use took a lot of work.

Adults in the 1950s had lived through The Great Depression and World War II,
and they were trained to save as much as possible, Davis says.

Sponsor Message
“It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to
inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people
were used to.”

A solution companies came up with was emphasizing that plastic was a low-
cost, abundant material.

A 1960 marketing study for Scott Cup said the containers were “almost
indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard
them after a few uses. To counter any “pangs of conscience” consumers might
feel about throwing them away, the researchers suggested a “direct attack”: Tell
people the cups are cheap, they said, and that “there are more where these came
from.”
A few years later, Scott ran an advertisement saying its plastic cups were
available at “‘toss-away prices.”
In a 1963 report for another plastics conference in Chicago, Stouffer
congratulated the industry for filling dumps and garbage cans with plastic
bottles and bags.
“The happy day has arrived,” Stouffer wrote, “when nobody any longer
considers the [plastic] package too good to throw away.”
Workers remove garbage floating on the Negro River in Manaus, Brazil.
Edmar Barros/AP/AP

A booming market hit a consumer backlash

By the early 1970s, plastics were booming. The market was expanding faster
than the “rosiest of predictions,” and its growth prospects were “out of sight,”
an executive at the chemical company DuPont told the Chamber of Commerce
in Parkersburg, West Virginia , in 1973. Soon, big soft drink companies
introduced plastic soda bottles.
But the industry faced a growing public-relations problem that was especially
threatening to beverage companies, whose names were stamped on the
packaging: Plastic litter was becoming an eyesore across the country.

“Even if you’ve convinced people that maybe the disposability of plastics isn’t
such a bad thing, people are still seeing this waste out in public,” says Bart
Elmore, a professor of environmental history at Ohio State University.

So drink makers went on offense. Elmore says they fought bans on throw-away
bottles and joined the plastics industry in pushing recycling as an
environmental solution.

Sponsor Message
However, multiple investigations, including by NPR , have shown that plastics
industry representatives long knew that recycling would probably never be
effective on a large scale. Officials have said they encouraged recycling to
avoid regulations and ensure that demand for plastic kept growing.
Trade groups for plastic companies say those investigations don’t accurately
reflect today’s industry.
There isn’t evidence that drink makers were part of those internal discussions
about recycling’s viability. But Elmore says they should have had enough
information at the time to know recycling was a risky bet.

In 1976 — two years before big soft-drink makers introduced plastic soda
bottles — a study by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded that
“substantial recycling of plastics is unlikely in the near future.” That echoes the
agency’s 1975 draft report that found “recycling of plastic bottles is unlikely to
be commercially feasible.”
“To make a gamble like that, where public agencies and public documents are
saying this at the time, I think raises real questions about culpability,
accountability in an era when I think a lot of people are asking for that,”
Elmore says.

Less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled globally. As countries try to

negotiate a global waste agreement, activists and scientists are focusing a lot of
their attention on chemical and fossil fuel companies that make plastic. But
Elmore says consumer goods companies like beverage makers also deserve
scrutiny, because they use a ton of plastic packaging and rank as some of the
biggest plastic polluters globally .
“If they take a stand, one way or the other, it has a huge global impact,” Elmore
says.

A business group called the American Beverage Association said in a statement

to NPR that one of its highest priorities is creating a so-called circular economy
where plastic is recycled and reused to prevent waste.
An aerial view of Buffalo, New York, facing Lake Erie.
Bruce Bennett/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

A lawsuit aims to hold a major plastic polluter accountable

The disposable culture that was fostered by the plastics industry is playing out
in places like the Buffalo River, which empties into Lake Erie in western New
York. Plastic debris litters the banks of the river, and it breaks down into
fragments called microplastics that accumulate in the lake ,
contaminating drinking water for about 11 million people .
Sponsor Message
One morning this spring, volunteers met at the river to clean up some of the
pollution. “We see plastic tops, bottles, we have single-use plastics from
takeout food,” says Jill Jedlicka, who leads Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, a
nonprofit that organized the event.

It’s constant work. The debris that volunteers collected will be replaced in
weeks by more plastic trash. “It’s an onslaught,” Jedlicka says.

A lot of the plastic waste around the Buffalo River is packaging sold by the
food and beverage giant PepsiCo, according to a lawsuit that New York State
Attorney General Letitia James filed last year against the company. New York
prosecutors say plastic pollution around the Buffalo River is a public nuisance,
and that Pepsi contributes to the problem by selling tons of single-use
packaging.
Activists say lawsuits like the one New York filed against Pepsi are a way to
try to hold corporations accountable.
In a court filing, Pepsi said it isn’t responsible for the Buffalo River pollution,
and that it shouldn’t have to warn people that plastic waste poses environmental
and health risks.

“Consumers are more than capable of purchasing a beverage or snack product,

consuming it, and placing the packaging in a recycling or waste bin,” the
company said.

Researchers say companies often blame consumers when plastic waste gets into
the environment.

Pepsi said in statements to NPR that “no single group or entity bears
responsibility for plastic pollution,” and that it is trying to improve recycling
and reduce how much new plastic it uses.

However, in its latest sustainability report, Pepsi said its use of new
plastic increased slightly in 2022 , partly because recycled material was
expensive and hard to find. Pepsi isn’t alone: Despite growing public pressure,
companies increased their use of new plastic by 11% between 2018 and 2022 ,
according to data compiled by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Sponsor Message
“There is so much that the plastics industry needs to do to improve the
sustainability of plastics,” says Shelie Miller, a professor at the School for
Environmental Sustainability at the University of Michigan. But she says
consumer culture is also part of the problem.

“If our stance is, consumers should be able to consume whatever they want in
whatever quantity they want and it’s someone else’s job to deal with it,” Miller
says, “that’s not a path toward sustainability.”