“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
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.” (Copley 2024)
The history of plastics indicates that plastics weren’t always ubiquitous. Because people had to be influenced into a throwaway culture, in theory, it should also be possible to dismantle throwaway culture. It’s complicated, though, because most of the blame lies in the greed of the plastic industry. So the answer can’t rely on banning plastics entirely, part of the answer lies in the consumer end of the plastic life cycle.
A lot of people are already aware of the plastic problem. Simply providing the option for an alternative to plastic production, and a small incentive to use the alternative might be enough. Perhaps there is a ‘plastic tax’ on plastic goods, while the alternative plastic free options are sold at a lower price.
Single-use plastics have little intrinsic value, perhaps there is a way to include graphics/artwork on single use plastic that encourages people to hang onto ‘trash’ for a little longer.
The original appeal of plastics was its durability. For the sake of making more money, the plastic industry is no longer concerned with making durable products. People are receptive to convenience, but there’s nothing more inconvenient than products that have short life spans. Designing product alternatives that are intentionally meant to be durable for a lifetime, even if made of plastic, encourages people to rethink throwaway culture.
‘Norms’ are typically subversive to start with. Granting the ability to change to those who are already prepared to pursue it is the start to turning the tide against plastics.
The advantage ODNR has over plastics is that visitors come to state parks in search of an experience that lasts. How can ODNR turn the plastics in circulation at their parks into items people don’t want to throwaway after a single use?
Copley, M. (2024, June 9). Creating a throw-away culture: How companies ingrained plastics in modern life. NPR; NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/06/09/nx-s1-4942415/disposable-plastic-pollution-waste-single-use-recycling-climate-change-fossil-fuels
