Garbage Capitalism's Green Commerce

GARBAGE CAPITALISM’S GREEN COMMERCE HEATHER ROGERS n American capitalism today, more than ever, the mass consumption of Icommodities lies at the heart of social life and economic growth, and intrinsic to consumption is garbage. In the United States over the last 30 years, rubbish output has doubled.1 Today almost 80 per cent of US products are used once, and then thrown away.2 While comprising just 4 per cent of the global population, the US churns out almost 30 per cent of the wastes generated by Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development member nations (the world’s most developed countries).3 Unfortunately, the mess does not remain confined within national borders; today, the Pacific Ocean contains six times more plastic waste than zooplankton.4 These unprecedented levels of rubbish are not the outcome of some organic process connected to human nature. The most developed countries create torrents of trash because waste and destruction are the necessary analogues of consumer society. Indeed, for capitalism to continue to grow – as it must – consumers are obliged to keep buying, which means they are destined to throw ever more mterials into the trash pile. Since the years after World War II, when the US began mass production and consumption in earnest, industry has exerted tremendous effort to man- age public perceptions of waste and, beginning in the late 1960s, the more far-reaching ecological impacts of a high-trash system. Garbage is a mini- ature version of production’s destructive aftermath, which inevitably ends up in each person’s hands; it is proof that all is not well. Since rubbish has the power to reveal to consumers the realities of an economy that pushes many of its costs onto the environment, garbage has become a key site for corporate ‘greenwashing’. Manufacturers neither pay the full price for the raw ma- terials they use in production, nor do they accurately account for the costs of pollution, energy use and the future environmental impacts of their activities. To maintain their relatively unfettered access to nature, as both a resource and a dumping-ground, US companies have had to convince the public that the 232 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2007 castoffs they can see – and, by extension, wastes they cannot see, like those created by industry – are benign, and not an indication of crisis. The roots of corporate greenwashing in the United States lie in two pre- vious episodes, one in the 1950s, the other in the 1980s, both relating to consumer products (and not to energy, or other products and services). In the 1950s the group Keep America Beautiful was formed by industry to pre-empt legal restrictions on disposable goods, namely packaging. Through an elaborate public relations campaign the organization generated a popular narrative about garbage that shifted responsibility from industry to the individual. Then, in the 1980s, manufacturers exploited the rise of recycling to further ingrain a sense of personal culpability for increasing levels of trash, and to crack open new consumer markets. This later effort was more explic- itly ‘green’, but both campaigns had the goal of protecting production from restrictive interventions and keep commodities flowing. These two episodes help explain today’s popular acceptance that individual consumer choices are the source of environmental destruction – and salvation. The form this now takes is referred to as ‘green capitalism’ or ‘green commerce’. The latest development in greenwashing, green commerce, is be- ing greeted with mounting enthusiasm by many in the environmental movement as well as in business circles, and by growing numbers of consumers; they are all embracing the idea that the planet can be saved simply by buying and selling environmentally friendly products. According to its boosters this market-based solution – referred to by some as the ‘investment’ phase of the environmental movement – bypasses the need for legal restrictions on the use of natural resources since, the theory goes, demand will create incentives for industry to adopt ecologically sound practices of its own accord.5 As the track record reveals, however, unregu- lated capitalist industry devotes its efforts not to protecting natural resources, but to seeking out its goal – surplus value. Just because a business professes its devotion to the health of natural systems, or makes an environmentally friendly product, doesn’t mean it has transformed its relation to nature. The ‘greening’ of business without concomitant changes in the economic struc- ture, and in the role of the state – including planning, a more democratic use of natural resources, and giving priority to human and environmental health over profits – permits the continuation of practices destructive to the earth’s ecosystems. KEEPING IT BEAUTIFUL To a large extent, American capital’s elaborate green offensive began with the earliest effort to restrict disposables in 1953. A measure passed by Vermont’s GARBAGE CAPITALISM’S GREEN COMMERCE 233 legislature – coming not from nascent environmentalists, but disgruntled dairy farmers – banned the sale of all throwaway bottles throughout the state. According to a newspaper report: ‘Farmers, who comprise nearly one-third of the House membership, say that bottles are sometimes thrown into hay mows and that there is need to prevent loss of cows from swallowing them in fodder’.6 Their livelihoods on the line, the husbandmen politicians ratified the law. Within a few short months the packaging industry concocted a lavishly funded nonprofit body called Keep America Beautiful (KAB). This was the first of many greenwashing corporate fronts to come, and its goal was to distract people from questioning the viability of an increasingly trash-reliant marketplace. KAB’s founders were the powerful American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, inventors of the single-use disposable can and bottle, respectively. They linked up with more than twenty other industry heavies – all connected to the disposables industry – including Coca- Cola, the Dixie Cup Company and Richfield Oil Corporation (later At- lantic Richfield), as well as the National Association of Manufacturers with whom KAB shared members, leaders and interests. Still a major player today, KAB urgently funnelled vast resources into a nationwide, media-savvy campaign.7 The centerpiece of the organization’s strategy was its great cultural in- vention: litter. This category of debris existed before, but KAB masterfully transformed its political and cultural meaning to shift the terms of the debate over an unprecedented surge of waste in the post-World War II years. KAB wanted to turn any stirrings of concern over the larger ecological effects of so much production and consumption away from industry’s massive and supertoxic destruction of the natural world, reducing the problem to the eyesore of litter and singling out the real villain – the ‘litterbug’.8 Taking this tack, KAB could defend disposability and obsolescence. The problem wasn’t the rising levels of waste, it was all those heathens who failed to put their discards in the proper place. By 1970, when the mainstream environmental movement emerged, KAB had already helped industry successfully navigate what the trade magazine Modern Packaging called the ‘awesome challenge’ of managing rubbish without restricting packaging production.9 KAB entered the eco-era a seasoned anti-environmentalist, an old hand at turning the tables. On the second Earth Day on April 22, 1971, KAB premiered the first of its now-iconic television advertisements starring the buckskin-clad longtime Hollywood actor Iron Eyes Cody. This commercial represented a growing sophistication in the industry’s messaging about environmental issues. 234 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2007 The haunting ad was seared into the guilty consciences of Americans young and old: after stoically canoeing through a wrapper- and can-strewn delta, past a silhouetted factory puffing smoke, Cody dragged his canoe onto a bank sprinkled with litter. Hiking to the edge of a freeway clogged with cars, the stereotypical Native American (who was posthumously discovered to be of Italian ancestry) was abruptly hit on the moccasins with a fast-food bag tossed out the window by a freewheeling blond passenger. Cody then looked straight into the camera as he shed a single tear. The accompanying music was stirring, the voice-over solemn: ‘Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. But some people don’t. People start pollution. People can stop it’.10 The TV spot’s inclusion of smokestacks and a traffic-choked highway marked a shift for KAB; maintaining its litter-is-the-root-of-all-evil posi- tion was getting more difficult as the organization confronted the main- streaming of ecological awareness. To uphold its legitimacy KAB was obliged to acknowledge issues like air and water pollution, against protests from its board of directors.11 However, neither this commercial nor subsequent spots featuring Cody in similar dirty, tear-soaked scenarios departed from KAB’s constant refrain – the responsibility for pollution lay with the individual. Environmental devastation was the bitter consequence of each person’s own selfish disregard for nature. The key tactic of blaming individuals – as one American Can execu- tive insisted, ‘Packages don’t litter, people do’ – obfuscated the real causes of mounting waste.12 KAB paved the way in sowing confusion about the environmental impacts of mass production and consumption,

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