Originally published at: Inside Plastic Executives’ Late-20th-Century Campaign to Blame Consumers for Their Industry’s Waste
This TPM Cafe article is an excerpt from PLASTIC INC.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet by Beth Gardiner. In 1969, Republican Congressman Paul McCluskey warned executives gathered at a packaging conference that they had to do something about the waste they were creating — “not dispose of it, but…
2 Likes
I worked in a grocery store in the mid sixties. On Saturday there was always one clerk working returns, reorganizing beer and soda bottles. At college returnable cases of beer were very popular. All this disappeared for ‘convenience.’
2 Likes
Most shocking, I should suspect, is the common man’s lack of understanding of how integral to Big Oil plastics stand.
1 Like
I knew of a number of students who kept several around as kind of a “bank” for hard times.
On the other hand, (reusable) plastic containers are great. They don’t shatter like glass. If your home has children or cats, this is a big safety feature (etc). The squeeze bottle is a good idea. Sadly, apparently it’s now been decided that it’s too dangerous to put food into plastic containers.
So what now? We’re back to using metals? Some kind of natural fiber, like bamboo or paper? Good old glass?
And what of the medical industry, which churns out megatons of plastic waste? Each and every instrument comes swathed in throw-away plastic. Each and every swab or bandage. Manufacture sterile, wrap in plastic, open, use, and throw away.
It’s time to get creative again. More science and engineering, less financializing and lawyering.
While safer in terms of shattering, microplastics are a huge and growing health concern. There is evidence linking microplastics to diseases including dementia. Microplastics have been found to cross the placenta into mammal fetuses. Plastic containers shed these tiny particles in many different scenarios where they become trapped in the body and brain, and have even been shown to disrupt the human endocrine system or mimic estrogen in the body. These health impacts have massive implications for health. Some - like estrogen mimicking plastics and their effects on males and females - we have barely begun to grapple with. We can scarcely chart the full human cost of plastics, even now. But the more we know the worse it gets.
In Iowa, there is a deposit bill but recent Republican legislatures have made it less useful, as redemption centers are few and far between, and they have rejected bottles on which deposits were paid–who’s going to argue with them over a nickel when the check that came two weeks after the bottles were returned is for $2.15?
But the biggest loophole, and I think this goes for all bottle bills, is the change in consumer taste in the last 30 years. When bottle bills were enacted, they covered beer and soda pop. The by far largest amount of plastic bottle trash is non-carbonated, water and energy drinks, which aren’t included.
This is a really important contribution to the website—thanks for this article. We do need to clean up our act. And it’s hard to do that when the folks who make all the disposable containers aren’t interested in helping us clean up.