This is an excerpt from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic.

An odd symbol, made up of three arrows arranged in a triangle, began showing up on plastic containers across America in the fall of 1988. Inside it was a number.

The idea to put codes on plastic containers came from the Society of the Plastics Industry. By 1987, Lewis Freeman, the trade body’s head of government affairs, had begun hearing that the fledgling plastics recycling industry was struggling to make sense of the dozens of different types of plastics they were receiving. The plastics had different melting points and other properties, which meant they couldn’t just be mixed together for recycling.

“Plastics is not really one material; it’s umpteen materials,” explains Freeman. “While plastics share a similar molecular structure and most are made from oil or natural gas, they’re otherwise quite different from one another.”

Before he joined SPI in 1979, Freeman worked as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, fighting Senator Ted Kennedy’s push to break up big oil companies. At SPI, where he stayed for more than 20 years, Freeman dealt with anything that could pose a reputational risk to the plastics industry. He spent much of his time convincing companies to make changes that would forestall the risk of regulation. 

When it emerged that dozens of babies each year were dying by drowning in large plastic buckets—at five gallons, the buckets were so heavy that if an infant fell into them, they didn’t tip over—Freeman was the man who rallied the industry to hand out warning stickers to parents buying the buckets. The companies, he remembers, didn’t want to add permanent labels, which made the buckets a few cents more expensive. Eventually, they capitulated when it became apparent their legal liability was enormous.

“Companies are essentially all the same regardless of industry,” says Freeman. “They don’t like to be told by someone else that they need to do something, period.”

Back in 1987, Freeman took the complaints he was hearing about recycling to SPI’s public affairs committee. Since the industry saw recycling as a tool to mitigate reputational damage, the public affairs group, consisting of men from big packaging makers like Owens-Illinois and the American Can Company, was the natural........

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