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 McCloskey warned executives gathered at a packaging conference that they had to do something about the waste they were creating — “not dispose of it, but reduce the actual amount.” Rising public concern about the environment “should not be underestimated,” and could, before long, prompt “sweeping changes in our laws,” he warned. Soon, Congress would probably consider requiring a five‑cent deposit on bottles, he said. While McCloskey acknowledged politicians’ consideration of tougher action was driven by public opinion, he nonetheless feared that as “the pendulum swings to the protection of the environment,” there was a danger “the swing can be too far.”

He needn’t have worried. In the years to come, companies would go to extraordinary lengths to protect the lucrative model for cheap, disposable plastic packaging they’d created, even as the mountains of trash it churned out grew ever larger.

Congressman McCloskey had been right about the country’s mood though.

The packaging waste conference coincided with a growing awareness of consumerism’s dark side that crystallized with the first Earth Day, in April 1970. In Atlanta, where an underground newspaper urged readers to “bring the trash home to the people who make it,” 1,500 protesters showed up at Coke’s head office with bags — and a pickup truck — full of empty cans and bottles. Even President Richard Nixon got on the bandwagon, decrying the shift toward disposable packaging. “We often discard today what a generation ago we saved,” he said, noting that “pouring more and more public money into collection and disposal of whatever happens to be privately produced and discarded” amounted “to a public subsidy of waste.”

Plastic executives feared the upswell of antagonism might “really end the industry,” the editor of the journal Modern Plastics later recalled. But they were ready to fight. In 1954, after Vermont prohibited disposable beer cans — farmers blamed them for damaging equipment and injuring cows when they were tossed into fields — nearly two dozen beverage, cigarette, candy, and packaging companies had formed an alliance they called Keep America Beautiful. In billboards and print ads, the group framed the country’s waste issues as a matter of littering, the result not of excessive production, but rather the bad habits of irresponsible individuals. Keep America Beautiful printed handbooks to teach schoolchildren “good outdoor manners,” distributed “how‑to‑do‑it” litter‑reduction kits, and instructed drivers to keep trash bags in their cars instead of tossing empties out windows. Under pressure from brewers and can makers, Vermont let its ban expire in 1957. But the organization whose creation it had prompted was just getting started.

No matter the medium, Keep America Beautiful’s message was clear. The problem wasn’t the overwhelming amounts of waste the shift to throwaway packaging was generating, but merely that a fraction of it was ending up in the wrong place. In other words, the mess wasn’t the fault of companies reaping huge profits from disposability, but of Americans themselves. And responsibility for fixing it was on them too. “Keeping America clean and beautiful is your job,” one ad lectured. Another accused readers of hiding behind the “alibi” that “average people don’t pollute. It’s the corporations,” and — with impressive nerve — exhorted them to “stop shifting the blame.” That very American message of individual responsibility — and its failure to acknowledge larger economic and political forces — was not unique to the issue of waste. Indeed, one packaging executive’s assertion that “packages don’t litter, people do,” carried eerie echoes of gun rights proponents’ claim that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Companies hammered home the idea in their own ads. One Coke campaign, “Bend a Little,” featured an attractive woman bending over to pick up litter, “to remind people that cleaning up America called for a little extra effort from all of us.” Another favorite theme was that consumers, not drink makers, had driven the shift toward disposability. The public “demands a choice of containers in many products, including soft drinks,” Coke explained in one ad, as if it were a helpless actor in the change it had pioneered. “We have to go along.” Not only were individuals responsible for littering; the entire system of throwaway containers was their fault too.

By 1967, with public concerns about waste nonetheless mounting, Keep America Beautiful decided to take things up a notch. “Our ‘soft sell,’” executives at one planning meeting concluded, should be toughened to slam litterers as “slobs.” Before long, a new TV commercial showed pigs trotting down a rubbish‑strewn street, then nosing through garbage on a beach, as a sanctimonious........

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