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If you have ever thrown a plastic water bottle into the trash can and feel a sense of guilt in your heart, then, from the perspective of marketing activities, this is exactly the way the packaging industry plans.

Consider this recent public service announcement. Two weird squirrel puppets are sitting on a tree, watching passers-by on the sidewalk, and cheering as they put plastic bottles in the recycling bin. A man almost threw a bottle into the trash can (gasp!), but at the last minute, put it in his bag for "recycling later". "Come on, Mr. Brownshoes!" said a squirrel. Then a message popped up on the screen: "Recycle your bottle as everyone sees it."

This ad comes from Keep America Beautiful, a non-profit organization supported by big companies (think Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Nestlé) and has been delivering different versions of this message for more than half a century. The focus has always been on the trash bugs that throw the trash on the ground, not the companies that make all of this trash in the first place.

After countless plastic garbage piled up like mountains, the situation changed suddenly. The motivation behind the idea that companies should be responsible for the waste they generate rather than taxpayers is growing. This summer, Maine and Oregon became the first states to pass laws requiring manufacturers to pay for such packaging. The resulting plan can revitalize the recycling system, and when cities look for ways to save money, they usually reduce the scale and prompt big companies to come up with cleaner alternatives.

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Finis Dunaway, a professor of history at Trent University in Canada, said: “These states are trying to convert this narrative into other forms of responsibility to get producers to pay for the idea. I think it’s a development indeed. Exciting and important."

The Maine law signed by Democratic Governor Janet Mills in July requires manufacturers to bear 100% of the city's recycling costs. The company will pay the organization responsible for reimbursing the urban recycling business expenses based on a variety of factors (such as the weight of the packaging and the ease of recycling). A law signed by Oregon last month would require companies to pay approximately 28% of the cost of recycling, with the municipality taking care of the rest.

The state’s U.S. Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley and California Democrat Alan Lowenthal reintroduced the "Break Plastic Pollution Act" in Congress. Free From Plastic Pollution Act). It will include a national plan for companies to pay for the packaging they use. A few states considered similar bills this year, including Maryland, New York, Hawaii, California, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Although these bills have not passed, Inka Bod-George, environmental health manager of the National Environmental Legislators' Caucus in Washington, DC, predicts that some of these bills may succeed next year.

This trend is driven by the crisis in the recycling system. The United States used to sell most of its plastic waste to China and then shipped it to the Pacific Ocean. But in 2017, China banned the import of many types of plastic and paper, and the U.S. recycling market was in trouble. Dozens of cities eventually suspended or weakened their recycling programs. Now, materials discarded for recycling are usually transported to garbage dumps or eventually incinerated. In most marginalized communities, toxic compounds pollute the air.

Sarah Nichols, director of sustainability at the Maine Natural Resources Council, said that in Maine, towns and cities are discussing abandoning recycling programs after they become too expensive. She said that the new law "may be the difference between having and not having a recycling program."

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A recent report by the Global Incinerator Alternatives Alliance found that in five major cities in the United States, only 8.8% of the plastic that enters the trash and recycling bins actually ends up being recycled. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, approximately 29% of soft drinks and water bottles — made of polyethylene terephthalate, a material that is fairly easy to recycle — are recycled in the United States. This is not to say that recycling is meaningless, but that there are bigger problems than the Squirrel PSA suggests. "When you see the scale of this problem, as consumers, we cannot solve this problem through recycling. We don't even have a sufficiently powerful system," Bode-George said. "And [the company] really needs to strengthen and fund our systems so that they can operate fully."

The "Plastic Era" was once a promising future vision. Just before the Second World War, some people dreamed that this low-cost and flexible material would bring riches to the world. In 1941, two British chemists Victor Yarsely and Edward Couzens wrote in the journal Science Digest: “Let’s try to imagine the residents of the “plastic age”. This “plastic man” will enter a colorful and bright The shining surface of the world...In this world, people are like magicians who can meet almost all needs."

On the contrary, plastic itself has become a disaster. Of the billions of tons of plastic manufactured since the 1950s, only 9% is recycled and 12% is incinerated. (This is not surprising to plastic producers, who know that most plastics are unlikely to be economically recycled for decades.) The rest of the plastics are still around us, threatening a 2017 study called "Natural The environment is almost permanently polluted" and the global health crisis. And it may continue to grow: According to data from the World Economic Forum, plastic production is expected to double in the next two decades. This is also Big Petroleum’s B plan. Petroleum is the basic ingredient of all plastic garbage bags and toothbrushes. As countries shift from fossil fuels to avoid the worst effects of climate change, oil companies see the future of plastic production.

After World War II, plastic became very popular. As Susan Freinkel wrote in "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story", Tupperware, vinyl siding, Barbie dolls and other objects became the background of life. With the proliferation of one-off materials, anti-spam advertisements focusing on personal responsibility have also emerged. Keep America Beautiful-Founded in 1951 by Owens-Illinois Glass Company, an American canning company and glass bottle manufacturer-Seek help from the Advertising Committee, which is known for creating Smokey Bear and the slogan "Only you can prevent forest fires" . They featured "Susan Spotless" in their early advertisements in the 1960s, a white girl in a white dress who would wave to her parents when her parents soiled public places with trash.

Around the time of the first Earth Day demonstration in 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans participated in these events, and the industry knew it was experiencing problems. When the demonstrators showed up at the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta with a pickup truck full of bottles and cans, the factory manager was ready, the trash cans were set up, and free drinks were provided to the demonstrators. Dunaway said activists’ legitimate concerns about the environmental impact of consumerism and disposable packaging were met with an emotional response from “let them drink Coke”.  

"They are beginning to acutely realize that their industry is under attack," Dunaway said. "They are not wrong."

Keep America Beautiful began to incorporate environmental themes into their advertisements. The famous "Crying Indian" ad was released on the first anniversary of Earth Day in 1971, depicting a Native American (actually an Italian-American actor) kayaking on the water. When someone driving nearby threw a bag of garbage out the window, the fast food wrapping paper fell on his moccasins, and when he shed a dramatic tear, the camera zoomed in on the person's face. "People are starting to pollute," the voice-over said. "People can stop it."

By 1990, personal action had become the default answer to environmental problems, one low-flow shower head at a time. The slogan of this year's Earth Day event is "Who said you can't change the world?" In the same year, a concept called "Extended Producer Responsibility" or EPR was conceived in Sweden on the other side of the ocean. An academic named Thomas Lindquist suggested that product manufacturers and distributors should be responsible for the waste generated by their products.

For many years, the Extended Producer Responsibility Law has been applied to batteries, paints, old medicines, and plastic packaging in most parts of the world. Although this is a new field in the United States, nearly 50 countries/regions have developed packaging EPR plans, including almost all of the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Cameroon, Australia, and many provinces in Canada. Such laws have achieved concrete results: for example, South Korea doubled its recycling rate in the first 10 years of the EPR program launched in 2003; similarly, from 2000 to 2017, Ireland’s recycling rate more than tripled . 

As these laws begin to gain a foothold in the United States, companies may fight. The US Institute of Packaging and Environmental Research, including 3M, Campbell, The Dow Chemical Company, Procter & Gamble, McCormick, and Kellogg’s, believes that the recently passed Maine and Oregon laws give the government too much control. , It also gave the company too much control. small. In Maine, the organization supports a competition bill that will give companies more oversight of the program and exempt many pharmaceutical products, as well as items such as paint thinners and cleaning products.

The industry also claimed that the EPR bill would increase the price of groceries, and cited a study to conclude that the Maine bill would cause companies to pass all costs on to consumers and make the average family of four spend on groceries every month Spend 32 to 59 dollars more. Nichols called the study "false" and pointed out that a project led by the author Calvin Lakhan of York University in Toronto reportedly received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Clorox Canada and other companies. Lakhan told Politico that no company influenced his research, but admitted that the quality of the data he used from Ontario’s expanded producer program was “very poor” and that the company might not pass all costs on to consumers. In contrast, an analysis of the Canadian EPR program by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality found that they increased the price of each item by $0.0056.

Nonetheless, Nichols said, many companies are at least beginning to admit that they have some responsibilities, which is an improvement. "At least we argued more, like'what should it look like?' instead of like'should you be responsible or not?'" Nichols said. "I think this has really changed."

Bode-George from the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators said the momentum to implement these laws may open the door to more ambitious legislation. In May, Washington State passed a law requiring the use of more recyclable ingredients in plastic beverage containers. Colorado has recently joined an increasing number of states to ban the use of plastic bags and polystyrene takeaway containers. California is expected to pass legislation banning the use of three-arrow recycling symbols (many of them-you can also thank the plastics industry for this) in products that are not actually recyclable, thereby making recycling more transparent.

"You know, for a long time, we put plastic bottles in recycling bins and assumed that it would be recycled," said Bod-George. "I think this push for EPR really means the fact that the veil has been lifted."

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