http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3642/

The Crying Indian
How an environmental icon helped sell cans -- and sell out environmentalism

Orion magazine
November/December 2008

BY GINGER STRAND

... Over two million Americans acted on that belief in 2006, volunteering for Keep America Beautiful activities: picking up litter, removing graffiti, painting buildings, and planting greenery. Many may not have realized they were handing their free time to a front group for the beer bottlers, can companies, and soda makers who crank out the containers that constitute half of America's litter. Or that this front group opposes the reuse and recycling legislation that might better address the problem. The information is not hard to find. Ted Williams wrote about it in 1990 for Audubon. Online, you can find many more narratives of KAB's real motives, including a summary by the Container Recycling Institute.

.... In 1953, Vermont's state legislature had a brain wave: beer companies start pollution, legislation can stop it. They passed a statute banning the sale of beer and ale in one-way bottles. It wasn't a deposit law—it declared that beer could only be sold in returnable, reusable bottles. Anchor-Hocking, a glass manufacturer, immediately filed suit, calling the law unconstitutional. The Vermont Supreme Court disagreed in May 1954, and the law took effect. That October, Keep America Beautiful was born, declaring its intention to "break Americans of the habit of tossing litter into streets and out of car windows." The New York Times noted that the group's leaders included "executives of concerns manufacturing beer, beer cans, bottles, soft drinks, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes and other products." These disciples of disposability, led by William C. Stolk, president of the American Can Company, set about changing the terms in the conversation about litter.

The packaging industry justifies disposables as a response to consumer demand: buyers wanted convenience; packagers simply provided it. But that's not exactly true. Consumers had to be trained to be wasteful. Part of this re-education involved forestalling any debate over the wisdom of creating disposables in the first place, replacing it with an emphasis on "proper" disposal. Keep America Beautiful led this refocusing on the symptoms rather than the system. The trouble was not their industry's promulgation of throwaway stuff; the trouble was those oafs who threw it away.

At the same time, the container industry lobbied hard behind the scenes. In 1957, with little fanfare, Vermont's senate caved to the pressure and declined to renew its reusable bottle law.

...In 1962, Michigan considered a ban on no-return bottles. Keep America Beautiful openly opposed it. Throughout the sixties, Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council battled a growing demand for legislation with an increasing vilification of the individual. They spawned the slogan "Every litter bit hurts" and popularized the term "litterbug." In 1967, meeting at the Yale Club, they decided to go negative. "There seemed to be mutual agreement," wrote campaign coordinator David Hart, "that our 'soft sell' used in previous years could now be replaced by a more emphatic approach to the problem by saying that those who litter are 'slobs.'" The next year, planners upped the ante, calling litterers "pigs." The South Texas Pork Producers Council wrote in to complain.

...It was an elegantly closed circle. The titans of packaging pushed throwaways into production. The Ad Council preached the creed of consumption, assuring Americans that the road to prosperity was paved with trash. The people bought; the people threw away. Then, the same industries and advertisers turned around and called them pigs. The people shamefacedly cleaned up the trash. And the packagers, pointing to the cleaned-up landscape, just went on making more of it.

...Symbolic protest rarely is. In 1976, after KAB testified against a proposed California bottle deposit law, the EPA and seven environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, resigned from its advisory board. Activists declared KAB a "front group." But by then, being outed didn't matter. The group's work was largely done. In 1976, two-thirds of America's soft drinks and nearly four-fifths of its beer came in disposables. Today, every American throws away about three hundred pounds of solid waste a year, about one-third of it packaging. Sixty percent of that comes from food and beverages.

Eleven states have succeeded in passing bottle bills. Beverage container recycling rates in those states are roughly double rates in nondeposit states. But in shifting the debate to bottle deposit legislation—which it opposed—KAB still won, because it shut down debate over whether disposable beverage containers were a good idea in the first place. Vermont's original 1953 law would have required manufacturers to accept and refill their empties. No one's talking about that now.

.....In 1960, the year Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council joined forces, containers and packaging composed just over 7 percent of the U.S. aluminum market. But Harper's gamble paid off. Within twenty years, aluminum containers would produce more revenue for Alcoa than its second-, third-, and fourth-largest markets combined. John D. Harper spent much of that time as a member of the Ad Council's Industry Advisory Committee.

...Ironically, perhaps unwittingly, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful got it right. The crying Indian hints at the root cause of the problem he mourns: it's not just roadside trash. It's the culture of consumption that created that trash—with government subsidized power—and sold it to the public as the American Dream, when in fact it was that very dream's death. Iron Eyes Cody may have wept on cue, but George Gillette wept for the land.

IS THE CRYING INDIAN the root of environmentalism, as Wikipedia would have it? Or is he its sole mourner, weeping its silent dirge? In the thirty years following his debut, Americans landfilled or incinerated more than a trillion aluminum cans—enough to encircle the Earth 3,048 times.

Please read this article sent by Ken Eidel:

http://www.naturalpath.com/sustainability/eric-lombardis-zero-waste-park

Here is the link to the "Story of Stuff" http://www.storyofstuff.com/