Many recycling practitioners in the United States seem unaware of how the hallmark of municipal
A new study published last fall in the Harvard Business History Review details how American beverage companies enrolled governments to set up, and taxpayers to fund, curbside recycling systems as they transitioned from refillable to one-way, disposable packaging. Elements of this story have been documented before.
For example, Samantha McBride in Recycling Reconsidered (chapter 2) tells the story of how New York City, in the 1970s, was led away from adopting beverage container deposits by the beverage industry. “The industry's strategy was to recruit compliant [environmental] organizations and support their campaigns to push for changes in municipal waste policy (curbside recycling) instead of changes in corporate practices.” MacBride tells the story in the context of a broader analysis of corporate co-optation of the environmental movement.
In Ontario in the early 1980s, the beverage industry provided seed funding for municipal curbside programs to thwart not only deposits, but also quotas for refillable containers. As Guy Crittenden observed in The Blue Box Conspiracy (1997), “The blue box on your front porch wasn't dreamed up by government officials. Or inspired by grassroots environmentalists. The soft drink industry and its packaging suppliers brought in the Blue Box to serve a common corporate agenda — thwarting government legislation that would have foiled their plans to bury the refillable bottle in the junk heap of history...” And: “By salting the low-value materials that we now find in our Blue Boxes with pricey aluminum, recycling the box's entire contents would become thinkable.” More detail is provided in Waste Blues, a 1997 article published in The Financial Post Magazine.
The new study in the Harvard Business History Review is by Bart Elmore, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. I quote extensively from his paper here, but encourage the reader to download and review the full paper at the link below, provided with the author's permission.
The author’s purpose is “understanding the elements of the American political economy that nurtured big business growth in the twentieth century.” For environmentalists, the story provides a cautionary tale of how vigilance is needed to ensure that new proposals for EPR for packaging deliver results in the public interest.
EXCERPTS from: The American Beverage Industry and the Development of Curbside Recycling Programs, 1950–2000. By Bartow J. Elmore, Harvard Business History Review 86 (Autumn 2012): 477–501.
ABSTRACT
Many people today consider curbside recycling the quintessential model of eco-stewardship, yet this waste-management system in the United States was in many ways a polluter sponsored initiative that allowed corporations to expand their productive capacity without fixing fundamental flows in their packaging technology. For the soft-drink, brewing and canning industries, the promise of recycling became a powerful weapon for combating mandatory deposit bills and other source-reduction measures in the 1970s and 1980s. …
WHY BEVERAGE GIANTS SWITCHED TO ONE-WAY CONTAINERS
By the turn of the twentieth century, soft-drink companies and major brewing giants shipped thousands of returnable bottles all across the United States. Most companies relied on a network of small bottlers to distribute their products to consumer outlets throughout America. ...
The shift to one-way container distribution began in the brewing business, not the soft-drink industry, in large part because the major brewing giants desired a cost-efficient way to break into the new markets made available by the collapse of small breweries in the wake of Prohibition. ...
Profits that once had gone into the pockets of local bottlers could now be channeled into corporate coffers if the company could take over bottling operations. … Smaller bottlers who depended on a returnable system to turn a profit lambasted the government for allowing soft-drink giants to pass off the costs of container collection and disposal on the government. ...
The one-way container allowed beverage giants like Coke to achieve record profits by shifting key costs of distribution onto municipalities. Coke’s success assured the consolidation of the soft-drink industry, as corporate rivals followed the number-one brand’s lead. The era of one-way metal soft-drink containers had arrived by the mid-1960s, and though the beverage companies would look to develop new packaging designs in the years ahead—Coke making a major shift toward plastics in 1978—the most dramatic conversion had already taken place by 1960. The beverage industry was primed for a new era of growth in the age of convenience packaging. The only question was, Would the consumer remain committed to this new distribution system?
CONSUMER BACKLASH: THE EXCESSES OF INDUSTRY BECOME VISIBLE
The soft-drink giants’ switch to one-way containers in the 1960s generated prodigious amounts of waste that alerted consumers to the environmental costs associated with corporate growth. Thousands of throwaway cans and bottles lay strewn across the American landscape by the 1960s, and many Americans began to call on the brewing, soft drink, and packaging industries to clean up the mess. ...
In the mid-1950s, the American canning, brewing, and beverage industries responded to consumer concern about one-way container waste by creating the first national antilitter organization, Keep America Beautiful. … KAB’s central objective was to deflect accusations that producers were to blame for the country’s growing litter problem. ...
Coca-Cola developed independent programs to fight the backlash against one-way container technology. Coke’s vigorous pursuit of these campaigns was in large part a response to the growing strength of an environmental movement that increasingly took aggressive actions toward visible corporate polluters. ...
Coke, NSDA, and KAB public ad campaigns in the 1960s and early 1970s certainly helped draw the public’s attention away from the fact that American companies were producing prodigious amounts of packaging waste, but corporate polluters knew that litter bags would not, in the long run, solve their problem of exposure. In the Pacific Northwest and New England in particular, legislators were frustrated that little was being done to combat the nation’s growing litter problem, and they pushed for mandatory deposit legislation in the late 1960s. The beverage industry had to respond with a more aggressive campaign directed to American lawmakers if it hoped to avoid costly pollution taxes. ...
RECYCLING BECOMES THE SOLUTION
By the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, the increased visibility of the country’s landfill problems intensified concerns about throwaway containers. ...
Publicly funded curbside recycling programs, or rather the promise of such programs, became the U.S. industry’s primary mechanism for combating legislation that would demand extended producer responsibility for packaging waste in the 1980s. ...
The soft-drink, packaging, and brewing industries held out recycling as the panacea that would solve the nation’s litter problems. Companies in these industries knew that they had to take preemptive steps to combat growing consumer concerns, and they believed recycling could be touted as an effective industry alternative to mandatory deposit schemes. ...
Unable on their own to clean up the mess they helped create, the nation’s big beverage companies turned to federal and local government agencies in the 1970s and 1980s to help develop solid-waste management programs that would keep corporate waste out of sight. Opposing initiatives requiring producers to pay for industry pollution, beverage companies lobbied for “comprehensive” recycling programs to solve the problem. Recycling became a corporate weapon in a fierce battle to undermine mandatory deposit legislation and bans on nonreturnable packaging, point-source pollution reduction programs popular among environmentalists in the “Age of Ecology.” …
In the end, industry lobbyists were victorious, pushing through legislation at the federal, state, and municipal levels that established recycling programs as the cure-all for the nation’s solid-waste problems. Recycling became the exclusive solution rather than the complement to mandatory source-reduction programs. While Coke and its corporate partners continued to produce billions of one-way containers, municipalities took on new debts in order to deal with the mounting piles of trash. ...
This highly visible corporate greening campaign, however, represented the veneer of a much larger system that had to be built from the ground up, largely by city governments and largely with taxpayer dollars. … Because the costs of cleaning up the mess were distributed, in other words, few citizens recognized the huge capital outlays that were being made by the public on behalf of private industry. Beverage and packaging companies had found a way to enroll local governments in a nationwide corporate cleanup and had done so without drawing the ire of an American citizenry typically averse to government bailouts of private industry. They succeeded because the support they received was largely invisible to the public. ...
The beverage industry positioned itself as the keystone of the recycling system. Through the end of the 1980s, soft-drink, brewing, and beverage-packaging companies sought to convince citizens and lawmakers alike that container waste was the essential fuel driving nascent [curbside] recycling programs. … Coke and its industry allies argued that the diversion of aluminum cans from the waste reclamation stream via deposit laws would eliminate the majority of the revenue generated from sales of recyclables. ...
The soft drink industry’s appeal proved effective. After 1986, only one other state (Hawaii) passed a mandatory deposit law. Most municipalities committed substantial resources and political support to the development of what the industry called “comprehensive” recycling programs. In 1986, only Rhode Island had a mandatory statewide recycling law on the books, but, just three years later, twenty-six states had passed laws requiring recycling as a component of solid-waste reduction, and seven states mandated the creation of statewide curbside programs. The number of curbside programs in the United States increased from just six hundred in 1989 to over four thousand in 1992. With the rise of curbside recycling, industries abandoned many of their own buyback programs and began to rely largely on municipal services that required them to pay no extra fees. ...
By the end of the 1990s, publicly funded recycling programs had become accepted as the method for cleaning up industry container waste.
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great blog Bill! I had no idea............as much an "ah-ha" moment as when I first discovered the crazy notion of "product stewardship."
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jack Bradbury