Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

The disposable economy was created and marketed as a joint venture by the plastics manufacturers and large corporations to realize greater profit margins through cheap, disposable packaging. The “cheap” packaging was actually more societally costly than what companies previously used because its disposable nature required collection, transportation, and treatment at either a recycling facility or landfill, but businesses considered those costs “external” because they were paid not by the business, but by society as a whole. Knowing the effects, industry groups pumped money into public relations campaigns to convince Americans it was their patriotic duty to purchase more disposable products and upgrade functioning products frequently and to refocus blame for increased waste on individual “litterbugs” rather than corporate actors. Simultaneously, they challenged any opposition to their new products in court and flooded markets with cheap disposable products—often consumers’ only choice. Consumers initially rebelled against the inferior products, but manufacturers limited consumer options, eventually breaking anti-plastic advocates and making disposable plastic the new normal.

Still, individuals make purchasing decisions, not corporations, and corporations are composed of individuals who exercise corporate decision-making authority. A corporation isn’t a sentient thing that develops a business strategy; groups of individuals develop business strategies for corporations—the same individuals being forced to live in a disposable plastic economy. An automobile company has an obvious incentive to convince you to upgrade your car frequently. That incentive has existed since the first automobile company was formed. A soda company has a natural incentive to defray packaging costs and earn more money. That incentive has existed since the first soda company was formed. These instincts are natural and inevitable in a market economy; it is consumers who must dictate their priorities and refuse to upgrade their vehicle or purchase soda with inferior packaging. Millions of Americans exercise this choice: People purchase used items on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace instead of buying new, minimalist living is growing in popularity, and companies are utilizing eco-friendly packaging and supply chain technology in response to vocal consumer demand.

However, examples of the difficulty of individual action to enact meaningful change in opposition to strong industry interests abound. Consumers expressed a desire for eco-friendly packaging, and business interests responded with packaging designed to be theoretically sustainable but actually wasteful. Clever marketing campaigns hide the wastefulness of these products from well-meaning consumers, who are tricked into using an environmentally damaging product despite their clear intention to purchase sustainably. Sustainable businesses like ChicoBag and TerraCycle remain tiny compared to their competitors that flood the market with cheap and environmentally damaging products.

Despite these examples, for Humes, the current waste situation is the result of decisions by individual people to live and consume more wastefully. He concludes the book by suggesting actions that individuals can take to change wasteful practices, thus putting the responsibility firmly on individuals to combat the disposable economy.