The Invention of Trash, The Power of People, and Other Earth Day Lessons

Last Wednesday was Earth Day. I normally love Earth Day! April 22nd is almost always beautiful. Green is my favorite color. And the history of Earth Day is inspiring. The first one in 1970 was conceptualized as a teach-in, and it came at a time when we were starting to really see the damage that industrialization was doing to our planet. We were recognizing that corporations, left unchecked, had not respected our collective resources. That people needed to step up, governments needed to step in, and corporations needed to be held accountable if we were to ensure a habitable planet for the future.

Twenty million Americans participated in the first Earth Day, through demonstrations, lectures, and other related events. That was 10% of the U.S. population—a statistic I find utterly astounding and virtually unimaginable. Almost as hard to believe is that the protests actually worked! They inspired the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (signed into law by Richard Nixon—yet another astounding fact) and the passage of key legislation such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Education Act, and Occupational Safety and Health Act. It was a time for change, and Americans from both parties worked together to make it.

Fast forward 56 years. I know we've made progress since then. But it's discouraging that we've also taken steps back—and that we've simply made progress harder for ourselves by becoming more entrenched in our single-use systems and more reliant on disposable products. Plastic water bottles and bags have proliferated in a way that folks protesting in 1970 barely saw coming. Few people at the time were eating holiday dinners on throw-away plates. We were only just learning how to consume things in the sense of using them up, throwing them away, and buying new ones to replace them.

And that behavior was indeed something we had to learn. The other week, I relistened to an episode of the Throughline podcast that changed my worldview the first time I heard it, now over 6 years ago. (It's embedded below, and I highly recommend you give it a listen or read the transcript.)

It exposed me to the idea that trash has not been around forever. People invented it, within my own grandparents' lifetime. Manufacturers needed things to manufacture; businesses needed things to sell. So companies intentionally started making things that were meant to be thrown away. Disposable cups, disposable cutlery, disposable diapers, plastic food containers, and all the other disposable plastic things we use today were invented in fairly recent history. And when they were invented, people had to be taught—explicitly educated through advertisements and corporate propaganda—how to use them. 

When people started to see the waste these new products caused and began to push back on it—as they were starting to do around the time of the first Earth Day—the corporations taught them that waste was their responsibility. Litter was an individual and community problem. The solution to waste was recycling. This completely obfuscated the fact that their products were causing the problem in the first place. It's a maddening story, and unfortunately still the chapter we're in today.

["Single-use plastic bottles are only single-use if they are thrown away," says a company that knows full well only about 30% of bottles in the U.S. are recycled.]

So with all that fresh in my mind, this Earth Day found me feeling a little cynical as I scrolled through social media and saw the Earth Day posts from companies and businesses that don't seem very Earth-focused the other 364 days of the year.

I realize my irritation treads a fine line. Gatekeeping, self-righteousness, and casting doubt on others' level of commitment does nothing to help the cause. Progress is progress. Surely thinking about sustainability some is better than thinking about it none.

However. What the story above tells us is that one way corporations make individuals feel like they care is by expressing concern in little ways that don't address the real problems. It's a sort of greenwashing that we're right to watch out for.

So when you see companies (certainly big corporations, but also small, local businesses) making what seem like token gestures toward environmentalism or promoting sustainability in certain areas while apparently disregarding it in others:

1. Encourage the good behavior (actually reach out and say something!), and also
2. Push them to care just a little bit more!