“A penny saved is a penny earned”? Not anymore.

The US has become the most wasteful country in the world. Waste in America is driven by consumerism. Supposedly, that term means promotion of the interests of consumers. But consumers don’t drive decisions. Corporations and government do. Consumerism drives the environmental catastrophes we face. And the plastics industry drives much of consumerism.

Throughout American history, periods of scarcity caused most economic problems. That is, until after the Second World War. American factories churned out far more products than Americans could buy. With most of Europe and Asia struggling to recover from the devastation of the recent war, they had no export market, either.

It would have been prudent for factories to adjust their output to match consumer demand. Instead, aided and abetted by the federal government, they sought to grow demand through marketing and advertising.

The effort required changing the entire character of the American public from savers to wasters. Vance Packard described the process in his 1960 book The Waste Makers.

As it turns out, the problem was even bigger and older than he imagined.

Waste makers according to Vance Packard

It’s amazing how accurately the opening paragraphs of The Waste Makers describe the American economy sixty years later:

What will the world of tomorrow be like? In the course of this book we shall examine a number of probabilities based on projections of current trends. Spokesmen for industry like to speculate about tomorrow even more than the rest of us. They invite us to peer out onto the horizon and see the wondrous products their marketing experts are conceiving for us. We are encouraged to share their dreams and to tingle at the possibility of using voice writers, wall-sized television screens, and motorcars that glide along highways under remote control.

Most of these marketing experts, despite their air of chronic excited optimism, are grappling with a problem that would frighten the wits out of less resolute people. That problem is the specter of glut for the products they are already endeavoring to sell.

Except by now, the marketing experts have already figured out their solution.

Packard imagined a city of the future that he called Cornucopia City, where everything would be cheaply built and disposable.

• Cars would have a life expectancy of only 4,000 miles.
• Cheap houses would be demolished and replaced every year to replace the old practice of spring cleaning.
• Repairing any appliance more than two years old would be considered unethical.
• Shops would be open 24/7, and even children would have credit cards to make spending money easier.
• Everyone would throw out old stuff—whatever they bought on the last shopping trip––as they entered stores to buy more.
• Factories could as easily throw out their output as sell it.
• Every week, the Navy would take all the surplus out to sea and dump it.

His cynical take, though exaggerated, hits too close to home.

What the 1950s wrought

The American public had gotten out of the Great Depression only by gearing up for a war economy. The Roosevelt administration rationed basic commodities. It forced manufacturers to abandon their traditional products to meet the needs of the war effort. For example, C.G. Conn had to stop making musical instruments and make such products as aircraft flight instruments instead.

So from 1929 to 1945, it was hard for consumers to buy consumer goods. The end of the war marked a turning point in the history of waste in America.

People tended to respond to the end of these conditions in one of two ways. Some continued to keep a tight rein on their spending. Many threw caution to the wind and spent with abandon. But even they couldn’t keep up with the glut of goods that companies created.

When nearly every American household already had a refrigerator, television, radio, vacuum cleaner, toaster, etc., how could manufacturers sell more? Here are a few tactics

• Make enough cosmetic changes to products’ appearance that the old ones would seem undesirable, even though they still worked as well as the new ones.
• Create “labor saving” devices, such as food processors that can’t do anything a cook couldn’t already do with a standard assortment of knives.
• Invent products that could only do one thing, such as wash windows, which made it necessary to have another product do one other thing, such as wash floors.

The government’s response to the glut

Packard attributes the recession of 1957-58 to the public’s inability to demand as much as manufacturer supplied. So manufacturers actually had to scale back production.

A reporter asked President Eisenhower how the public should help end it. “Buy,” he said. “Buy what?” the reporter asked. “Anything,” the President responded. Ever since, the top complaint of economists during any economic downturn has been that consumers aren’t spending enough.

The administration did its part. It spent billions of dollars on farm subsidies, highways, national defense, and pay raises. It encouraged farmers to grow more crops than anyone wanted or needed in order to increase sales of chemical fertilizer.

Then the government used millions of tons of metal to build storage for the surplus—not only of food but of paint, lumber, and anything else the government overbought.

The growth of consumerism

Marketers and government economists clamored for growth. Never before was growth for the sake of growth promoted so urgently. But as someone has observed, growth for the sake of growth is what cancer cells do.

A company might have been delighted to sell a million dollars’ worth of a product one year. The next year it would have to sell more than a million dollars’ worth of that same product or the whole year seems like an abject failure. The stock market still punishes any company that doesn’t grow as much as expected.

The concept that companies should limit production to what the public wanted to consume, if anyone ever thought of it, was soundly rejected by government and industry alike. Consumers had to be encouraged to raise their consumption to meet the glut of products coming off assembly lines.

The term “consumerism” seems to be a marketing ploy to sell the idea that consumers bore primary responsibility for the health of the economy. According to its boosters, the concept put the needs of consumers front and center. Instead, it appealed to people’s most selfish and frivolous instincts.

Consumer debt and all kinds of pollution soared. The rush to create enough landfills to hold all the waste soon met with resistance.

The trouble with consumerism

Americans began to catch on to the problems caused by consumerism in the 1970s. Landfills were reaching capacity, but no one wanted a new one nearby. “Not in my back yard” became the rallying cry. But it seemed like nothing more than a waste disposal problem.

Consumerism remained rampant.

The environmental movement became a powerful force in the wake of the first Earth Day in 1970. For the next decade, favoring environmental legislation and regulation was the safest stance for any elected official. Activists goaded government and industry to do more and more to clean up the environment.

But dialing back on wasteful consumer spending? It seems not to have crossed anyone’s mind.

In 1970, Americans produced 3.3 pounds of waste per capita every day. By 1990, that figure had risen to 4.3 pounds. Plastic and paper make up most of it. Paper, at least, is biodegradable if it’s not recycled.

The special problem of plastic

As a child of the 1950s, I can remember when “plastic” was synonymous with cheap and inferior. Yet little by little, plastic goods became better and better. Plastic began to push other materials out of the market.

A look at the history of plastic’s rise to prominence shows that the problems of manufacturing excesses and their solutions started earlier than Packard ever imagined.

The general public never conceived a need for plastic. The plastics industry created first the plastics, then the demand for plastics, and then the acceptance of single-use disposable plastics.

Even as people are beginning to try to wean themselves away from plastic, production increases. Industry churned out more plastic between 2000 and 2020 than between 1950 and 2000. And that latter amount was much more than production in the first half of the twentieth century.

Plastic as a solution to a waste problem

In the 1920s, when demand for automobiles started to grow, Union Carbide began to make Prestone antifreeze by synthesizing it from natural gas. The production process generated a waste by-product, ethylene dichloride. It had no practical purpose.

Rather than haul it to a dump, Union Carbide started to look for something to make with it. It eventually decided on vinyl chloride, the building block for polyvinyl chloride and polyvinyl acetate. No company had ever commercialized vinyl, so Union Carbide had to create a market for it.

Every petrochemical company faced similar problems. Each core product created byproducts for which there was no use, but simply dumping them cost too much money. It was easier and more profitable to create new substances and persuade other manufacturers to use them for something.

They had limited success until the Second World War broke out. The new plastics turned out to have important advantages for the war effort. For example, wire and cable insulated with polyethylene enabled radar. Synthetic rubber enabled production of sufficient quantities of numerous supplies from the soles of soldiers’ boots to tank treads and bomber tires.

The plastics could be made from either petroleum or grain alcohol. The oil and farm industries vied for government contracts to supply them. But growing grain depended on weather conditions. Droughts or floods made production too irregular and commodity prices fluctuate too much. The government eventually backed a petroleum boom that drove grain-based plastics out of the market.

The plastics industry feeds consumerism

After the war, consumer products such as Teflon developed from these new plastics. As with everything else, factories produced far more than the public could absorb without major transformation of spending patterns. The plastics industry made an outsized contribution to waste in America.

Eventually, it decided that moving plastic into homes would not boost consumption enough. It began to move plastics through homes in the form of disposables. To accomplish that end, it became one of the advertising business’ biggest clients.

Advertisers touted the convenience of, say, attractive cups for entertaining that the hosts could throw away instead of wash. They created an unprecedented demand for convenience.

The plastics industry also moved into packaging with a vengeance. Plastic eventually supplanted paper for packaging raw meat, eggs, bread, shopping bags, and much more. Consumers can only buy what stores make available. And stores make very little available that has no plastic in its packaging.

Do you think you can avoid plastic by buying beer or soda in aluminum cans? Think again. Those cans have a plastic lining, as the following experiment demonstrates:

Don’t try to produce that experiment at home. But here’s something that’s safe enough: soak a paper coffee cup in water. When the water saturates the paper, it will fall away, leaving a plastic liner. And that liner explains why you can’t recycle the cup. Thank God the aluminum recycling industry can deal with the plastic.

The obvious solution is to stop making plastic and reverse consumerism. But without careful planning and coordination, it would wreck the economy and impoverish us all. Is anyone in government or industry even thinking of it?

Sources:

American waste practices / Disposable America

How bad are plastics, really? / Rebecca Altman, The Atlantic. January 3, 2022

The waste makers / Vance Packard (New York: David McKay, 1960)