Flooded Lizard Kingdom

More on social change, in follow-up to my post about justice and charity. From Bradford Plumer's review of Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage over at MoJo Blog:

In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America's garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the "litterbug" became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, "littering" is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn't realize what was happening until years later.

And KAB's campaign worked—by the late 1950s, anti-litter ordinances were being passed in statehouses across the country, while not a single restriction on packaging could be found anywhere. Even today, thanks to heavy lobbying by the packaging industry, only twelve states have deposit laws, despite the fact that the laws demonstrably save energy and reduce consumption by promoting reuse and recycling. (A year after Oregon passed the first such law in 1972, 385 million fewer beverage containers were consumed in the state.) And no state has contemplated anything like Finland's refillable bottle laws, which has reduced the country's garbage output by an estimated 390,000 tons. But hey, at least we're not littering.

So it's a nifty judo throw, as far as it goes. I'm guessing that much the same thing is behind industry promotion of recycling. Again, no one can be "against" recycling. It's very good. But of the three suggestions in the phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," the last is the practice least effective in curbing the manufacturing of junk.

Look, we're concerned about the environment! Look, it's your problem!

In this light, please check out (via a post on Treehugger) this ad campaign from the EU:

Enough said.