Creating A Throw-away Culture: How Companies Ingrained Plastics In Modern Life

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But soon, the messaging started to change. In 1956, the industry learned about a new way to boost sales — and profits. At the plastics industry’s annual conference in New York, Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of an influential trade magazine, urged executives to stop emphasizing plastics’ durability. Stouffer told the companies to focus instead on making a lot of inexpensive, expendable material. Their future, he said, was in the trash can.

“It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people were used to.”said the containers were “almost indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard them after a few uses.

In 1976 — two years before big soft-drink makers introduced plastic soda bottles — a study by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded that “substantial recycling of plastics is unlikely in the near future.” That echoes the agency’s“To make a gamble like that, where public agencies and public documents are saying this at the time, I think raises real questions about culpability, accountability in an era when I think a lot of people are asking for that,” Elmore says.globally.

A lot of the plastic waste around the Buffalo River is packaging sold by the food and beverage giant PepsiCo,that New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed last year against the company. New York prosecutors say plastic pollution around the Buffalo River is a public nuisance, and that Pepsi contributes to the problem by selling tons of single-use packaging.

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