Downtown Fro-Yo April 2015
Last weekend when I was walking downtown, I came upon a huge mess. The garbage can outside the new “fro-yo” place was overflowing with cups and was all over the sidewalk and the curb. I went inside and asked the staff if they could please do something about it. A woman who appeared to be a manager told me that it was the town’s garbage can and it was the town’s job to empty it. I suggested that they put an additional can of their own at the exit to the store. “That would be messy”, she said.
I took a photo and left. It got me thinking. Who is responsible for the messes that are made?
It seems to me that this can full of trash is a metaphor. Who should be cleaning up the mess? The companies that make it? The people that use it? Who should make sure the mess gets cleaned up?
BP made quite a mess in the Gulf of Mexico
5 years ago, BP spilled more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This major mess has yet to be fully cleaned up. BP continues to fight hard NOT to pay those who were damaged by the disaster. After all, their loyalty is to the shareholders, not to the victims.
This is the core problem. Both BP and the frozen yogurt place in my town have their priorities skewed in the wrong direction. Corporations big and small put profits ahead of health, safety and the environment. Companies should be held accountable for the mess that they create. Whether it is killing trees, the lungs of our planet, to make all those yogurt containers or whether it is destroying air and water through the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, we need to find a way to add this to the accounting.
People start pollution, people can stop it.
I remember the first Earth Day, I was a youngster in a scout troop. We went and did a clean up along a busy road, cursing the “litter bugs” with every piece of trash we picked up. The commercial for Keep America Beautiful with the crying Indian is still seared into my consciousness. Turns out that guys was and Italian actor, and that’s not the worse part of this ad campaign!
People start pollution, people can stop it. This tagline from the Keep America Beautiful campaign turns out to be corporate greenwash at it’s best.
Sadly, I learned a few years back that this iconic advertisement had a sinister background. Heather Rogers, author of Gone Tomorrow: the Hidden Life of Garbage explains that the packaging industry created a well funded non profit organization called Keep America Beautiful. By focusing on our “bad habits” of littering, it helped to keep laws from regulating industry. KAB help to encourage laws that would crack down on litter bugs, but not giant corporations who were making an even bigger mess. Corporations like the American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, inventors of one use cans and bottles, funded this lovely sounding campaign. Others include the Dixie Cup Company, Coca Cola, and the National Association of Manufacturers. This is why we no longer have returnable bottles, we have one use containers instead. Corporations continue to lobby against bottle bills that would require them to recycle.
Trees are the lungs of the earth. Without them, we will not survive.
Wouldn’t it be great if that frozen yogurt place encouraged less of a mess by giving folks discounts who bring in their own re-useable containers? Or how about they sell nice bowls that can be brought home and used again and again? And what about recycling those thousands of paper containers?
To me, it seems crazy to kill a tree to create a container that will be used for less than 5 minutes.
End of rant.
