What we Leave Behind

Not all incentives are so obvious. Let’s look at so-called “feminine hygiene” products. The term “feminine hygiene” has seen a lot of use in the past century. During the 1920s and later, the term “feminine hygiene” was primarily a euphemism for birth control.²⁷⁰ A casual survey of historical documents of the time might lead you to believe that “feminine” hygiene apparently had a lot in common with hygiene in the kitchen, bathroom, and hospital. That’s because from around 1930 to around 1960 the single most common method of birth control in the United States was a post-coital Lysol douche. Yes, Lysol. That Lysol. Household cleaning product Lysol.

Beginning in the 1920s, the makers of Lysol ran a series of advertising campaigns promising that douching with Lysol would eliminate the “feminine odor” that might cause a woman to “spend the evenings alone” or even lose her marriage: “Yes, the proved germicidal efficiency of ‘Lysol’ requires only a small quantity in a proper solution to destroy germs and odors, give a fresh, clean, wholesome feeling, restore every woman’s confidence in her power to please.”²⁷¹

Others gave instructions on how to use Lysol as a contraceptive: “The douche should follow married relations as a cleansing and antiseptic agent . . . Lysol has that rare quality of penetrating into every crevice and furrow of the membranes, destroying germ-life even in the presence of organic matter.”²⁷²

Many of these advertisements featured endorsements by European “physicians” who, upon later investigation by the American Medical Association, did not actually seem to exist. Lysol was not even an effective contraceptive, a fact known in the 1930s. In their 1936 book Facts and Frauds in Woman’s Hygiene, Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M.D., remarked of the Lysol ad campaigns that, “Such sentimental trash would be laughable were it not for the tragedy of the many women who have become pregnant because they have relied upon antiseptic douches.”²⁷³ Unfortunately, many women were also burned by the strong antiseptic.²⁷⁴

Around the same time, another company was at work in the nascent “feminine hygiene” industry. Kimberly-Clark had been a large producer of “cellucotton,” a material the company had developed for use in dressings during the First World War. After the war ended, the company was left with warehouses full of the stuff, and plenty of money invested in the infrastructure and factories for its manufacturing. They had a lot to lose if they couldn’t figure out a new market for their cellucotton.

Up until around that point, women commonly made their own reusable menstrual pads from sewing scraps, rags, and similar materials. But in 1920, Kimberly-Clark introduced the Kotex sanitary napkin, a product which conveniently incorporated a large amount of cellucotton. The advertising campaign emphasized the high-class nature of the napkins. One advertisement asserted that “80% or more better-class women have discarded ordinary ways for Kotex.”²⁷⁵ Kotex ads also equated disposability with modernity and progress: “Just as the coming of telephones and electric lights changed old habits of living, so too Kotex warrants the forming of a new sanitary habit.” “Study lamps instead of pine torches. Printed books instead of written parchments . . . a new sanitary habit made possible by Kotex.”

Women found that they could customize Kotex pads for their own needs by changing the shape or opening up the pad to change the amount of stuffing. This customizability was a major source of popularity. At the same time, it was the beginning of the end for homemade pads in the mainstream. Beginning with businesswomen and women at school, more and more women found themselves too busy to make their own, or lived in small urban spaces with little room to store cloth, rags, and sewing supplies. Although wealthier women were certainly the first adopters, extensive advertising campaigns eventually (and successfully) targeted women of all classes.

Though Kotex is an especially notable example, nearly every modern disposable product had a reusable, or reused, predecessor. And each disposable replacement product had an advertisement and propaganda campaign designed to discredit that predecessor and sell more disposable items. Toilet paper, from around the 1870s, was often just reused newspaper or catalogue pages (although sometimes softer papers were saved for use by guests). Advertising campaigns insisted that reused papers directly caused hemorrhoids (which is untrue) and clogged the plumbing. In the 1910s, a campaign was undertaken to convince people to use disposable paper drinking cups when out of the home, starting with trains. This campaign was led by health authorities concerned that disease would be spread through public fountains, and also of course led by paper manufacturers. More “respectable” travelers generally carried their own collapsible or folding cups, and some paper companies made folding paper cups that could be reused. But of course, there was more money to be made by designing cups to do the opposite. The Individual Drinking Cup Company designed the “Health Kup” to be “destroyed if you try to fold it for a second use.” The Health Kup became widely adopted, and soon had a name change to Dixie Cup.

Products like Kleenex and cardboard cereal boxes shared much of the same history. Disposable packaging in general was advertised with an emphasis on sanitation and cleanliness, since beforehand many products—even things like toothbrushes—were sold from piles or bulk bins at stores which many customers might handle. So products like toothbrushes, for example, were marketed with their sanitary boxes as the main selling point. It’s ironic that a cultural obsession with cleanliness has led to the production of so much garbage.

So what are our individual incentives to be wasteful? Our historical examples show some common threads. Certainly convenience. Hygiene and cleanliness. An association with affluence or being higher-class. The association with progress and modernity (since disposability is the future, what choice do we have?). The price tag also plays a role, since disposable and cheaply made products are usually much cheaper than durable and long-lasting versions.

But let’s not get too bogged down at an individual scale. As we’ve already discussed, personal waste accounts for only a tiny percentage of total waste production. Industrial-scale waste is a much larger issue. Corporations have many incentives to be wasteful. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that corporations exist to make profit, and that wasteless industrial activities would be extremely expensive, if not impossible. Waste is an externality. And from the beginning corporations have been social machines and legal fictions set up for the sole purpose of privatizing profits and externalizing costs: what do you think “limited liability” really means?

More to the point, a corporation makes money by selling products, and it makes more money by selling more products. You can sell more products by making the useful lifetime of a product as short as possible, through either obsolescence or breakage. Of course, in an industrial age, the most important thing a company manufactures is not a physical product. A company grows by manufacturing demand for its products. And so companies are constantly encouraging people to throw away what they have to buy something new, regardless of whether the propagandized benefits are true or not.

In the years following the Second World War, the rapid rate of plastic production began to cause a major problem for plastics manufacturers. By churning out economically inexpensive items so rapidly, they had begun to saturate the market. The solution? As plastics manufacturers were told at a 1956 industry conference: “Your future is in the garbage wagon!” The production of huge amounts of waste became not merely a by-product of capitalism, not accidental, but an explicitly stated goal of industry. The priorities of manufacturers should be “low cost, big volume, practicability, and expendability.”²⁷⁷ And so it was. The subsequent production of vast quantities of disposable items like plastic plates, diapers, and sunglasses was combined with marketing campaigns emphasizing fashion and a need to throw away unfashionable old items and purchase new ones.

Consumers were unaccustomed to such behavior, and the memory of a long Depression was still fresh for many. Plastics companies found that in the late 1950s customers were still saving and reusing their “disposable” cups. So they created major “educational” campaigns to convince consumers that it was appropriate (as well as classy and hygienic) to promptly dispose of their plastic consumables.²⁷⁸ As a major advertising journal had previously observed, “The future of business lay in its ability to manufacture consumers as well as products.”²⁷⁹ Instead of advertising the virtues of their particular product compared to other similar products, they increasingly began to glorify consumption itself.

And when they can’t convince people to buy their products, they simply destroy the alternatives. Clive Ponting describes one example in his book A Green History of the World: “In 1936 three corporations connected with the car industry (General Motors, Standard Oil of California and the tyre company Firestone) formed a new company called National City Lines whose purpose was to buy up alternative transport systems and close them down. By 1956 over 100 electric surface rail systems in forty-five cities had been purchased and then closed. Their biggest operation was the acquisition, in 1940, of the Pacific Electric system, which carried 110 million passengers a year in fifty-six communities. Over 1100 miles of track were ripped up, and by 1961 the whole network was closed.”²⁸⁰

Governments also have incentives to encourage wastefulness. Governments rely on tax money, tax money comes from economic activity, and economic activity usually consists of turning parts of the natural world into garbage, directly or indirectly. And governments themselves buy and use huge amounts of disposable goods. Governments benefit by encouraging production, and by encouraging corporations, which (in theory at least) creates jobs. Governments want to keep the economy going. As president Herbert Hoover proclaimed in 1931, a time of dangerous frugality, “The sole function of government is to bring about a condition of affairs favorable to the beneficial development of private enterprise.”

Author Richardson Wright summed up a lot of this in 1930 when he wrote (in a glowing endorsement of industrial-scale disposability): “We live in a machine age. To maintain prosperity we must keep the machines working, for when machines are functioning men can labor and earn wages. The good citizen does not repair the old; he buys anew. The shoes that crack are to be thrown away. Don’t patch them. When the car gets crotchety, haul it to the town’s dump. Give to the ashman’s oblivion the leaky pot, the broken umbrella, the clock that doesn’t tick. To maintain prosperity we must keep those machines going.”²⁸¹

Beyond a certain point, of course, it becomes obvious that all this might not be such a good idea. Eventually all of the garbage starts to pile up, the pollution starts to accumulate, raw materials become in shorter and shorter supply. But that doesn’t change the behavior of those who run governments or corporations, because governments and corporations are based on short-term thinking, competition, exploitation, and the externalization of costs. A government that doesn’t keep the economy going gets overthrown. A CEO who doesn’t turn a profit gets fired. A corporation that can’t sell more disposable junk than competitors goes bankrupt. The whole system is based on making decisions in the very short term, and then pushing the consequences off into the future, or out to other places.

Even if they did it wouldn’t help us very much. If the government of any given country mandated a 10 percent reduction in disposable packaging, that country would simply take eleven years to produce all the disposable packaging garbage it would previously have made in ten. (And of course, as we’ve previously discussed, consumer waste is only a tiny percentage of total waste: it really wouldn’t make much difference at all.)

I began this section with economists and incentives, and an economist might say that the way to change someone’s behavior for the good is to change or remove their incentives for bad behavior, or offer incentives for good behavior. Incentives often suggested include things like tax breaks for polluting less, or carbon credits, or increasing the cost of garbage disposal. It’s been suggested, rather absurdly, that the capitalist economy could be made completely sustainable simply by adding a system of incentives.

Sounds nice in theory if you really like the status quo, but there are a few problems. First, there must actually be non-wasteful options available for people to be encouraged to choose. Capitalism is supposedly all about choice, and if I walk into the grocery store I can find tens of thousands of different products. Of course, not a single one of these products will be ecologically sustainable, so really we’re only offered the illusion of choice.

A second problem is that most suggested incentives target consumers. We’ve already talked about the problem of getting sidetracked by household waste when the vast majority of waste is produced on an industrial scale. But even beyond that, consumer-based incentives tend to be especially ineffective. Who is going to impose them? Corporations don’t want to impose “artificial” incentives by making less wasteful products less expensive, because this cuts into their profits. Yes, less wasteful products could be less expensive to manufacture, but that’s already reflected in the cost. Governments can impose taxes on especially wasteful products, but those have their own pitfalls. If you significantly increase the price of a commonly used but wasteful product, rich people simply absorb the extra cost, and poor people (who may simply be buying the cheapest version) struggle with it.

Sure, there are exceptions to this, too. There’s no real reason people couldn’t use cloth bags instead of plastic or paper ones when shopping, for example. Cloth bags don’t break easily, they last for decades and then can be composted, and they have a negligible ecological impact compared to plastic or paper bags. The only reason people use paper or plastic bags is convenience, because they don’t want to be bothered bringing their own bags to the store, and because most stores subsidize the waste by giving bags away for free.

You can argue that plastic shopping bags can, at least in theory, be recycled, and therefore wouldn’t be so bad if people disposed of them responsibly. But even that isn’t really true, because most plastics aren’t so much recycled as they are downcycled. Carol Misseldine, sustainability coordinator for Oakland, California, notes; “We’re not recycling plastic bags into plastic bags. They’re being downcycled, meaning that they’re being put into another product that itself can never be recycled.”²⁸² And frankly, even downcycling would be optimistic: in 2000, only 5 percent of US plastics were recycled.²⁸³

Part of the problem is that incentives that apply at a personal level aren’t determined at a personal level. The reason it’s so convenient to create waste by, say, using disposable plastic bags, is because of decisions made at corporate and governmental levels. And those decisions are largely determined by the larger system—industrial civilization—that corporations and governments are embedded in. Specific programs and laws that reduce waste can—and generally should—be put into effect. But these tend to have a small impact in the scheme of things, partly because they focus on consumer-level issues.

Moreover, these programs can act as distractions and diversions to activists and citizens. Here’s an example. My career as an activist started around age ten, when I helped to start an environment club at my school. We sold Tupperware and reusable bags, encouraged household composting, and generally worked on waste reduction issues. In high school, we set up separate containers next to the garbage bins for students to put their recyclable plastic and glass bottles in. Then we would collect them, sort out all of the garbage that people had thrown into the clearly marked bins (they also threw recyclables in the adjacent garbage), wash the bottles off with a hose, and arrange to have someone pick up the bottles for recycling (which was rather more difficult to find at the time).

You could argue that instead of doing this, we should have spent our time lobbying government for mandated recycling programs, and then we wouldn’t have to go to all the trouble of washing bottles ourselves. But that’s not where I’m going with this, because neither option addresses our fundamental underlying problem. Sure, a small reduction in waste is better than nothing, but it’s not good enough. And if we spend our time doing only “better than nothing” when we could be stopping all waste, the eventual outcome is the same. We’re like Skinner’s pigeons—bobbing our heads and turning in circles instead of trying to get out of the cage.

All this brings to mind Thoreau’s observation that “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Most incentives that motivate people aren’t from programs, they’re systemic. If you want to change a system that’s profoundly broken, you don’t tinker with programs, you get a different system.

If you really want to remove the incentives for being wasteful, you have to change this culture at the deepest level you can find, and then deeper than that, and deeper still. How deep can we go? Yes, individual people are wasteful because it’s cheap, convenient, and they don’t know any better. Corporations make a profit because you make more money by selling things that shortly thereafter become garbage. Governments benefit when corporations do this because it keeps the economy going and offers taxes.

These things only persist because the consequences of wastefulness are exported, like so many trash-laden barges, to seemingly distant places and times. If you want to stop the incentives for wastefulness, you have to stop the systems that export and postpone the disincentives. You have to bring the consequences home. And most of all, you have to stop the industries that manufacture waste in the first place.

We could fantasize about a technotopia where government simply banned waste. Where it made corporations responsible for the eventual disposal of everything those corporations produced. But such a fantasy contravenes the deepest tendencies of civilization, and the structural rules that reward short-term gains over long term considerations (including life on this planet), and that reward people for taking more than they give back.

We could also fantasize that guns can give birth and that stealth bombers convert carbon dioxide to oxygen and pencil lead, and generate energy to boot. Governments and corporations are social machines invented to accomplish specific purposes—working in tandem to centralize power (and privatize profits) and to externalize costs; in other words, to facilitate and magnify exploitation; in other words to wage more effective war upon the poor and upon the earth—and it makes as little sense to expect these social machines to accomplish goals other than those for which they were created as it does to expect other instruments of war to perform life-fulfilling activities.

While we’re at it, why don’t we fantasize that you can convert a living planet to machines without killing it. And we can fantasize that dams don’t kill salmon, that burning oil doesn’t release carbon dioxide, that clearcutting forests improves their health, that you can suffocate oceans without killing them.

This culture is based, once again, on a straight line. Its mythologies are linear and progressive. They depend on a beginning, middle, and end. The natural world is based on circles and cycles. A linear, progressive culture is not compatible with a finite world.