Prompt: Rewrite the details of a significant event in your issue’s history from the point of view of your opposition and/or from those whose voices have largely been unheard regarding the issue. What did this activity help you discover about your issue and those affected by it?
So, uh, I was researching littering history, and I found out that Keep America Beautiful – my main source of statistics – was literally created by the companies who started litter in the first place. The packaging and beverage industry was worried that the litter problem would cause a reduction in sales, so they made it the consumer’s responsibility to recycle stuff and buy more stuff. “The packaging industry relied on convincing people they needed to buy more stuff and that these items would undergo a cycle of becoming trash almost immediately. Society had to be trained to dispose of single-use plastic."[1]
I know this is kinda tangential to the prompt but I didn’t realize that KAB came from and was being funded by those companies. I just kinda assumed that they were some overall good organization based on their professional looking website. Don’t get me wrong, I do think they are definitely partially good, but at the same time there seems to be a conflict of interest, when the companies that are funding them literally need to make infinite amounts of waste to sustain their businesses.
There’s always been something off about the way that these big companies pretend to improve the environment while at the same time making sure that the status quo stays the same so that they can line their pockets with dollars. I guess after learning the history of Keep America Beautiful, I can’t say for certain that they aren’t doing the same, benefiting from the status quo of littering while on the outside condemning it.
During my time researching littering in the past, I never thought about why there was so much garbage in the first place and how it got there. I just looked at garbage as a constant, like gravity.
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