Back in this post, we brought you a 1973 video called either Keep America Beautiful or Keep U.S. Beautiful…either way, a light-hearted variety show telling us it was not a good idea to litter or pollute. I received this message from John R. Hall…
Here's a bit more context on Keep America Beautiful.
In 1953, America's beverage companies — led by Coke and Pepsi — formed a non-profit called "Keep America Beautiful." Its goal was primarily to reduce littering and secondarily to promote recycling — ostensibly — in order to reduce support for "bottle bills" that placed a deposit on beverage containers. The bottle bills were and are designed to create incentives to keep beverage containers out of the waste stream and the litter stream by making it more expensive to avoid small beverage containers that make up most of the non-paper litter.
K.A.B. was controversial from the beginning, because its sponsors made its purpose clear.
A few years before the special you cited, I was part of a University of Pennsylvania research center project for Anheuser Busch to assemble facts related to waste and litter, framed in economics terms. This was about the time that the Council on Environmental Quality, a federal agency that paved the way for the Environmental Protection Agency, was created. I think the timing of the special is what one might expect when the threat of increased regulatory costs seemed to be rising. Anheuser Busch was one of the few beverage companies that thought they needed to offer a serious alternative to bottle bills. More typical was Coors, which led the scorched earth companies that opposed anything that would cost the beverage companies anything at all.
The term "greenwash" (based on whitewash) was developed for projects like Keep America Beautiful. I think your challenge to readers to judge how well that approach has worked is (as usual) the right way to judge how serious the K.A.B. sponsors were about meaningful change.
I'm a big believer in "Follow the money." I think it usually explains more than most people think. I'm not a big believer in crusades that make people feel they're doing more than they have. I'm thinking now of the folks who thought they'd struck a meaningful response to the terrorists of 9/11 by spending 29 cents and putting a made-not-in-the-U.S.A. American flag on their cars. It's not nothing but if it makes you feel you've done your part and now the problem's gone away, it might be worse than nothing.
It's nice to hear that Anheuser Busch thought they needed to do something meaningful and it's disappointing (but hardly shocking) that Coors did not. That might cause me to switch brands but it would be another meaningless gesture since I've never had a beer in my life. Thanks for writing, John.