Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rot—the five core tenets (“five Rs”) of the contemporary zero-waste movement—were popularized by Bea Johnson in her 2013 book, The Zero Waste Home. Together, the five Rs are meant to guide our purchasing and waste-management decisions as we “go zero waste,” from ditching our plastic kitchen utensils to washing our clothes less often.
Plastic Free July is a totem of this preoccupation with individual responsibility. Founded by Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, who in 2011 convinced her community in Western Australia to skip single-use plastics for a month, Plastic Free July has grown to a global movement that “helps millions of people reduce plastic waste through simple, everyday choices.” To name a few examples: We should avoid using cleaning and bathroom products packaged in plastic, choose natural fibers and alternatives to tampons and pads, and swap refillable washing liquid with washing powder. Because, as the official Plastic Free July pledge reminds us, “together, our small actions make a big difference toward a plastic free future.”
Unfortunately, these endless lists of eco-chores haven’t come close to offsetting the tide of plastic pollution blanketing our coastlines and poisoning our communities. Since the launch of Plastic Free July and publication of The Zero Waste Home in the early 2010s—which heralded the mainstream arrival of the zero-waste movement—global plastic production has increased by more than 54%. And recent predictions indicate that the situation is only going to get worse—much worse.
For those of us who care deeply about the environmental and human health impacts of plastic pollution, that prognosis is a difficult pill to swallow. As Plastic Free July kicks off on the eve of Fourth of July celebrations—which are rife with single-use red, white, and blue plastics—we need to ask ourselves: If the growth of the zero-waste movement has coincided with a dramatic increase in plastic production and pollution, why do we continue to commit time, energy, and money to its primary tactic of reducing our individual plastic footprint? Is the movement fundamentally flawed, or does it simply require greater investment to scale?
The answer takes us back to the origins of Big Plastic’s blame-shift campaign. In the 1950s, some of the biggest plastic polluters, including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, bankrolled the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful. Two decades later, in Keep America Beautiful’s infamous 1971 Crying Indian commercial, they revealed their agenda to shift the blame onto individuals for trash littering American landscapes by declaring: “People start pollution. People can stop pollution.” In the final scene of the ad, concerned citizens are encouraged to write in for a free pamphlet entitled “71 things you can do to stop pollution.”
Yes, you read that right. One of the first handbooks encouraging individuals to help reduce pollution through a litany of lifestyle actions was written by none other than the plastics industry itself. Dozens of books with titles derivative of Kathryn Kellogg’s 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste still compete for shelf space in bookstores across America today.
Thirty years later, BP (British Petroleum) spent millions of dollars popularizing the idea of a carbon footprint to advance industry’s narrative of individual responsibility—indirectly setting the stage for the explosion of the zero-waste movement.
Then in 2011, Big Plastic brought its Trojan Horse to the gates of the nonprofit industry, expanding their agenda of deceit: Ocean Conservancy launched the Trash Free Seas Alliance with Coca-Cola and other founding members, giving its corporate sponsors a branded vehicle to fund beach cleanups—another of Big Plastic’s preferred tools to shift the responsibility onto individuals for cleaning up the mess it made.
Recognizing that the zero-waste movement is underpinned by industry propaganda, we can uncover a litany of both ethical and strategic fatal flaws within its logical foundation, epitomized by Plastic Free July. The most consequential of which is that going zero waste isn’t scalable due to its inaccessibility to a large swath of Americans, namely low-income, working-, and even middle-class families. Unfortunately, most people are simply unable to bike to multiple bespoke markets each week to ensure none of their groceries is packaged in plastic.
In other words, the zero-waste movement conflates ethical consumer purity with class privilege and calls it activism. And because the prospects of going zero waste as a solution to the plastics crisis hinge on the absurd hypothetical “if everybody did it,” investing resources to grow a movement that can’t sufficiently scale is a zero-sum game: every activist it captures is one not working toward systemic change.
Plastic Free July is meant to inspire and empower us; to make us feel like we’re doing something impactful while facing down a planet drowning in plastic. But the palliative effect is fleeting because the zero-waste movement is a movement of a placebo politics; one that permits us to feel better about ourselves, but that hasn’t solved the plastics crisis.
As University of California San Diego professor Benjamin Bratton diagnosed in his scathing 2013 TED Talk, “At a societal level, the bottom line is if we invest in things that make us feel good but which don’t work, and don’t invest in things that don’t make us feel good but which may solve problems, then our fate is that it will just get harder to feel good about not solving problems. In this case, the placebo is worse than ineffective, it’s harmful. It diverts your interest, enthusiasm and outrage until it’s absorbed into this black hole of affectation.”
That black hole of affectation? It’s a zero-waste influencer’s year’s worth of plastic trash fitting into a single mason jar. (Although, it’s less impressive now that we know they were cheating all along.)
Many exceedingly smart people who have dedicated their lives to solving the plastics crisis willingly admit that lifestyle actions alone are insufficient to address it (e.g. Judith Enck’s The Problem with Plastic). This framing, however, misdiagnoses the fundamental flaw with the myopic focus on ethical consumerism. It’s not that reducing our individual plastic footprint is an incomplete approach on its own; rather, it’s a false solution that wastes our time and squanders our indignation—all of which could be aimed directly at the industry responsible for creating the crisis. To reiterate Professor Bratton’s point: it’s not just ineffective—it’s harmful.
Thankfully, there are nonprofits, community groups, and frontline activists across the United States working diligently on systemic solutions to plastic pollution. Hard-hitting campaigns have banned some of the worst offending single-use plastics at the local, state, and federal level. A burgeoning movement has notched major victories in the fight to slow the buildout of petrochemical facilities, including ethane crackers—massive complexes that “crack” ethane into the chemical building blocks used to make virtually all plastics—happening at a disconcerting rate across several regions of the United States.
In one uplifting example, community organizations on the fenceline of the petrochemical buildout in Cancer Alley, Louisiana—including RISE St. James and Louisiana Bucket Brigade—are leading a campaign against Formosa’s $9.4 billion ethane cracker, which, at 2,400 acres would be one of the largest in the world. Utilizing a combination of community organizing and strategic litigation, they have prevented Formosa from breaking ground on the construction of their ethane cracker for years.
Too often, though, plastics campaigners working at nonprofits have neglected to integrate us more fully into their campaigns to slow plastic production, oppose plastic incinerators, and force polluters to pay for cleanup costs, defaulting instead to sending us waste-reduction homework assignments. For example, educating supporters about how to minimize their exposure to microplastics does nothing to advance a bill in congress that would meaningfully address microplastic pollution. By divorcing actions from desired policy outcomes, environmental nonprofits have overlooked a critical step in movement building: creating a pathway to deeper involvement in their campaigns—what organizers call “moving people up the ladder of engagement.”
If we want to finally stem the tide of plastic pollution, implementing Big Plastic’s preferred “solution” of personal accountability is a surefire way to fail. Instead, those of us working on systemic solutions to the plastics crisis should focus our efforts on organizing people, by providing clear and facilitated ways for them to contribute to our campaigns and then moving them up the ladder of engagement; not sending them more eco-chores.
For concerned citizens, winning will require reevaluating our civic—rather than consumer—responsibility. Instead of obsessing over the five Rs, join a group that’s organizing people to take on Big Plastic. If one doesn’t exist in your area, there are still meaningful entry points: Organize within your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, or your city council to pass legislation or force policy changes.
Lifestyle changes put the cart before the horse. Individual behavior change will be required to implement the systemic solutions we need—but it won’t help us achieve them. We win when we lead with systemic change, mandating and incentivizing individual behavior changes we need, while inspiring cultural changes as we go. So, when you get your seventh email urging you to participate in Plastic Free July this year, guiltlessly put down your mason jar, tear up your list of eco-chores, and join the real fight.