Above: the original TV ad, featuring actor ‘Iron Eyes Cody’, not actually an Indian although he adopted an alter ego as one and has been much written about. It was launched on Earth Day 1971, one year after the first Earth Day in 1970, seen by many as the start of the ‘modern’ environmental movement.

The framing is obvious but it has served the manufacturers of packaging well for nearly sixty years. ‘Crying Indian’ made individual consumers responsible, not the manufacturers, wholesalers or retailers. It then motivated individuals to accept and act on that responsibility for ‘littering’. Its success is measured in the many millions who take part in litter clean-ups without challenging plastic production, and in the framing, for example, of marine plastic pollution as ‘marine litter’ in the research, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and now the plans for its ‘Plastics Strategy’, by the European Commission. Like a spreading ‘meme’, when a strategic frame colonises our thinking ranging from the European Commission’s ‘Circular Economy’ down to community beach cleans, it simply has to be judged a brilliant success.

Consequently NGO initiatives like #Breakfreefromplastic and #Rethinkplastic which want to challenge the growing production of plastic, have their work cut out.

Roots in the 1950s

Ginger Strand describes better than I can, how this strategy goes back even further than 1971. She points out that in the 1950s, it became US Government policy to stimulate consumer purchasing to boost the economy, and that could be encouraged by replacing reusable things with throw-away things.

Led by beer manufacturers, refillable bottles started to be replaced by ‘throwaway containers’ and ‘many of them were ending up as roadside trash’. Ginger Strand records:

In 1953, Vermont’s state legislature had a brain wave: beer companies start pollution, legislation can stop it. They passed a statute banning the sale of beer and ale in one-way bottles. It wasn’t a deposit law — it declared that beer could only be sold in returnable, reusable bottles. Anchor-Hocking, a glass manufacturer, immediately filed suit, calling the law unconstitutional. The Vermont Supreme Court disagreed in May 1954, and the law took effect. That October, Keep America Beautiful was born, declaring its intention to “break Americans of the habit of tossing litter into streets and out of car windows.” The New York Times noted that the group’s leaders included “executives of concerns manufacturing beer, beer cans, bottles, soft drinks, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes and other products.” These disciples of disposability, led by William C. Stolk, president of the American Can Company, set about changing the terms in the conversation about litter.

By 1957 Vermont was pressured into dropping its reusable bottle law and disposable drinks containers grew rapidly throughout the 1960s. Strand writes:

In 1962, Michigan considered a ban on no-return bottles. Keep America Beautiful openly opposed it. Throughout the sixties, Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council battled a growing demand for legislation with an increasing vilification of the individual. They spawned the slogan “Every litter bit hurts” and popularized the term “litterbug.” In 1967, meeting at the Yale Club, they decided to go negative. “There seemed to be mutual agreement,” wrote campaign coordinator David Hart, “that our ‘soft sell’ used in previous years could now be replaced by a more emphatic approach to the problem by saying that those who litter are ‘slobs.’” The next year, planners upped the ante, calling litterers “pigs.” The South Texas Pork Producers Council wrote in to complain.

Meanwhile:

At the same time, KAB’s corporate sponsors made sure their own glass containers and cans never appeared as litter in the ads

Then non-corporate members of the Ad Council (an industry foundation organising pro-bono public service ads) revolted and threatened to pull support from littering campaigns. ‘Backed into a corner, KAB directors agreed to expand their work to address “the serious menace of all pollutants to the nation’s health and welfare’.

The result was that an executive from the American Can Company, ‘volunteering’ for Keep America Beautiful, brought in his own company’s agency, Burson Marsteller, who created the seminal Crying Indian ad.

Today, in terms of what we know of human health and ecological threats, the can industry seems a relatively benign influence compared to plastics but Marine Litter Solutions is still using the tried and tested tropes, for example with a ‘Don’t Be A Litterbug’ campaign.

The Plastics Story Now

In 2017 scientists from several US institutions calculated that since the 1950s ‘humans have created 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics … and most of it now resides in landfills or the natural environment’. The biggest use of plastics is packaging. Roland Geyer, lead author of the study and associate professor in University of California Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management said: “Half of all plastics become waste after four or fewer years of use.”