Spring 2000
Thirty tears later Keep
America Beautiful
is still Keeping America Blindfolded
Keep America Beautiful tugged at the heartstrings of the American
public with their unforgettable ad campaign launched on Earth Day
1971. Professionals in the advertising business have rated it one
of the most powerful and successful ad agency creations of all time.
The now legendary image of the lone American Indian in full native
dress, staring teary eyed at a littered landscape, left an indelible
tattoo on the American psyche.
Unfortunately, decades after KAB's offer to keep America beautiful,
the American landscape is still choked with trash. KAB was never
able to ‘get America beautiful’ much less keep it beautiful!
An updated version of the Iron Eyes Cody ad was introduced on Earth
Day 1998. According to a story in the New York Times (April
22, 1998), KAB’s Evan Jones said, “Our equity is the tear,
and we’re hoping to build that equity.” One might argue
that the ad that ran 27 years after his single falling teardrop
should have featured Iron Eyes Cody weeping uncontrollably at the
sight of littered roadsides and mountainous landfills.
Writer Ted Williams didn’t mince any words in his article titled
“The Metamorphosis of Keep America Beautiful” (Audubon
Magazine, March 1990). Williams wrote, “My thoughts on
the weeping Indian ad are that it’s the single most obnoxious,
commercial ever produced . . . . It strikes me as the ultimate exploitation
of Native Americans: First we kicked them off their land, then we
trashed it, and now we’ve got them whoring for the trashmakers.”
Three decades after the crying American Indian was introduced to
the American public, armies of well-intentioned volunteers still
stand ready and willing to pitch in whenever they hear the rallying
cry for flower planting, beach clean ups or park renewals. These
litter purges are well attended and well organized, but the results
are short term and short lived.
KAB and its various state and local affiliates all operate under
the umbrella of KAB's glowing image, and who could fault an organization
dedicated to keeping America beautiful?
CRI respects the efforts of well-intentioned groups and hard-working
individuals across the country that enlist in programs sponsored
by Keep America Beautiful and its many reinventions of itself. We
believe that many, if not most of them, are unaware that they have
aligned themselves with a trade group rather than an environmental
organization.
The fact remains that more than 75 corporations fund KAB. The strongest
supporters of KAB are beverage manufacturers like Coke and Pepsi
and their trade association, the National Soft Drink Association.
Together with packaging companies they promote Clean Community Systems
and litter taxes as alternatives or replacements for container deposit
laws and other government regulations that make those companies
responsible for their products and packaging.
Since the inception of Keep America Beautiful, hundreds of state
and local KAB programs have been created and dozens of litter tax
plans have been offered as alternatives to beverage container deposit
legislation or bottle bills. These band-aid solutions, applied to
the problem of litter and waste, have proven ineffective in stemming
the flow of litter across America and have helped defeat bottle
bill proposals in almost every state in the country.
Bottle bills, not KAB, have kept hundreds of billions of cans and
bottles from ending up as litter or landfill inventory. It makes
no sense to support an organization that works to undermine a proven
method of litter reduction and recycling in the name of keeping
America beautiful. It makes good sense to support bottle bills.
- CRI
A History of
Keep America Beautiful
1953 to 2000
In the aftermath of magazine ads
promoting beverage cans as “throwaways”, Keep America
Beautiful (KAB) was founded in 1953 by a group of businessmen from
the beverage and packaging industries. Their purported interest
was to curb the growing problem of litter. Coincidently, 1953 was
the year Vermont passed the nation’s first bottle bill, banning
the sale of beer in non-refillable bottles. 
Litter was a visible problem nationwide and the bottlers and packagers
were concerned that government would make them responsible for solving
the litter problem by regulating their industries. That concern
was the catalyst for founding KAB. The organization launched its
first campaign theme, “Every Litter Bit Hurts” and the
most visible environmental organizations joined KAB’s war on
litter.
In the early 1970’s KAB mounted a splashy new campaign aimed
at making individuals responsible for cleaning up litter that was
a blight on parks, playgrounds, country roads and city landscapes.
The now legendary image of the Native American with a tear angling
down his face caught the attention of the public, but many environmental
organizations serving as advisors to KAB were offended by the “People
Start Pollution , People Can Stop It” theme.
Environmentalists thought the theme implied that individuals were
solely responsible for pollution. Environmental organizations including
the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society and National Wildlife
Federation wanted KAB to join them in working for strategies such
as bottle bills, that focused on preventing litter and making producers
responsible for their packaging waste. But the industry backers
of the KAB strongly objected.
In 1972 Oregon and Vermont enacted the nation’s first bottle
bills requiring a 5-cent deposit on beer and soft drink containers.
By 1974, when the California legislature began to debate whether
to enact a container deposit law, KAB made a strategic decision
to publicly oppose the bottle bill. Roger Powers, President of KAB
testified against the California bottle bill before the state legislature
in Sacramento.
Some Advisory Committee members saw this public opposition to bottle
bills as an indication that KAB was serving its own interests and
not those of the broader environmental community and as a result
threatened to quit the advisory board. In order to keep the environmentalists
on board, KAB agreed that it would not take a position, either for
or against deposit legislation.
As public support for bottle bills grew and aggressive bottle bill
campaigns were waged in Maine and Michigan, the brewers needed an
alternative response to litter, otherwise more states might soon
adopt bottle bills. In 1975 the U.S. Brewers Association (USBA)
developed a sophisticated campaign called the “Clean Community
System” (CCS), which they touted as an alternative to bottle
bills. As the parent organization, KAB kicked off the new Clean
Community Campaign at its annual meeting in 1975.
In a memo several months later, the US Environmental Protection
Agency’s (EPA) Thomas Williams explained the underlying purpose
of the CCS. It is a public relations campaign, he wrote, used by
the industry “ in an attempt to focus the attention of hundreds
of communities on anti-litter campaigns . . . When successfully
inaugurated, it tends to abort any local efforts to institute beverage
container deposit systems, placing emphasis on street-cleaning and
other litter control activities.”
The final blow to environmentalists was dealt during a speech at
a July 1976 KAB Board of Directors meeting at the Biltmore Hotel
in New York, when American Can Company chairman William F. May labeled
bottle bill proponents “Communists” and called for a total
KAB mobilization against the four bottle bill referenda on the ballot
in November. Present during the speech were KAB’s Advisory
Committee members, many of whom were the subject of May’s attack.
The story was picked up by Jack Anderson and aired on his national
television show. On August 12, 1976, the EPA resigned from KAB’s
board and by October 1976 more than a dozen environmental and citizen
groups, including National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation,
League of Women Voters and Sierra Club disaffiliated from KAB. In
November of that year voters approved bottle bills in Michigan and
Maine.
Industry opponents of deposit legislation recognized that simply
‘opposing’ legislation was not enough. Since 1976 hundreds
of CCS and similar KAB programs have been proposed in cities and
counties across the country as a direct alternative to local container
deposit ordinances. Funding, however, has strings attached, as one
environmental group in New York discovered.
In New York City, the Environmental Action Coalition (EAC) received
$350,000 in support over three years from Pepsi-Cola, the Can Manufacturers
Institute and the Aluminum Association for anti-litter education.
EAC lost industry funding in 1975 when it endorsed the proposed
New York bottle bill.
The most effective statewide strategy used to convince legislators
that bottle bills are not needed has been litter taxes. These alternatives
generally involve a small annual tax on all manufacturers and retailers.
The taxes are then used to create a government agency that addresses
litter issues. Litter taxes were passed in Colorado, Kentucky, Arkansas,
Connecticut, California, Ohio and Virginia as alternatives to bottle
bill proposals.
Bob Warrick, farmer and President of the Nebraska chapter of the
Sierra Club said of KAB’s programs, “I’m tired of
pumping money into front organizations whose goal is to educate
and plant flowers. My ditch is filled with cans and bottles. Legislation
mandating deposits would stop litter before it starts, but KAB never
supported a bottle bill.”
Warwick’s disappointment echoes that of Newark’s Mayor,
Sharpe James who said of the KAB program, “The Clean Communities
alternative to a bottle bill offered by the industry in New Jersey
has been a failure.”
With increased public interest in recycling and waste reduction
in the 1980’s, KAB’s emphasis shifted from litter cleanups
to recycling. KAB’s Clean Community Systems grew to more than
400 local groups and its list of financial supporters expanded to
include a broader range of manufacturing industries and companies
in the waste disposal industry such as Waste Management, Inc and
Browning Ferris.
In the 1990’s, KAB adopted yet another campaign slogan —
“Let’s not waste the 1990’s” — which stressed
the need to encourage citizens, municipal officials and civic leaders
to “re-examine recycling’s capabilities and limitations.”
The new campaign presented a 5-pronged solution to solving the problem
of solid waste – source reduction, recycling, composting, incineration
and sanitary landfilling.
KAB’s 1990’s slogan was new, but the message had changed
little since Iron Eyes Cody warned that “People Start Pollution
– People Can Stop It.” The promotional materials made
no mention of policies such as recycled content requirements, mandatory
recycling rates, bottle bills or other measurers that shift the
burden of waste management and waste reduction from government to
the manufacturers and producers of waste.
On April 5, 1993 KAB hosted a nationwide videoconference “Recycling
Realities: A National Town Meeting.” In announcing the conference,
KAB President Roger Powers said, “While recycling can be an
important method of dealing with our waste in some communities;
it is not the only option. In order to safely and effectively manage
trash, the public must be informed of every alternative.” Powers
was of course referring to the waste management options of landfilling
and incineration.
More than a dozen environmental and public interest groups, in a
letter to KAB President Roger Powers, charged that the panel of
waste experts addressing the videoconference was void of representation
from the environmental community. The groups wrote, “It is
clear that the perspective of your corporate members will be effectively
articulated by such panelists as Jane Witheridge of Waste Management,
Inc. and Melinda Sweet of Lever Brothers Company. We are dismayed
that you have chosen to exclude advocates and experts on successful
source reduction and recycling initiatives.”
Rick Hind, Executive Director of Greenpeace and one of the co-signers
of the letter said, “KAB continues to put the blame for waste
generation and the responsibility for waste management on the public
sector, when the real polluters are the industries that manufacture,
sell, bury and burn the waste.”
At least one local KAB organization broke ties with Keep America
Beautiful as a result of the videoconference. The board of directors
of Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment (ACE) voted to disaffiliate
with KAB after ACE director Steve Coffee attended KAB’s Recycling
Realities Meeting in April 1993. Coffee was dismayed to find no
environmental groups on the panel and turned off by what he believed
was a deliberate effort on the part of KAB to avoid questions on
deposit legislation.
When Powers was asked why no environmental groups were members of
KAB, Powers said he had “no idea.” “Our members are
a good cross-section of the Fortune 500 corporations. They are working
on enlightened self-interest. We are helping to educate 495 American
communities on what the options are. I don’t go hat in hand
seeking out environmental groups.”
Eighteen months after the videoconference KAB funded a report titled
“The Role of Recycling in Integrated Solid Waste Management
to the Year 2000”. The $400,000 report concluded, among other
things, that “recycling and composting as currently practiced
have limits that will be reached in this decade.” The study
drew fire from recycling advocates and environmentalists who felt
that it painted recycling in a negative light, focusing on the limits
of curbside recycling and advocating alternative waste management
technologies such as landfilling and incineration.
At KAB’s annual meeting in December 1994, Mark Lichtenstein,
President of the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) told KAB meeting
attendees, “After reading the study and talking with many respected
leaders in our industry, I find myself asking what exactly is the
agenda of the KAB national office? I have to ask. . . can the NRC
count on the KAB national to help in our mutual war on waste?”
In an article in Biocycle, Former President of NRC and Manager
of Market Development for Weyerhaeuser Recycling, Pete Grogan, wrote,
“I find myself questioning the agenda behind the study. . .
The report reminds us that it is ‘cheaper’ to send solid
waste to the landfill. Well, I can easily argue that tossing solid
waste in the river is even cheaper.”
Earlier this year, Keep Washington Beautiful (KWB) sponsored a cosmetic
cleanup in Anacostia, a densely populated community in Washington,
DC. Volunteers biked and cleaned up trash at four predetermined
sites. The sites included two parks, an area along the Anacostia
River and a mini dump that had grown up beside a short stretch of
railroad track. During the four-hour cleanup, volunteers working
with members of the newly formed Keep Washington Beautiful -- a
KAB clone -- culled tires, miscellaneous litter and lots of beverage
containers from the four sites. Beverage containers accounted for
fifty per cent of the collected materials.
Keep Washington Beautiful is one of the newest big-city KAB affiliates.
Like most other KAB affiliates, KWB grew out of industry opposition
to a proposed bottle bill referendum.
In March 2000 Keep America Beautiful launched its second annual
Great American Clean-Up sponsored by corporations including Pepsi-Cola
and McDonalds. From mid-March to mid-May two million volunteers
in 35 states participated in cleanup programs such as litter disposal,
recycling, park cleanup, renewal, painting and graffiti removal.
In KAB’s latest, expensive advertising campaign the mascot
once again is the famous American Indian. The new ad features a
tearless Iron Eyes Cody. KAB has disposed of the tear, but not the
litter and waste that first brought Iron Eyes Cody to tears.
