Spring 2005
"Litterbug World"
Ariane Conrad Hyde
Heather Rogers' film, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, explores the success of the free market system by looking at our waste. In the span of 20 minutes, the film examines the realities of planned obsolescence and waste-by-design in our market economy, asking deep questions from a fresh perspective. In the film, Rogers contends that recycling is far from an actual solution, and is at best a band-aid approach—a much harder look, she argues, needs to be taken at our addiction to waste. She recently spoke to us about her film, and her forthcoming book of the same name (to be published October 6, 2025 by The New Press).
Ariane Conrad Hyde: What inspired you to make Gone Tomorrow?
Heather Rogers: Two things: I wanted to know what happened to my garbage, because it seemed like it disappeared, but I knew it didn't and I wanted to find out where it went. I also realized that garbage is a substance through which the market's relation to labor and nature is made apparent. Since garbage is something everyone makes, everyone can relate to it. It reveals the connections between daily life and larger environmental crises.
In your film, you document several major shifts in the attitude towards garbage in the U.S. Can you talk a little bit more about the most significant shifts?
It's not common knowledge anymore, but in the 19th century there was a huge amount of re-use. People often couldn't afford to buy manufactured goods because they were so expensive, so they had to mend and reuse.
The first big shift came with the Industrial Revolution, which suddenly made commodities much cheaper. The spatial component of the Industrial Revolution was that the way people lived was transformed; people were leaving the countryside and concentrating in cities, to work in factories. And in cities they didn't have places to store their wastes like they did in the countryside, so it wasn't as easy to save fat to make candles and soap, for example, or scraps of materials to re-use and repair. That, in conjunction with commodities becoming cheaper, meant that people bought more of the things they needed instead of making these items themselves.
The next big transformation came with World War II. During that time, there was a massive streamlining and perfecting of the manufacturing process, bringing about mass production and consumption. The byproduct of all this was a massive surge in waste. One of the most influential innovations of the postwar period was the disposable commodity. Some disposable commodities like paper towels and cups, and single use cans and bottles were invented in the early years of the 20th century, but didn’t find their way into major markets until after WWII.
During the war there was real cooperation between labor and capital—enforced by the government. Also businesses had to cooperate with each other in unprecedented ways; they had to share information and they had to give in to the overarching demand to churn out the goods for the U.S. military. When manufacturers emerged from the war, they were so highly productive that, suddenly, making commodities that were meant to be thrown away made sense. It was economical, it was feasible, and there weren't controls on natural resources like there were during the war. So there was this boom in disposables—packaging was a huge part of it—and the market share of disposables has only grown since then. Also, obsolescence was a key development after World War II. It meant that durable goods began to be made to wear out faster than before.
And that was a conscious decision on the part of industry?
Yes. Built-in obsolescence wasn't a new idea either, but there was this confluence of resources and comprehension of marketing and productive power that came together after World War II that made it all possible. Incomes were also high, and people had buying power they didn't have before the war.
And shortly thereafter, as you point out in the film, there's the establishment of one of the first industrial front groups, Keep America Beautiful.
Keep America Beautiful was established in 1953, it was the first of the green-washing corporate fronts. It was founded a few months after the state of Vermont passed a law banning disposable beverage containers. Within months the beverage container industry created Keep America Beautiful (KAB).
KAB formed itself into a public relations-savvy beautification group. They identified a new political category of garbage called "litter," a term which had existed before, but not with the same meaning that KAB imbued it with. They connected with the federal and regional governments through politicians, local businesses, and the education system to create this civic organization that on the surface was simply opposed to throwing litter on the side of the road. Essentially, they said the problem isn't all of this garbage that's suddenly proliferating everywhere; the problem is that individuals don't understand what to do with it! To quote a film called Heritage of Splendor, which KAB made in 1963 (and which Ronald Reagan narrated): "Trash only becomes trash after it’s been thoughtlessly discarded."
KAB’s spin was (and remains) that the problem isn't what industry's doing—the extraction of natural resources at an ever-increasing rate or the destruction of the planet on a scale that had never happened before—no, the real problem is all this garbage that individuals keep carelessly throwing around. They've stuck to that message and it's been very effective for them, because it displaces responsibility from the people who make garbage—the producers of disposable goods and commodities designed to wear out faster than they need to. It shifts the responsibility away from production, and onto the individual consumer.
Can you talk about packaging, this product that is not quite a commodity?
The thing about packaging that is so interesting is that it is a commodity, but it's barely perceptible as a commodity. People accept that it's designed to be immediately thrown away. It again speaks volumes about how successful manufacturers have been in training us to accept disposability.
The development of packaging was about easing distribution for producers, because before that, everything was sold in bulk containers. The transformation of production and distribution as well as retail sales—going from mom and pop stores to the chain supermarkets we have today—illustrates the central role packaging played. I think producers were very conscious of how helpful packaging could be in centralizing their businesses. In consolidating, they got to downsize and streamline to create economies of scale that they couldn't achieve before.
The changes wrought by the efficiencies packaging offered can be seen quite clearly in the beverage container industry with the switch from refillable to disposable cans and bottles. The beer and soda industries consolidated massively in the post-WWII period, while the number of drink makers shrank dramatically. The beverage industry no longer needed regional bottling plants, where trucks could only go so far to deliver the products, because they had to return the empties to the bottling plant. With throwaways, they could just drive straight through, one way, and they didn't have to take anything back. They could go to the next central hub, pick up more stuff, and keep driving.
I'm curious about the links between the issue of waste and racial justice.
Environmental racism has deep roots in this society. In the 19th century, the poorest of the poor were forced to work in, eat from, and live in garbage. In many ways that's still true today, and it reveals the realities of a fundamentally unequal system that produces so much wealth, poverty and environmental destruction. Inevitably, the people who have to live in the most toxic conditions are the poorest people.
New York City, where I live, has the highest concentration of transfer stations (where garbage gets taken after it gets collected and before it goes to the recycling center, the landfill or the incinerator) in the South Bronx, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York. They have some of the highest asthma rates in the country, and they deal with real environmental fallout on a daily basis. They deal with the diesel exhaust; they deal with the rats and the roaches that are everywhere because there's so much garbage being processed there. They deal with thousands of garbage trucks rolling down streets where kids play. And they deal with it in a vastly disproportionate amount than the people who live on, say, the Upper East Side. And New York City—the country's largest garbage producer, and one of the wealthiest cities in the country—ships its waste to poor, rural areas in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. The poorest regions in the U.S. get saddled with the trash.
Internationally, you've got loads of toxic waste getting shipped overseas to countries like the Philippines, India and China. The EPA did a study showing that it's 10 times cheaper to "recycle" a computer in China than in California. There's an economic imperative to ship waste to countries where labor is cheaper. What that means is those people have to live with the toxicity of that process. The environmental and labor laws are more lax, and again the poorest people end up with the greatest amount of filth and hazardous conditions, because it serves the interests of the wealthiest in the world.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Yeah. On the policy side, I think the Zero Waste movement offers some good and realistic solutions. They want to get rid of landfills and incinerators. They want to re-design manufacturing so that most materials can be re-used, and so that toxics are removed from the production process as much as possible. This would be enforced through government intervention and regulation, which means reaching back into the realm of production and telling industry that it can't just endlessly extract resources and design commodities to be thrown away.
The Zero Waste movement is very hopeful, and they have a lot of good and realistic solutions. We can't just leave this up to industry, and we can't just leave this up to the market—we need to intervene, because there's a fundamental lack of democracy in the use of our resources. We need to democratize the way that the state intervenes, and the way that our collective natural resources are being used, so that they don't get wasted and destroyed for this and future generations.