How the packaging industry convinced you plastic pollution is your fault

When you hear “plastic pollution,” or “litterbug,” where does your mind go? Someone leaving a cup on the beach? A kid throwing junk out of a bus window? That time your bag of chips blew away and you did an awkward stop-start chase after it until you nearly got hit by a car?

If so, a decades-long, industry-funded public relations campaign has worked exactly as intended on you. That’s not an insult. It worked on almost everyone, and it’s still working.

The idea that plastic pollution is mainly a consumer behavior problem, solved by individual responsibility, better recycling habits and keeping “our nation” beautiful, was promoted and paid for by the companies that make and sell single-use packaging. Here’s how.

The origin: 1953

In 1953, Vermont’s legislature banned disposable glass bottles. Dairy farmers were fed up with bottles thrown from cars shattering in fields where their cows grazed. The packaging industry saw that one small law as a serious threat, and that same year it organized.

The result was Keep America Beautiful (KAB), founded in 1953 by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, later joined by Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Company. Journalist Heather Rogers, author of Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, describes the strategy this way in an NPR interview:

“The problem wasn’t the garbage itself; the problem was what individuals did with it. It’s not garbage; it’s litter, and it’s litter because you’re putting it where it shouldn’t be.”

The point, she says, was to shift everyone’s focus away from where the cans and bottles were coming from in the first place. It worked. Vermont’s law was allowed to expire a few years later.

We’ve seen this movie before. It plays after many corporate-caused crises: individualize the blame. Plastic pollution becomes your litter problem. Climate change becomes your carbon footprint. Don’t litter! Lower your footprint! Make better choices!

The question shifts from “who designed, marketed, profited from and normalized this system?” to “why didn’t you, the individual, behave better?”

Was this our decision?

The Crying Indian (1971)

You’ve probably seen the ad, or a parody of it. A Native American man paddles a canoe through increasingly polluted water, past smoking factories, pulls up on shore, and a passerby tosses a bag of fast-food trash out of a car window. A single tear rolls down his cheek. The narrator: “People start pollution. People can stop it.”

KAB debuted the ad in 1971. At the time, environmentalists were pushing “bottle bills,” laws that would have required soft drink and beer makers to go back to selling in returnable containers. KAB, funded by beverage and packaging companies, lined up against them, and major environmental groups, including the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, quit its advisory council over the fight. The ad’s message, historian Finis Dunaway argues, deflected responsibility away from corporations and onto viewers.

A footnote that tells you everything: the actor, Iron Eyes Cody, wasn’t Native American. He was an Italian American born Espera De Corti who, across roughly 100 Westerns and his life off screen, presented himself as Indigenous. The manipulation ran several layers deep.

The recycling myth

By the late 1980s, the public was worried about overflowing landfills and plastic that never goes away. The industry’s answer was recycling.

A 2020 investigation by NPR and PBS Frontline found that the oil and plastics industry had doubts about plastic recycling from the start. “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. Starting in 1989, the industry lobbied almost 40 states to require the chasing-arrows symbol on plastic, even when there was no economic way to recycle it. Larry Thomas, a former president of the industry’s main trade group, told NPR: “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.”

The economics haven’t changed much. A 2020 Greenpeace survey of US recycling facilities found that only #1 (PET) and #2 (HDPE) bottles and jugs are accepted widely enough to meet the Federal Trade Commission’s threshold for labeling something recyclable. And the US recycled an estimated 5 to 6% of its plastic waste in 2021, according to The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics. The EPA’s last official figure was 8.7%, for 2018.

The arrows on your yogurt tub are, in most cases, a marketing device.

The current offenders

Since 2018, the Break Free From Plastic coalition has run global brand audits. Volunteers collect plastic litter and count the brands on it. In the most recent global results we could find, for 2023, Coca-Cola was the top polluter for the sixth year in a row, followed by Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, Mondelēz, Mars, Procter & Gamble, Danone, Altria and British American Tobacco.

A peer-reviewed analysis of five years of that audit data (2018–2022, 84 countries) found that Coca-Cola’s brands accounted for 11% of all branded items, PepsiCo 5% and Nestlé 3%. It also found a close relationship between how much plastic a company produces and how much of its branded plastic shows up as pollution, with food and beverage companies disproportionately large polluters.

Coca-Cola

The world’s top branded plastic polluter in every global Break Free From Plastic audit from 2018 to 2023. In 2019, the company disclosed that it used about 3 million tonnes of plastic packaging a year, based on 2017 figures. It had promised to use 50% recycled material in its packaging by 2030. In its 2023 environmental update, it admitted it was “currently behind plan” on that goal; recycled PET made up 17% of the PET it used in 2023. In December 2024, it replaced the goal with 35–40% recycled material by 2035 and dropped its reuse target. According to Waste Dive, citing the company’s reporting to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, just 1.2% of its plastic packaging was reusable in 2023.

Coca-Cola is also still a KAB partner: in 2024 it agreed to fund cleanup and recycling grants for KAB affiliates in 10 states.

PepsiCo

Number two in the peer-reviewed analysis, at 5% of branded items. In the 2023 audit, PepsiCo items outnumbered Coca-Cola’s for the first time. It ranked fourth only because its waste turned up in fewer countries.

Nestlé

Second in the 2023 audit. Nestlé agreed in 2021 to sell its North American water brands, including Poland Spring and Pure Life, to private equity firms for $4.3 billion. Those brands now belong to Primo Brands. Nestlé kept its premium waters, Perrier, S.Pellegrino and Acqua Panna. In 2018 it pledged to make 100% of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025. By the end of 2025, it reported having designed 87.5% of its plastic packaging for recycling, short of its own target of over 95%, and cutting virgin plastic by 28% against a one-third goal.

The pattern across all of them: voluntary pledges that outrun actual progress, and targets quietly revised when the deadline gets close.

What actually works

Individual action alone can’t fix this, because most of the plastic was never your decision. The Plastic Waste Makers Index from the Minderoo Foundation traced the world’s single-use plastic waste back to the companies that make the raw polymer. It found that just 20 polymer producers, led by ExxonMobil, Sinopec and Dow, accounted for an estimated 55% of it in 2019. These aren’t the brands on the bottles. They’re the petrochemical companies that make the plastic the brands buy.

That’s why the fix is policy. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws make producers pay for what happens to their packaging after you’re done with it. As of early 2026, seven US states had packaging EPR laws: Maine, Oregon, Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland and Washington.

This is where your vote and your voice matter more than your recycling bin. Call your state representative. Support the groups pushing EPR and bottle bills in your state. And in the meantime, buy less of what these companies sell.

Keep America Beautiful is still around, still running litter cleanups, and still taking Coca-Cola’s money. The strategy hasn’t changed because it hasn’t needed to.

Now you know. What you do with that is up to you.