This is a series where I take my lectures presented as adjunct professor teaching sustainable design at Ryerson University School of Interior Design in Toronto and distill them down to a sort of Pecha Kucha slideshow of the essentials.

Building up to and during the Second World War, aluminum production capacity in the States was vastly increased to churn out airplanes. Dams were built to generate electricity specifically for making aluminum (which is sometimes known as solid electricity because it takes so much to make it). After the war, there was more aluminum production capacity and electrical power than anyone knew what to do with. There were huge numbers of planes to recycle, the production facilities were idled, the electricity was going unused. How would they use up all that aluminum? Bucky Fuller tried building houses but that didn’t take off. Something had to be done.

The aluminum companies actually held contests to come up with uses, inventing the aluminum folding chair and aluminum siding. But the real score was disposable packaging and foil. According to Carl A. Zimrig in Aluminum Upcycled, the stroke of genius was the disposable aluminum container that became the bottom of TV dinners and frozen food. An Alcoa exec is quoted: “the day was at hand when packages would replace pots and pans in the preparation of meals.” And then, the biggest score of them all, the aluminum beer and pop can, which like the disposable bottle, was not recycled but thrown out the car window.

The National System of interstate and defense highways, as it is properly known, was more a product of the Cold War, built to induce sprawl and spread people around so that the Russians would need a lot more bombs.

But in one way, it had the opposite effect; it made it easy to move goods by truck, and to centralize production of the kinds of things that used to be made locally, like beer and Coke.

But you couldn’t centralize production with returnable bottles; they were too heavy and too expensive to return back to the centralized facility. That’s where the aluminum can, the disposable glass bottle and finally, the PET plastic bottle came into play. Now the aluminum and glass factories could expand business, because what had been a returnable was now a consumable. This made money for everyone; it became an economic engine. In her brilliant article Design for Disposability, Leyla Acaroglu quotes economist Victor Lebow, writing in 1955, in which he explains how consumption IS the economy:

It also used to be that if you wanted to eat, you went to a restaurant or diner, sat down and got served your coffee in a porcelain mug and ate off a china plate. There was not much waste at all, but after the Second World War, lifestyles and expectations were changing, Emelyn Rude writes in Time:

This required disposable packaging, the famous take-out containers of the fifties with the metal handles.

But Rude continues, describing the changes that came with the car:

Now we were all eating out of paper, using foam or paper cups, straws, forks, everything was disposable. But while there may have been waste bins at the McDonalds’ parking lot, there weren’t any on the roads or in the cities; this was all a new phenomenon.

The problem was that people didn’t know what to do; they just threw their garbage out of their car windows or just dropped where they were. There was no culture of throwing things out, because when there were china plates and returnable bottles, there was no waste to speak of. They had to be trained. So the Keep America Beautiful organization, founding members Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola, was formed to teach Americans how to pick up after themselves with campaigns like “Don’t be a litterbug ‘cause every litter bit hurts” in the sixties:

And in the seventies, the famous campaign with the “Crying Indian ad” starring actor " Iron Eyes Cody, who portrayed a Native American man devastated to see the destruction of the earth’s natural beauty caused by the thoughtless pollution and litter of a modern society."

He was, in fact, an Italian named Espera Oscar de Corti, but then the whole campaign was a fake too; as Heather Rogers wrote in her essay, Message in a Bottle,

So now people were mostly picking up their litter and putting it in the garbage. But according to Heather Rogers, this led to an entirely new set of problems: the dumps were all filling up.

Local and State governments brought in bottle bills to put deposits on everything, which would have sent the bottlers and the entire convenience industry back to the dark ages. So they had to invent recycling.

The campaign was a tremendous success; we are trained from our first Playmobil set that recycling is among the most virtuous things that we can do in our lives. Studies have shown that for many people, it is the ONLY “green” thing that they do. And it is an extraordinary scam. We have come to accept that we should carefully separate our waste and store it, then pay serious taxes for men in special trucks to come and take it away and separate it further, and then try and recover the cost by selling the stuff. The trouble is, it isn’t really recycling; it is downcycling.

Every time you do it, the materials are a little weaker, the contents a little bit dirtier. So much of it is designed simply to make us feel good; As I once said about coffee pod recycling, where the pods are shipped across the country and downcycled into plastic benches and compost, calling it " the worst kind of phoney feel-good environmental marketing, designed for the sole purpose of assuaging the guilt about consuming overpriced and unnecessary crap." Or as Ruben Anderson described Tetrapak recycling of wine boxes:

And we cannot forget what much of that recycling actually is: the biggest scam of all, the waste from bottled water. First, they had to convince us to drink this stuff instead of tap, which they did by constantly impugning the quality of tap water (even though 64 percent of bottled water is tap water) and charging us 2000 times the price for the convenience of it being in a bottle. As I noted in my review of Elizabeth Royte’s Bottlemania, this was extremely well done.

And to make us buy more, they convinced us that we had to stay hydrated, drinking eight servings of water per day, preferably each in an individual bottle. Even though this is a total myth.

There is no proof that you need to drink this much water.

He is right. So we have to do both.

As the Ellen Macarthur Foundation points out, if we keep going the way we are going, we really are going to drown in plastic. The industry is aiming to almost quadruple production, the ratio of fish to plastic will be one to one, and the making of plastic will contribute 15 percent of the greenhouse gases. This truly will kill us all. We have to simply stop pretending that we can recycle our way out of this madness; we have to redesign our lives.

Design for Circularity

This old drawing of a zero waste world, the circular economy, is still the best I have seen because most of the newer ones leave off Producer Responsibility, which is one of the most important aspects. We have to think of everything that we make or buy in terms of this circle.

Design for Reusability

Think about beer. In the USA, only three percent of beer is sold in refillable containers; that is so that they can brew almost all of it in one big brewery in Colorado and ship it by truck all over the country. North of the border in Canada, beer is sold in refillable bottles; 88 percent of them get refilled. In Norway, it is about 96 percent. It saves a huge amount of greenhouse gases and significantly reduces waste and litter. There is a cottage industry of Chinese ladies with buggies picking up bottles for their deposits. It would work perfectly well in the USA but of course, the producers don’t want to do it so they don’t. But it is a circular economy, and there is almost zero waste in the beer delivery system. It is Design for Reusability.

Design for Disassembly

Everything we make should be designed for disassembly so that the components can be reused and repurposed. Alex Diener on Core77 explains it wonderfully:

Design for Sufficiency

One that I will add is Design for Sufficiency: How much do we really need? Do we have to manufacture electric self-driving cars, or can the majority of people get around on a simple, efficient bicycle? Do we need big houses or can we live happily in smaller apartments in walkable neighborhoods? Do we have to, as that economist said in 1955, keep consuming more and more all the time? When I started here on TreeHugger, I wrote my personal description:

A dozen years later, I wouldn’t change a word of it. The best way to solve this problem is simply to use less of everything.

A Change

Things are beginning to change. In the UK, panicked over China closing its doors to plastic trash, we learn that they are considering banning plastic straws, a drop in the ocean but a start. Katherine wrote recently about how the entire beverage industry is in crisis mode.

But it is not just plastic, it is everything, and it has to happen now.