Picking-Up What We Inherit
The Roadside
We have only a few hundred feet of frontage along the two-lane road that runs past Fellowfield. There is no sidewalk, just the edge of the pavement and a ditch, and periodically one of our staff has to walk that little stretch with a trash bag and pick up what has accumulated.
There are paper cups and food wrappers, plastic water bottles, Monster drink cans, cigarette packs, and scraps of plastic. Some things might have fallen from a truck or blown out of a trash bin, but I suspect the Starbucks frappuccino glass bottle several feet from the road probably did not get there on its own. Someone finished with it, opened a car window, and threw it out.
Wind catches the lighter things and pushes them into the grass. Plastic bags snag on stems and branches. Rain moves smaller pieces into the ditch. When we miss picking up something and hit it with the mower, one piece of trash becomes many. In winter, it disappears under the snow but always turns up again in spring.
And what gets thrown beside the road does not necessarily stay beside the road. Wildlife discovers it. In heavy rains, the debris is carried downstream. Each time I collect the litter, I am shocked by how quickly the bag fills. I look at it and feel some combination of disbelief and outrage.
For years, I visited schools around Washtenaw County to teach about waste and water quality and what happens when trash reaches streams and lakes. I have spent a lot of time helping children trace connections that are easy to miss when we see only the place immediately in front of us. I am able to explain where that bottle might go when it rains, what happens to different materials over time, and why keeping trash out of the environment matters. I’ve learned those things well enough to teach them to other people.
Yet I don’t remember learning “do not litter”.
You Don’t Litter
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and by the time I was old enough to think much about it, littering already belonged to a category of things you simply weren’t supposed to do. Like murdering someone or leaving the house without your pants.
You didn’t drop your candy wrapper on the ground. You didn’t throw a bottle out the car window. If you saw someone do it, you knew they were doing something wrong.
That certainty came before I knew anything about watersheds or how long different materials persist in the environment. I didn’t need to know where a cigarette butt went after a storm. Or the myriad of ways our solid waste compromises human health. The rule I learned was much simpler. Don’t litter.
There were signs along roads and lessons at school. There were cleanup days and public-service announcements. Woodsy Owl told us to “Give a Hoot! Don’t Pollute.” Adults used the word “litterbug,” which managed to make littering sound not only wrong but slightly disgraceful.
I don’t remember giving any of this much thought. I don’t remember anyone making a particularly persuasive argument about litter or a moment when I decided they were right. The messages were simply there, coming from enough directions and with enough consistency that there wasn’t anything to question.
By adulthood, I had plenty of additional reasons not to litter. I understood much more about waste and water and wildlife, but I still didn’t need any of those reasons to stop me from throwing a cup out a car window. I was already someone who didn’t do that sort of thing.
Standing along the road at Fellowfield with a trash bag, I’m forced to realize that there are many people who do do this sort of thing.
How Litter Became a Problem
The word litterbug is older than I am.
It became part of the American vocabulary during the middle of the twentieth century, at roughly the same time when common materials were undergoing a big transition in America. After World War II, disposable packaging became an increasingly common part of everyday life. Beverages that had often been sold in refillable bottles were increasingly available in cans and bottles designed for single use. Food came with more packaging. Products were designed to make eating and drinking on the go and away from home easier, generating containers that had to go somewhere when people were finished with them. A growing number ended up along roads, in parks, and on city streets.
Starting in 1953, the Keep America Beautiful anti-litter campaigns began and expanded around the country over the following decades. Governments posted signs and adopted fines. Civic organizations organized cleanups. Schools taught children about litter. Public-service campaigns brought the message into homes.
Some of the most enduring messages were aimed directly at children. In 1971, the U.S. Forest Service introduced Woodsy Owl, whose green hat, enormous eyes and “Give a Hoot! Don’t Pollute” message appeared on television, posters, activity sheets and educational materials.
That same year, another campaign produced one of the most recognizable public-service advertisements of the era. A man presented as Native American paddles through increasingly polluted surroundings and eventually stands beside a highway as someone throws garbage from a passing car. The camera ends on a tear running down his cheek.
The man in the advertisement, Iron Eyes Cody, had built a career portraying indigenous characters and publicly claimed Native ancestry. He was actually the son of Sicilian immigrants. The advertisement drew much of its emotional force from a romanticized image of indigenous people as representatives of an unspoiled natural world, even as the person chosen to embody that image was not.
The ad ran repeatedly and remained in circulation for years. Its closing line was: “People start pollution. People can stop it.”
I was very young when the advertisement first aired, and I don’t know whether I ever saw the original version on television. I do remember the world of messages around it.
When the Trash Was Mostly Bottles and Cans
The litter along Michigan roads looked somewhat different when I was a child. In the 1970s, throwaway bottles and cans were estimated to make up about 80 percent of the state’s roadside litter.
These containers were also relatively new. Before the 1950s, most beverage containers in the United States were returnable. Bottlers collected empty bottles, washed them and filled them again. As single-use bottles and cans became cheaper to manufacture, the reusable system began to disappear. The new containers saved beverage companies the expense of having to collect, sort, transport and wash their packages for another use. Consumers were even willing to pay a little more for the convenience of a container they could just throw away.
Michigan legislators had begun introducing bills to ban throwaway containers or require deposits in the 1960’s. None got very far. Bottling-industry representatives opposed the proposals.
By the early 1970s, the issue had become visible in Ann Arbor. The first Earth Day teach-in at the University of Michigan in 1970 helped launch the Ecology Center, where I would eventually spend ten years working. At the teach-in, University students carried 10,000 nonreturnable cans to the local Coca-Cola bottling company and dumped them outside.
The Ecology Center opened a recycling station that same year and soon began working on something more ambitious. The Recycling Coordinator, Pat Taylor, had been studying beverage containers and recruited two University of Michigan law students to help draft an Ann Arbor ordinance modeled on Oregon’s newly adopted bottle law. The proposal did not simply ask people to put their bottles in a recycling bin. It would change which bottles could be sold in the city and create a deposit system that gave people a reason to bring them back.
Local merchants and bottling-industry representatives objected. Stores would have to accept empty bottles, pay employees to sort and inspect them, and arrange to get them back to manufacturers. They argued, the ordinance would raise prices and hurt businesses - some beverages could even disappear from store shelves.
In response, the Ecology Center went to grocery stores and compared the prices of twenty-three beverage brands sold in returnable and non-returnable containers and found returnable bottles were 35% cheaper on average.
Mayor Robert Harris, who had initially opposed the ordinance, did research as well, by contacting Oregon officials to find out what had happened there after the nation’s first bottle law went into effect. Oregon reported that beer sales had increased, prices had fallen or remained stable, and roadside litter had dropped substantially. So, the Ann Arbor City Council approved the ordinance 8 to 3.
But the new ordinance never took effect. Two days before its scheduled implementation, a group of Ann Arbor merchants filed a class-action lawsuit against the city. A circuit court overturned the ordinance, citing a conflict with the state’s authority over liquor packaging and sales. The judge also questioned whether a local ordinance could work when people could simply buy disposable bottles outside the city.
If Ann Arbor wanted a bottle law, Ann Arbor needed to think bigger.
Taking the Bottles to Lansing
The Ecology Center and other environmental organizations shifted their attention to the state legislature, and in 1975, State Representative Lynn Jondahl introduced a bill requiring a minimum ten-cent deposit on beer and soft-drink containers. The bill would also prohibit the detachable pull-tabs then used to open many cans, small pieces of metal that had themselves become common litter.
The bill went to the House Consumers Committee, and then, rather than sending it to the House floor for a vote, the committee sent it to Appropriations, where supporters expected it to die.
Tom Washington, who headed the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, proposed another route. Michigan citizens could put a law on the ballot themselves if they collected enough signatures, but they would need to collect 212,000 signatures by June.
No conservation measure in Michigan had ever reached the ballot that way.
Environmental organizations across the state began circulating petitions. In Ann Arbor, the Ecology Center helped organize local and statewide groups, distributed information through its newsletter and library, and invited people to come to its headquarters to pick up blank petitions and collect signatures themselves. By June 1, they had more than 400,000 signatures. Proposal A would go before Michigan voters in November 1976.
Opponents included bottlers, retailers and labor groups. They warned that a mandatory deposit would impose new costs on stores, threaten jobs and drive businesses out of Michigan. The opposition campaign spent over $1.2 million.
Bottle-bill supporters did not have comparable money. They had petitions, pamphlets, rallies, local organizations, and piles of bottles. On October 11, volunteers went to the Huron River and began collecting throwaway beverage containers along a ten-mile stretch. They came back with 37,000 bottles and cans.
On November 2, 1976, according to state records, 2,160,398 Michigan voters voted for Proposal A. Another 1,227,254 voted against it. Statewide, the proposal received 64 percent of the vote. In Washtenaw County, it received 76 percent.
Ten Cents
Michigan’s bottle law took effect in December 1978. Four years after implementation, research found that litter had declined by about 40 percent and estimated that the system was saving 15,000 tons of aluminum and 65,000 tons of glass each year.
Michigan’s deposit also created something I grew up taking for granted. An empty pop can lying beside a road was not waste, it was money. Children collected them for fundraisers. For many years, Michigan maintained redemption rates above 90 percent.
The bottle law did not eliminate roadside litter. It did not eliminate disposable beverage containers either, but it did change what happened some of those containers when empty.
Personal Responsibility
The companies fighting Michigan’s bottle bill in the 1970’s were not new to the litter problem. More than twenty years earlier, these same companies had helped establish the anti-litter campaign I grew up with. Keep America Beautiful was founded by organizations such as the American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, and later Coca-Cola and Pepsi became prominent participants.
These companies developed the anti-littering message at the same time they were shifting the system toward disposable containers. For the industry, this shift made economic sense. A refillable bottle required a trip back. Someone had to collect it, sort it, transport it, wash it and put it into circulation again. A one-way package allowed the beverage and its container to travel in a single direction and out of their hands. Once made and sold the container was no longer the industry’s responsibility.
Keep America Beautiful’s campaigns reinforced that idea by concentrating heavily on what the person who bought the package did with it. Don’t be a litterbug. Put trash where it belongs. Keep America beautiful. The consumer was the one responsible for pollution and the one capable of making the choice to stop it. And the effort seems to have been effective, at least in one respect: in a recent national survey conducted for Keep America Beautiful, nearly nine out of ten people said that reducing litter is a matter of personal responsibility.
That is a striking level of agreement for almost anything.
Beyond the Individual
The environmental groups in Ann Arbor were describing the problem of litter and its solutions differently. In a 1972 Ecology Center newsletter, writers objected to what they called the hidden price of disposable convenience. Manufacturers benefited from one-way packaging, they argued, while taxpayers paid to remove discarded containers from roadsides and municipalities paid to collect and dispose of them.
They were not claiming that the person holding the empty bottle wasn’t responsible for what they did with it. But the activists were challenging whether the consumer deserved all the responsibility. By asking questions about how the bottle came to be in the first place, the environmental movement was calling attention to the larger system around the bottle, and naming other members of society who had significant influence on and responsibility for the growing ecosystem of disposable containers.
Michigan’s deposit legally changed the system to assign some of that broader responsibility by bringing retailers and manufacturers back into the life of a bottle after its sale.
Forty Years Later
In 2016, Washtenaw County turned its attention to another disposable object. This time it was the shopping bag.
The county adopted an ordinance that would have required retailers to charge ten cents for disposable plastic and paper checkout bags beginning the following year. Ten cents would not prohibit people from taking a disposable bag, but it would change a thoughtless act into one that required a decision. Without the fee, a cashier can start loading your purchases in a plastic bag (or two bags or ten). The customer may not even be a part of the decision. With the fee, the bag becomes a choice - something you have to notice and decide. Do I want a bag enough to pay 10 cents for it? Wait, how many bags do I really need here?
But before the local ordinance could take effect, the Michigan Legislature passed Senate Bill 853. The new law prohibited Michigan counties, cities, villages and townships from regulating, restricting or imposing a fee on what it called an “auxiliary container.” The definition included bags, cups, bottles and other packaging, whether reusable or single-use. The House passed the bill 62 to 46. Governor Rick Snyder signed it in December 2016, and it took immediate effect.
So Washtenaw County’s ten-cent bag fee never began. For shoppers, that meant nothing changed. No one had to decide whether a disposable bag was worth paying for. The familiar transaction could continue exactly as it had before. The state had prevented the county from creating the conditions in which that particular choice would become more visible.
Forty years earlier, Michigan residents had gathered more than 400,000 signatures to put a ten-cent deposit on disposable beverage containers before voters. In 2016, Washtenaw County residents did not get a comparable opportunity to decide whether ten cents should be attached to another disposable object. State law decided that local communities could not even ask the question.
Back at the Roadside
These days the trash I pick up along the road in front of Fellowfield looks different from the 37,000 bottles and cans volunteers pulled from ten miles of the Huron River.
It doesn't pile up quickly, but there are still plenty of bottles and cans. Probably because Michigan’s ten-cent deposit only applies to carbonated soft drinks, beer and certain other beverages covered by the law, which are now a fraction of the beverages that people can purchase. Today we have bottled waters, teas, juices, sports drinks, iced coffee, and other noncarbonated beverages sold in no-deposit containers that look indistinguishable from ones worth ten cents.
Then there is everything that isn’t a bottle or can. On our stretch of road, we pick up fast-food wrappers, plastic bags, takeout containers, disposable cups and lids, straws, snack packages, cigarette butts, pieces of Styrofoam and plastic whose original purpose isn’t always identifiable. More recently there are disposable vapes, which combine plastic, electronics and a lithium battery in a product designed to be discarded when it is finished.
Some of these objects didn’t exist when Michigan voters passed the bottle bill. Others existed in much smaller numbers. There are no return systems for most items, so responsibility for what happens to them falls on the person who bought them and on the waste systems available where that person happens to be.
Many people do put their empty cup with a straw in a trash can. Some put their bottles or cans in recycling ( (if one is lucky enough to live someplace with recycling). They carry the chip bag home rather than throwing it out the car window. At home, someone empties the bin. A truck takes the contents away to a landfill. When the waste system works as expected, I never see any of it.
What I pick-up along the road is the portion that did not disappear from view.
What We Learn to See
By the time I was old enough to buy my own pop, an empty can was worth ten cents. I inherited the result without having to know about the people who had researched, debated, organized and voted to make it happen. A system that had been intensely contested only a few years earlier had already become part of the ordinary world I learned to navigate.
I inherited something else from that period too: you don’t litter.
That lesson worked remarkably well on me. I absorbed it so completely that I cannot remember learning it. I learned to see the person throwing the bottle. I did not learn to see all the decisions that put a disposable bottle in that person’s hand. And that was no accident. It was the result of coordinated effort across an industry working to shift cost and responsibility off itself.
John Dewey wrote more than a century ago about the influence of “the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection.” He was not arguing that we should question every familiar practice. Much of what we inherit has to become habitual; a society could hardly function if every generation had to investigate everything it inherited before acting.
But democracy asks something more of us than knowing how to function within the world we have. It asks us to participate in decisions about what that world becomes.
That requires some ability to recognize what we have learned to take for granted.
Sometimes history helps us see. Learning that the ten-cent deposit was once a contested proposal makes something I experienced as ordinary visible as a choice people made and had to work for.
Sometimes another person helps us see. I still remember my surprise when two students in a high school environmental science class I was teaching chose “stopping littering from their cars” as the environmental behavior they would change for a month. Something I had experienced as an obvious rule was apparently not equally obvious to them.
Encounters with different living beings and kinds of knowledge can do the same thing. They can show us that our own experience does not contain everything there is to know.
In this way, differences over time or in perspective make us aware what we see is incomplete. That creates room for questions. And finding answers can do more than reveal how the system works. The people working on the bottle bill learned their way through the existing structures of participation. When Ann Arbor lacked the authority to require deposits, they went to the state. When the bill stalled in the legislature, they learned that Michigan citizens could put the question directly before voters. Understanding more about where decisions were made gave them more ways to participate and influence the existing systems.
Those structures for decision-making can change too. Authority can be moved, expanded, restricted or taken away. Washtenaw County had the authority to create a ten-cent fee on disposable checkout bags. Then the state passed a law preventing local governments from imposing fees on bags. The county lost the authority to make that decision.
At Fellowfield, we try to create opportunities for people to look more closely at what they might otherwise take for granted. The purpose is not simply to uncover particular hidden systems and explain them. It is to give people practice noticing when there may be more to understand, becoming curious about what they cannot yet see, and learning how to investigate. History, ecology, cultural stories, art, and other people can bring different parts of a situation into view.
Picking up trash along the road is an ordinary maintenance job. But once I began asking why so much litter was there, the questions led well beyond the ditch: to the materials themselves, the companies that made them, the messages I grew up with, laws that changed, and our legal system itself.
The world we inherit is full of decisions that no longer look like decisions. Some produced things we may want to protect. Others left problems we are still living with. Many are so embedded in ordinary life that we rarely think of them as choices at all. Seeing the choices does not tell us what to keep or what to change. It helps us see the world is not as fixed as it seems, from the landscapes we live in to the rules and institutions that shape our lives. Seeing the choices gives us the chance to ask what we value and the space to consider what we need.
And that, too, is part of what we inherit in a democratic society: not simply a world shaped by other people’s choices, but responsibility for deciding what we will do with it.
References
Ecology Center. (n.d.). The frontier of recycling. Ecology Center. https://www.ecocenter.org/ecology-center-50/frontier-recycling
Environmental Justice HistoryLab, University of Michigan Department of History. (n.d.). Ann Arbor non-returnable beverage container ordinance of 1973. Ecology Center History.
https://ecologycenter.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/ecohistory/page/ann-arbor-non-returnable-beverage-container-ordinance-of-1973
Environmental Justice HistoryLab, University of Michigan Department of History. (n.d.). Michigan bottle bill of 1976. Ecology Center History. https://ecologycenter.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/ecohistory/page/michigan-bottle-bill-of-1976
Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. (n.d.). FAQ: Michigan’s bottle deposit law. State of Michigan. https://www.michigan.gov/egle/faqs/recycling/bottle-deposit-law
Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. (n.d.). FAQ: General recycling information. State of Michigan. https://www.michigan.gov/egle/faqs/recycling/general-recycling-information
Michigan Legislature. (1976). Beverage Containers, Initiated Law 1 of 1976, MCL 445.571–445.576. https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/mcl/pdf/mcl-Initiated-Law-1-of-1976.pdf
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