yep, bad usability can ruin everything, every good idea
18/06/2013, 20:04
The messed up part?
American beverage companies HAD a very green recycling program back in the 1950s, but they threw it away.
Soda and milk bottles were glass, and you returned them to the store, kind of like we still do at the liquor/beer store. The bottles would be washed and re-used. Very green.
However this naturally mandated running expensive bottle retrieval networks, and running a bottle-washing factory, all of which was a bit expensive, so they switched to disposable, single-use containers.
This generated a ton of extra trash, creating new crisis's of overflowing landfills all on their own, some of it ending up littered all over the streets, making cities look terrible, and some even thrown into farmer's fields, where the cows would eat the plastic bottles (they still smelled like their contents) and die.
So, these litter-generating companies launched the first anti-littering campaign, "Keep America Beautiful"! which pushed all the blame for the litter problem onto the consumer for throwing their garbage on the ground... which is admittedly at least partially accurate... but absolved them completely of any responsibility for CREATING the garbage in the first place.
Their blame-diversion campaign was enshrined in media history with the now famous "Crying Indian" commercial. The "Indian" was actually an Italian man in a costume.
American beverage companies HAD a very green recycling program back in the 1950s, but they threw it away.
Soda and milk bottles were glass, and you returned them to the store, kind of like we still do at the liquor/beer store. The bottles would be washed and re-used. Very green.
However this naturally mandated running expensive bottle retrieval networks, and running a bottle-washing factory, all of which was a bit expensive, so they switched to disposable, single-use containers.
This generated a ton of extra trash, creating new crisis's of overflowing landfills all on their own, some of it ending up littered all over the streets, making cities look terrible, and some even thrown into farmer's fields, where the cows would eat the plastic bottles (they still smelled like their contents) and die.
So, these litter-generating companies launched the first anti-littering campaign, "Keep America Beautiful"! which pushed all the blame for the litter problem onto the consumer for throwing their garbage on the ground... which is admittedly at least partially accurate... but absolved them completely of any responsibility for CREATING the garbage in the first place.
Their blame-diversion campaign was enshrined in media history with the now famous "Crying Indian" commercial. The "Indian" was actually an Italian man in a costume.
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