Free Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash by Edward Humes Page A

paved the road to the good life—began to fade, surpassed by the notion that the highest expression and measurement of the American Dream lay in material wealth itself, the acquisition of stuff. This was the moment when the perceived power to move nations and economies shifted from the ideal of the American citizen to the reality of the American consumer. The phrase “vote with your wallet” entered the public consciousness in this era, elevating the act of spending money from unfortunate necessity to civic virtue.
    This change did not happen in secret, unnoticed and unremarked upon. On the contrary, visionaries at the time saw clearly what was about to unfold and called it out—or, more often, celebrated it. The quote that best sums up the economic ethos of the day comes from J. Gordon Lippincott, who pioneered the modern fields of product design and corporate branding. An engineer by training, his marketing and design company’s creations included the iconic Campbell’s Soup label, Chrysler’s “Pentastar” emblem, Betty Crocker’s trademark spoon and the distinctive, stylized “G” of the General Mills cereal logo. Lippincott made this telling observation in 1947:
Our willingness to part with something before it is completely worn out is a phenomenon noticeable in no other society in history … It is soundly based on our economy of abundance. It must be further nurtured even though it runs contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of humanity, the law of thrift.
    Lippincott’s assertions would have sparked doubts about his sanity had they been uttered in Colonel Waring’s day at the turn of the last century, when waste was public enemy number one, or in 1932, as the Great Depression crushed working Americans and the amount of trash generated by families reached record lows because every scrap of wood, paper and food was precious, and every tool and product had to be used, reused and repaired many times before anyone would consider consigning it to the trash. But Lippincott’s era came in the very different boom times that followed victory in World War II, with America the last great power left standing and whole. His words became a marketer’s battle cry signaling a break with the past. He plainly acknowledged that the disposable, thriftless lifestyle he championed ran counter to the most basic human instincts and recent world history, yet he urged its embrace as part of the postwar belief that America—its resources, its wealth, its potential—had reached a state that had no real limits. What does waste matter in the America of Lippincott’s imagination, with its infinite “economy of abundance”? The more we waste, in his view, the more stuff his clients could sell, the more consumers would buy, and the more prosperous America would become. Failure to waste was the enemy. If only Americans would waste more, they would boost production, enrich businesses and create more jobs—that was Lippincott’s vision, and it was embraced by most of the nation. The only way to defeat such an economy, he argued, was for consumers to lose their desire to consume in ever greater quantities.
    His life’s work, like that of the marketing and design industries he helped create and lead, was dedicated to preventing that from happening, to erase thrift as a quintessential American virtue, and replace it with conspicuous consumption powered by a kind of magical thinking, in which the well would never go dry, the bubble would never burst, oil and all forms of energy would grow cheaper and more plentiful with time, and the landfill would never fill up.
    Lippincott is a fascinating historical figure, erudite, brilliant, seemingly easygoing. But there was nothing easygoing about his approach to reinventing the American consumer. With a team of 130 psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and industrial designers backing him up, he mastered the art of making a product or a company or a concept appear to be something it