Dear Outsiders,
I remember the first time I saw a crying “Indian”…
He was paddling a canoe — in full Native American regalia — through what appeared to be a serene-looking river. Things quickly took a dark turn. The canoe approached an industrial wasteland filled with factories, pollution, and tons of garbage. His face became sullen by the time he pulled up to land.
At that point, he crawled out of the canoe and found himself standing by a highway where a motorist proceeded to toss a massive bag of fast food litter out of the window which landed directly on his moccasins.
He turned towards me and shed a single tear…
Of course, I wasn’t actually there to witness it — I saw it on television. I’m talking about the famous “Crying Indian” commercial that was meant to shame people about littering. It is one of the most iconic public service announcements of all time.
But there are a few dark secrets behind this commercial that weren’t known to the public…
Let’s start with the obvious problem of calling this man “The Crying Indian.” These days you could never use that term — clearly Native Americans were never “Indians.” How an esteemed explorer like Christopher Columbus thought he landed in South Asia when he was 8,000 miles from there will have to be chalked up to that early era of discovery.
But the name shouldn’t have stuck around for that long — Columbus knew his mistake pretty quickly, however the moniker has only recently begun to be retired. The Cleveland Indians baseball team just changed its name to the Guardians last year, for instance.
The second issue is the man in the video is actor Iron Eyes Cody, who was perhaps the most famous representative of Native Americans in movies at the time, but was actually a Sicilian named Espera Oscar de Corti.
Not exactly the most native of Americans…
So we already have some issues with this commercial, but that isn’t the most disturbing part of this story.
This was brought to us by the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign, which sounds great. Of course nobody should be tossing trash out of a car at all. The problem was that it was sponsored by companies like Coca-Cola, Dixie Cups, and American Can Company. These corporations decided they needed to fight laws like the Oregon Bottle Bill that existed back then. It called for beverages in glass, plastic, or metal cans to be “returnable for reuse” — in other words, recyclable — which threatened to cut into these large companies’ profits. So they started a propaganda campaign which — while containing good, obvious advice — was only meant to serve their business interests.
If you are old enough to recall, we used to reuse our bottles — think about the milkman.
But we switched over to a disposable culture that began to heavily pollute the environment with plastic. A bottle of water or can of soda is certainly more convenient than having to save and return your glass bottles for reuse.
The “Keep America Beautiful” campaign may be the first-ever instance of “greenwashing.” The companies weren’t concerned about the litter or the pollution, they were concerned about their bottom line. And they wanted to make sure it was the consumers that felt bad for littering while they continued to churn out more and more products for you to toss on the ground or to dump into landfills.
It worked, and now we’ve seen the whole planet taken over by discarded plastic. It’s not just those bottles you see strewn on city streets or the side of the road. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 300 million tons of plastic are produced each and every year, and 14 million tons of the stuff ends up in the ocean annually, making up 80% of all marine debris.
Just have a look at the “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”:
You don’t have to be in Greenpeace to be disgusted by such a sight. It’s enough to make a grown man cry. Thankfully there is a new alternative to plastic that could not only repair the planet, but make you a fortune…
One company has developed a 100% biological plastic alternative that uses no fossil fuels at all and that’s fully compostable within a few weeks. It could replace everything from water bottles to eyeglass frames to those little coffee pods.
What it’s done is manufactured resins that are used to create polymers. Polymers are the basis of all plastic-like substances. Developing this new bioplastic took this company five years and cost $35 million. It has 10 patent applications filed, and will soon have a complete moat around its technology…
This is still rather confidential. That’s why big commercial partnerships haven’t yet been announced officially, but it could be a complete game-changer for both the environment and your portfolio.
My colleague Alex Kofman has been in touch with the company and has an entire report ready for you. You can check out the details here.
If all goes well, there will be one less reason for that sad, solitary tear…
