A wolf in sheep's clothing?

Despite its Famous Crying Indian, Keep America Beautiful Is No Friend Of the Greens

Mike Hogan recalls being shocked the day he discovered that Keep America Beautiful (KAB) isn't an environmental group. Like countless baby boomers, Hogan grew up watching KAB's infamous crying Indian TV advertisement. One of the most popular public service announcements of all time, it featured a Native American who, after paddling a canoe through a littered waterway, weeps at the sight of the pollution surrounding him.

"It made quite an impression on me, says Hogan, program director of the Container Recycling Institute in Washington, D.C. It wasn't until a co-worker showed Hogan a list of KAB's corporate members, including 3M, WMX Technologies (the former Waste Management, Inc.), Philip Morris, Georgia-Pacific and Anheuser-Busch, that he decided KAB is a corporate creation whose primary purpose is burnishing its members' environmental images.

Located in a nine-story office building in Stamford, Connecticut, 43-year-old Keep America Beautiful may be the granddaddy of the country's corporation-funded nonprofits. It boasts 200 corporate members and an annual war chest of $2 million, which funds a steady stream of advertisements, brochures and reports. According to The Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations, KAB is one of an ever-growing legion of groups that "are little more than corporate greenwashing campaigns created by high-priced PR firms and bankrolled by the corporations they represent."

KAB is popularly believed to be an environmental "good guy," partly because of its well-chosen name. Also, KAB supports a network of 435 community and 21 state affiliates which conduct litter removal campaigns, anti-graffiti projects, and other environmentally positive activities. These image-polishing programs obscure KAB's promotion of its corporate members' agendas, which includes such environmentally dangerous practices as waste incineration and landfilling.

Greenpeace spokesman Rick Hind says that KAB puts "the blame for waste generation and the responsibility for waste management on the public sector, when the real polluters are the industries that manufacture, sell, bury and burn the waste."

The environmental groups (including The National Audubon Society, the Container Recycling Institute and Greenpeace) that have criticized KAB are sadly mistaken, says spokesman John Kazzi. "Keep America Beautiful is an environmental group," he says. "We are proud to count 200 leading corporations as our members. Corporations sponsor us because we provide the best information on solid waste disposal." Susanne Woods, the senior vice-president of development and environmental programming, also denies that KAB puts the needs of its corporate members first. "I've been here for 12 years and no one's telling me what we should do," she says.

Marlin Stover, vice president of marketing for KAB member First Brands, declines the opportunity to put a public relations spin on what KAB does. "I don't call them an environmental group," he says. "Keep America Beautiful is an educational resource for solid waste issues."

KAB first angered many environmental groups in the mid-1970s when it emerged as a staunch and well-funded opponent of local, state, and federal bottle deposit legislation. During the 1990s, KAB has launched a multi-million dollar campaign whose primary purpose, says Pat Franklin, a McLean, Virginia bottle bill expert, is "to ease people out of recycling." KAB has trumpeted this negative spin on recycling in a widely distributed brochure, "Recycling Realities: Facts, Myths and Choices," which says that recycling is expensive and of limited use, and in a public service TV advertisement featuring actor Michael Douglas, who tells viewers that "recycling alone just can't do it."

In 1994, KAB released a two-inch-thick report, The Role of Recycling in Integrated Solid Waste Management to the Year 2000. Like the "Recycling Realities" brochure, The Role of Recycling portrays recycling as expensive, of limited use, and only one of many waste disposal methods, such as landfilling and incineration.

Peter Grogan, manager of market development for Weyerhaeuser Recycling, criticizes the report. KAB "could have used the financial investment to guide local governments on the path to more effective recovery of solid waste," says Grogan. "Obviously that wasn't the agenda."

KAB's Woods denies that the group is anti-recycling. "We have members who make money from recycling," she says.

Veteran environmentalists are not surprised by KAB's current spin on recycling. Previously, its chief mission was to defeat local, state and federal bottle bills, says Franklin.

Franklin, Hogan and others charge that KAB tells state politicians that bottle bills are unneeded because their home state has an educational KAB affiliate. "Most KAB affiliates are in non-bottle bill states," says Hogan. KAB denies that charge, but it has an affiliate in only one state with a bottle bill, California. Not surprisingly, bottle bill states - with KAB nowhere in sight - have the highest recycling rates.

CONTACT: Keep America Beautiful, 9 West Broad Street, Stamford, CT 06902/(800)USA-4-KAB; Consumer Recycling Institute, 1400 16th Street NW, Suite 250, Washington, DC 20036/[phone].