The Keep America Beautiful Campaign focuses on anti-litter campaigns but ignores the potential of recycling legislation and changes to packaging. It seeks to attribute litter and waste disposal problems to individual's acting irresponsibly and admits no corporate responsibility for the problem. In the 1970s Keep America Beautiful opposed bottle deposit legislation and more recently it has sought to discredit recycling with television advertisements, reports and brochures which emphasise the cost and limits of recycling.

It receives approximately $2 million per year from "some 200 companies that manufacture and distribute the aluminium cans, paper products, glass bottles and plastics that account for about a third of the material in US landfills" including:

• Coca-Cola
• Pepsi-Cola
• McDonald's
• Kellogg

It is also funded by waste companies that landfill and incinerate hazardous wastes and prefer the focus of waste disposal to be on the tidy disposal of litter.

The Campaign's directors have included representatives of

• Philip Morris
• Mobil Chemical
• Procter and Gamble
• PR giant Burson-Marsteller.

In the past it has been coordinated by the public relations director of Union Carbide.

See also Keep Australia Beautiful, which is the Australian equivalent.

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Additional Material

Keep America Beautiful - Online Network News

Keep America Beautiful - Press Releases

University of Wisconsin - Course Material

CLEAR info on Keep America Beautiful

Bleifuss, Joel, 1995, 'Covering the Earth with "Green PR"', PR Watch, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 1-7.

CLEAR, Industry Deploys New Anti-Environmental Strategy, 1 Juy 1997.

Deal, Carl, 1993, The Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations (Berkeley, California: Odian Press).

Megalli, Mark and Andy Friedman, 1991, Masks of Deception: Corporate Front Groups in America, Essential Information.

Rosenberger, Jack, 1996, 'A wolf in sheep's clothing?', E Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 19-23.

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