When Henry T. Ford announced the first Model T, the slogan was “You ought never have to buy another one.”

Here are the facts: The average American produces 4.5 pounds of garbage a day. Eighty percent of the products used in America are used once and thrown away. From 1960 to 1980, garbage production quadrupled in America.

Only 5 percent of total plastic products are recycled, and 24 percent of plastic bottles are recycled.

And get this: There is a clump of plastic twice the size of Texas three miles deep on the ocean floor.

Should consumers feel guilty about this? According to Heather Rogers, author of “The Hidden Life of Garbage,” you shouldn’t feel guilty after all.

Rogers came to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art Gallery Oct.3 to address the issue of garbage as an environmental crisis.

“Garbage is a unique substance that allows us to see an environmental crisis within our daily lives. Garbage is a way to see ‘this thing in my hand- this becomes garbage.’ It is an opportunity to think about where resources come from and where they go when they leave our hands,” said Rogers.

One of many comments she made during her lecture was that the consumer is not the one that should be blamed for this overabundance of garbage; it is the manufacturers that play a major part in creating waste.

“I try to situate this in our daily realities. How did it become OK to throw these things away? Part of it is because the waste disposal system we have makes the things we throw away disappear.”

Then, to take the blame off of their shoulders, these companies try to point the finger at consumers, the “litter bugs.”

Take for example the Keep America Beautiful Campaign (KAB). The campaign focuses on three primary areas: litter reduction, waste minimization and beautification.

Started by Dixie Cups, the makers of the first disposable cans and bottles, Coca Cola, and various other companies, KAB may have ulterior motives behind its environmental stance.

For example, KAB began using the term “litter bug” back in the 1960s, an effective way to place the blame on the consumer.

“By shifting the focus off of the industry and putting it on the individual, KAB makes the problems of garbage seem less infrastructural. It’s now a bigger problem shrunken down to an individual’s behaviors and choices, hence the ‘litter bug’ term,” said Rogers.

“It has been a successful strategy on the part of the manufacturer to make this make sense, to make this waste seem okay. They want you to feel guilty.”

Manufacturers are motivated to make more products as a way to make more money, so they are constantly designing products that are made to be lightly used and then thrown away, said Rogers.

A proliferation of packaging equals more money in companies’ eyes.

“Part of the reason we have all that packaging is because of the push from the plastic sector to use that material,” said Rogers.

The term “built in obsolescence” refers to the manufacturer’s decision to produce a product that will become obsolete or unusable in a specified amount of time. Products built in obsolescence benefit the producer since the consumer can’t purchase a product that will last indefinitely.

The life of the product's usefulness is fixed, so eventually the consumer has to buy again. This is yet another way waste is created at no fault of the consumer.

When Henry T. Ford announced the first Model T, the slogan was “You ought never have to buy another one.”

Today, for many products, it would go something like “You should need to buy another in six months because it is only made to last that long.”

Yet, Rogers doesn’t let consumers entirely off the hook. “We have had to learn to be wasteful. It is not human instinct,” she said, “but we can unlearn it.”

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