Book Review: Consumed – How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic by Saabira Chaudhuri
Plastics are everywhere, and for decades we’ve been told the same story: just recycle and everything will be fine. In Consumed, Saabira Chaudhuri shows us how that story was never true. Recycling, she argues, was never a legitimate solution to our consumption problem. Instead, it was sold to the public as a convenient narrative—at best naïve, at worst intentionally misleading—allowing corporations to keep us hooked on disposability while appearing responsible.
What makes this book so powerful is its scope. Chaudhuri doesn’t just describe the plastic crisis as it exists today; she traces it back to its roots. She reveals how corporations and industry groups used PR campaigns to defuse public backlash as far back as the 1980s, rebranding failed or ineffective solutions as new ideas, and ensuring that real change never took hold. Along the way, she connects plastic to larger issues of overconsumption, health risks, and the cultural addiction to convenience.
This is not a despairing book. Chaudhuri makes it clear that change is possible—but only if we understand the systems that got us here. Her writing is sharp, accessible, and deeply researched, giving readers the knowledge they need to push for structural reforms instead of settling for surface-level fixes.
For anyone seeking to understand where our dependency on plastics came from, why recycling hasn’t delivered, and what it will take to build a future free from plastic waste, Consumed is essential reading.
We had an opportunity to discuss the book with Chaudhuri and she was kind enough to answer a few of our questions in her own words. You can read her responses in full below.
⭐ 4.5/5 — Highly recommended.
What inspired you to write Consumed?
In 2018, as part of my beat covering consumer goods companies for the Wall Street Journal, I
I began writing about how many of these companies were facing a backlash from consumers increasingly concerned about the damage that single-use plastic packaging was wreaking on the environment.
Over the next two years I wrote about two dozen stories for the Journal about how these companies were trying to deal with this backlash – for instance by touting recycling as a solution, attempting to increase recycled content, trying to find alternatives like plant-based plastics or switching to paper. There were huge problems with each of these approaches.
As I explain in the book’s preface, I also began to realize that much of what was being sold to consumers as “new solutions” to our plastic waste problem were in fact old attempts that the companies had unsuccessfully tried going back as far as the 1980s.
It felt impossible to write a single article in which I could say lay out how complex the plastics issue was: our deep dependency on it, the way it has rewired our everyday behaviour, the deeply fundamental problems that have always plagued plastics recycling, the conflicts of interest companies have between often wanting to do the right thing but being bound by law to maximize profit for their shareholders, the problems with so-called green single-use alternatives–like biodegradable plastic and paper–the issues with landfilling and the incineration of plastic, how often making progress on one metric like carbon emissions can reduce progress on another like recyclability etc.
Ultimately, writing a book felt like something I needed to do in order to give people an accurate and comprehensive picture of how we ended up here, why none of the solutions companies offer us have worked and where we should go next. The alternative was continuing to take a piecemeal approach through my WSJ stories in which I was leaving readers with a better understanding of one small part of the plastics problem but wasn’t telling them about the rest - which felt deeply unsatisfying!
I mentioned this in the book but I really do believe that understanding how we got here, what the world looked like before plastics and what has been tried (and has failed) before is key to making better decisions about the future. Simply switching from plastics to another material without addressing the root drivers behind why we’re driven to consume in such huge quantities isn’t going to solve the problem. Consumed has several stories about “market making” – all the work companies put into convincing us we need their products – because I think making people more conscious of how companies manipulate us all into thinking unending consumption is akin to having a better life could put us back in the driving seat, lessening our desire to keep buying and discarding.
How did your personal relationship with plastic change while writing this book?
I researched and wrote the book over about four years while working fulltime for the Wall Street Journal and in between having two babies. Over this time I moved from seeing plastics as being primarily a waste and biodiversity issue to also being a health concern. I stopped using plastic baby bottles, water bottles, chopping boards, cooking spoons and food containers and switched to stainless steel and glass. I no longer bought canned chickpeas or tomatoes after learning that the plastic liners in aluminium food cans contain Bisphenol-A, a known endocrine disruptor, and that acidic foods like tomatoes encourage leaching.
Another way in which my relationship with plastic changed was that I came to see the problems tied to plastic waste as being less about the material itself and more about the larger convenience model predicated on disposability that plastic has so cheaply enabled and accelerated.
As I say in the book, disposable products and packaging existed before plastics entered our lives. But the enormous functional benefits and many conveniences that plastics offer so very affordably have rapidly accelerated our use of disposables and created a culture of reckless overconsumption, while turbocharging profits for companies. Convenience and choice offer benefits to human beings, but come with largely unacknowledged, uncounted environmental and health costs that impact us all. I’m much more cognisant of those unseen costs now and am less complacent about my consumption overall.
In your research, what was the most shocking thing you discovered?
The most shocking thing I learned is actually the story I start the book with: the fact that there was an enormous backlash against plastics in the 1980s that had the potential to change the shape of how we consume and instead crashed out in the face of a huge wave of greenwashing by companies.
Before I started doing the research for Consumed I thought that our concerns about plastic waste were relatively recent, having started in 2015 when a video of a turtle with a plastic straw stuck up his nose went viral.
Back in 1987, a large, orange, smelly garbage barge called the Mobro 4000 wandered the coastline of the U.S. for months hoping to find a place that would accept the over 3000 tonnes of Long Island trash it was carrying. The barge became a nightly news story across the U.S. Nobody would take its trash. It was turned away by North Carolina, Louisiana, Mexico, Belize and the Bahamas.
It sparked the first big outcry against single-use plastic in particular. Paper, aluminum and glass could be recycled and food waste composted but at the time there were no solutions in place for plastic waste other than burning or landfilling it. Regulators threatened to ban plastic for good while many places began moving to tax it.
Faced with the prospect of losing billions of dollars in sales, chemical and consumer goods companies rushed to make a string of inflated promises. Pampers-maker Procter & Gamble promised diapers that were compostable and recyclable, Coca-Cola and Pepsi said they would make their plastic soda bottles out of recycled plastic, McDonald’s said its heavily food-soiled styrofoam clamshell containers would all be recycled while Hefty said its trash bags would disappear in landfills.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the companies didn’t keep their promises. But, helped by an $30 million a year PR campaign from the plastics industry, they successfully pulled the companies that relied so heavily on plastic back from the brink of a real crisis. This early success paved the way for the production of single-use plastic packaging, and waste, to keep rocketing upwards.
Many companies now pledge to reduce plastic or to move toward "circularity". From your perspective, are these pledges sincere progress or just the next chapter in greenwashing?
Many of the companies in my book and beyond started out from a reasonably good place: they didn’t like being seen as polluters and genuinely hoped that by making environmental pledges positive change would follow.
The problem then, which remains the problem today, is that while companies may start out sincerely, reality quickly catches up. Once companies are confronted with the scale of the investment they will need to make to change supply chains that are built entirely around disposability, packaging design and existing business models, they break their pledges. Often they do so quietly so nobody notices.
For publicly-traded companies, the duty to prioritize shareholder profits above all else usually means that any genuinely positive change has to be imposed through regulation. But even for private companies, market pressure means that regulation is the best way to truly effect change. One of the anecdotes I have in my book is about a roadside fruit seller in India in the 1990s who was ultimately forced to start selling his fruit in plastic bags because the other fruit sellers were using them and customers liked the convenience and were abandoning him. Without regulation, if a single company makes a change - launching a smaller package, offering only cage-free eggs, or scrapping single-use bags – but their rivals don’t, they often lose market share or competitiveness.
You argue that voluntary efforts aren't enough. In your view, what specific policies or frameworks could actually curb plastic production?
Laws that mandate reuse or tax single-use products and packaging would be a strong start. For the latter it’s important that single-use taxes target all materials, not just plastics, since every material has an environmental footprint and replacing single-use plastic with say single-use paper could cause mass deforestation and a rise in water and chemical use.
Laws that mandate reuse should also set targets for container return rates to eliminate the risk that companies simply modify their products or packaging slightly but continue to price and market these essentially as single-use. This happened in Lisbon after the city banned single-use cups and is currently happening in the UK where the sellers of single-use vapes have simply replaced these with vapes that are technically reusable but so cheap and similar to the previous ones that they’re simply thrown away after a single use.
Another law that could help is extended producer responsibility (EPR) - which extends a brand owner’s responsibility beyond simply making, advertising and selling the product to also managing the costs associated with its disposal. EPR, when designed effectively, levies fees according to how environmentally damaging a material is. This can incentivize companies to redesign products so they’re easier to reuse and recycle and use fewer harmful chemicals.
Container deposit laws (which charge a refundable deposit for containers) are another powerful tool to improve recycling and reuse. Only 10 US states have such laws for recycling - there’s room to expand these to the rest of the country and raise the paltry deposits charged today (which industry has lobbied to keep stagnant for decades) to a more meaningful figure that moves with inflation and incentivizes people to return containers. In Europe there are citywide efforts afoot to encourage the use of reusable coffee cups and takeaway food packaging, which could slash waste.
To improve recycling, apart from EPR and container deposits, laws that ban some non-recyclable plastics, require packages to be be designed for recycling, limit the plastics and additives that companies are allowed to use, and require packaging to be made from a minimum amount of recycled material could help address some of the big problems that have long plagued plastics recycling. Pay as you throw laws, in which households are charged by the amount they throw away, would also encourage us all to think harder about what we buy and discard.
Are there any companies or industries that are actually leading meaningful change?
To be meaningful I think positive change needs to be widespread and affordable. There are lots of companies–both big and small–that are trying to find alternative materials to fossil-fuel-based plastic, set reuse programs in motion and improve recycling rates but ultimately without regulation these efforts are unable to scale.
That being said, there are impressive efforts on a local level that offer examples of measures that can drive positive change more broadly. Boston University charges students $2.50 fee for using single-use food containers, which has sparked a real shift in consumption habits as students who previously habitually chose disposable to-go containers have opted for reusables instead. I also think there’s promise in reuse models like the citywide one for cups in Aarhus–these could certainly be meaningful if they’re mandated by law and catch on elsewhere.
When it comes to disposable packaging, there are companies experimenting with making fossil-fuel-based plastic alternatives from materials like seaweed, which avoids some of the land use and pesticide concerns from growing crops like corn. For any new biobased plastic packaging to be sustainable, it must be cost competitive, energy efficient to produce and easily recyclable or compostable – with facilities in place that accept these and a market for the end product. Today, much biodegradable packaging doesn’t end up actually biodegrading because there’s a lack of composting facilities that take these. Instead, they linger in landfills, releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, or go to incinerators.
For individuals who feel powerless in the face of such a massive issue, what action can they take that will matter the most?
A big reason why I wrote a book about plastic waste through the lens of the big consumer goods companies that choose to put their products in plastic was to put a face on our plastic problem. I wanted to make the issue more tangible and to empower people who sometimes feel quite helpless at the scale of the problem.
Consumer goods companies really want us to like them, they need us to buy their products which gives us power to push them to do better. They in turn can push their suppliers who in turn can together put pressure on the oil companies. Consumed takes a really murky, difficult to decipher world and gives us a starting point to lobby as consumers for something better.
I lay out a lot of this in the conclusion of my book but essentially as individuals if we see something we should say something. Think a company is using unnecessary packaging, making misleading claims or could launch a reusable or recyclable option of a product? Don’t buy their product and email their customer service people, ping their executives on Linkedin or start a campaign in your office or school to express your displeasure and push them to change.
It sounds daunting but one of the examples I cite in the book is how two young schoolgirls in the UK got McDonald’s to stop handing out plastic toys with its Happy Meals by starting a campaign that got loads of attention. McDonald’s still hands out synthetic soft toys (in other words plastic!) with their Happy Meals, without even asking if people want them but the campaign did achieve a big concession from one of the most powerful companies in the world.
If there's one idea you hope sticks with readers after finishing Consumed, what is it?
Simply that change is possible–it doesn’t have to be this way. Disposability, and the waste and health impacts that come with it, wasn’t inevitable. It was a business strategy by companies that was sold to us to increase profits - and it doesn’t have to be the default. I really hope that by taking the time to understand how we got here my readers will feel motivated to push for a better tomorrow.
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