A Hollywood push to snub single-use plastics on the screen

Could depictions of single-use plastics on TV shows go the way of cigarette smoking, becoming a taboo that Hollywood wants to avoid on screen?

The Plastic Pollution Coalition and some well-known performers, including the new president of the Screen Actors Guild, actress Fran Drescher, are behind an effort trying to do just that.

The new initiative, called "Flip the Script on Plastics," hopes to shift public opinions about single-use plastics by getting TV programs and movies to stop showing them on screen. Instead, they want entertainment to portray characters either with reusable bottles and containers or packaging-free alternatives.

"The campaign is really focused on getting single-use plastics out of film and TV," said PPC CEO Dianna Cohen. "We are in the process of de-normalizing single-use plastics in our lives."

PPC released a report in November, with the University of Southern California's Annenberg Norman Lear Center, examining how single-use plastics are portrayed on TV and giving recommendations to studios and show creators. It's also doing outreach in the entertainment industry.

The PPC effort has an ally in Drescher, who became president of SAG-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in September and formed a green council to work with environmental groups.

She put her support behind the effort in a Jan. 19 PPC webinar.

"I am excited to be working with you and excited to be making the elimination of single-use plastics the first cornerstone of the green council effort," Drescher said. "We have a responsibility to put content out there that normalizes the direction we want to be going in."

Drescher and SAG-AFTRA did not respond to a request for comment, but she's long spoken out on plastics topics, like a 2016 video encouraging Californians to vote in a referendum for the state's plastic bag ban.

"We had to be taught not to drink and drive; we had to be taught to buckle up for safety," Drescher said on the PPC webinar. "We had to be taught not to litter, and we have to be taught not to use single-use plastics."

In an interview, Cohen said the campaign is in its early stages but said PPC is finding a positive reaction as it gets out and talks with the entertainment industry.

"We're talking to a lot of groups that are seminal in this industry," she said. "It's been very, very affirmative."

The PPC report, prepared by researchers with the Media Impact Project at Lear Center, looked at how single-use plastics were portrayed across 51 hours of programming on 32 popular TV shows in 2019 and 2020. It said it found an average of 28 single-use plastic items in each episode, but also that in only 7 percent of the cases were the items disposed of on screen, with depictions of littering being common.

"It contributes to the myth of magically disappearing trash," Cohen said. "But it's not the reality."

One of the report's authors, Dana Weinstein at the Lear Center, said on-screen depictions of single-use packaging were much more common than reusables. Their research found, for example, that single-use plastic straws were 35 times more common than reusables and single-use beverage bottles were eight times more common than reusables, she told the webinar.

But there were some exceptions, like the former NBC show Superstore that consistently depicted employees during the series that ended in 2021 at a Walmart-like retailer drinking from Hydro Flask mugs in a break room, Weinstein said.

"The fact that these were recurring characters is highly noteworthy," she said. "Research suggests people are more likely to engage in the behavior they see modeled by others, and that includes fictional characters."

Cohen said PPC has noticed more reusables being depicted on prominent shows, like high-end water bottles on the new reboot of the Sex and the City series.

On the panel, actors and researchers compared the prevalence of on-screen single-use plastics packaging with cigarette smoking on TV and movies and how that changed.

"We know there's been a whole movement against showing smoking on TV," Weinstein said. "We could be at the precipice of a similar movement to kind of de-normalize showing single-use plastics on television and instead model the kinds of reusable behaviors we'd all like to see."

Weinstein said the report offers baseline information for starting to talk with writers and showrunners. As well, she said it presents recommendations that go beyond simply inserting reusables into scenes, encouraging writers to have storylines and dialogues around broader topics.

"That could mean writing a TV storyline about the power of collective action to fight for corporate accountability and progressive anti-plastics legislation," Weinstein said. "This could help shift the cultural conversation away from blaming individual consumers and towards holding corporations and systems accountable for their large role in the plastics pollution crisis."

Drescher suggested programs could use exchanges between characters with different points of view, as in the 1970s comedy series All in the Family, where the traditionalist Archie Bunker traded funny barbs with other characters over social changes.

"We're able to laugh with the characters, as well as at the characters, and that's kind of the direction I think we have to go," she said. "We have to put a fire under all the people that are in a position to write and produce content."