Convenience-obsessed culture fueled by single-use plastics has transformed sustainability into a superficial fix rather than true change

When Saabira Chaudhuri began covering consumer-goods companies for The Wall Street Journal, she thought she was writing about marketing campaigns, product launches, and quarterly results. What she found instead was a tale of industrial ingenuity turned liability: a business model built on disposability, dressed up in the rhetoric of sustainability. Her new book, Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic, traces how plastic became indispensable to modern capitalism and why efforts to rein it in have so often failed.

Chaudhuri’s route into journalism was neither straightforward nor inevitable. Growing up in Bangalore in the 1990s, she imagined a legal career like her grandfather’s, until she realized her memory may be too poor for the courtroom. A scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts opened another path. After earning a sociology degree and submitting more than a hundred job applications, she landed at Forbes as a multimedia producer. That first foothold in journalism led to Fast Company in New York, Mint in New Delhi, Dow Jones, and finally the Journal, where she spent 12 years reporting from New York and London. She stepped down in May 2025, after the publication of Consumed, to work as a freelance journalist.

Her book grew out of reporting that began in 2018, as consumer unease about single-use plastics swelled. Bags, bottles, straws, and cups—once symbols of convenience—had become emblems of waste. Companies scrambled to demonstrate environmental responsibility, touting biodegradable packaging or recycled content. Yet Chaudhuri soon noticed a pattern. “The more I reported on how companies were responding, the clearer it became that each of these ‘solutions’ was riddled with flaws,” she recalls. What appeared novel was often recycled messaging from decades earlier, deployed to protect a profitable system of disposability.

Plastic’s triumph, as she makes clear, was never accidental. It offered companies everything they desired: lightness, durability, malleability, and above all, cheapness. It allowed supply chains to stretch across continents and created habits that multiplied consumption. The disposable coffee cup is one of her most telling examples. Paper cups existed long before but collapsed under heat. After World War II, a thin plastic lining solved that problem. Coffee, once tethered to the breakfast table or diner counter, became a portable staple. By the 1950s, it was America’s top-selling beverage. The story repeats across industries: diapers, shampoo, ultraprocessed food, soft drinks, fast fashion. Plastic was the accelerant that turned necessities into markets of abundance.

Advertising played a no less decisive role. Since the 1920s, plastic makers and their corporate customers linked disposability with modernity. The message was simple: throwaway living meant progress, hygiene, and freedom. Branding then reassured consumers that environmental consequences could be managed. Recycling campaigns, many of them industry-funded, soothed consciences while doing little to stem the tide of waste. “Our throwaway culture rests on the idea that what we already have isn’t good enough,” Chaudhuri observes.

She is hardly the first to note these contradictions, yet she places them in historical perspective. The backlash of the 1980s—ignited by the Mobro 4000 garbage barge, laden with 3,000 tons of refuse, being turned away from port after port—might have changed the nation’s course. Regulators threatened bans, companies promised compostable diapers and recyclable bottles, and the plastics industry mounted a $30-million annual public-relations campaign. The promises were not kept, but the campaign worked. Plastic’s dominance deepened.

For Chaudhuri, these stories underscore the leverage of powerful brands. She recalls one interview with Shelby Yastrow, McDonald’s longtime general counsel. His push to replace bleached paper bags with unbleached ones met fierce internal resistance and supplier obstruction—until the company forced change. Then, suddenly, everyone could comply. For Chaudhuri, the lesson is that brand owners, pressured by public opinion, can transform supply chains that individuals cannot. Consumers, in turn, wield influence over those brands if they choose to exercise it.

Her research has altered her own life. After having two children, she replaced plastic baby bottles, water bottles, and food containers with stainless steel and glass, shunning canned tomatoes once she learned about chemical leaching. Yet she resists framing the issue as one of personal virtue. “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,” she says.

Younger generations, she believes, may prove decisive. With social media reach and a sharper awareness of health risks—from microplastics found in organs to chemicals linked with cancer—they are better positioned to reject greenwashing and demand structural change. Whether business will adjust its model of growth is another matter. Technology, Chaudhuri argues, will not deliver salvation on its own. Biodegradable plastics are often illusory fixes. What is required is a reckoning with convenience, profit, and the culture of disposability.

For readers of Consumed, the message is not that plastics are inherently villainous but that they have enabled an economy addicted to throwaway living. Chaudhuri’s reporting points to a sobering truth: the crisis is not just environmental but cultural, and the solutions will demand more than technical tweaks. They will require, as she puts it, “a cultural reset.”

An interview with Saabira Chaudhuri

Rhett Ayers Butler for Mongabay: What is your background and why did you decide to become a journalist?

Saabira Chaudhuri: I grew up in Bangalore in the 1990s and for many years thought I’d follow in the footsteps of my grandfather, a barrister who practiced law until the age of 92. However, I have a terrible memory and worried I wouldn’t be able to retain the facts I’d need to argue in court! Eventually I abandoned the idea of law and won enough financial aid to study at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After graduating with a BA in sociology, I applied for jobs widely—to the ACLU, Amnesty International, local nonprofits, communications consultancies. After over 100 job applications, Forbes magazine offered me a job as a multimedia producer. I was thrilled! It wasn’t my ideal role but I’d always loved to write – it was a way into journalism and potentially a career doing something meaningful. I’ve been a journalist for nearly two decades now. After Forbes, I worked for Fast Company in New York, the business newspaper Mint in New Delhi, Dow Jones newswires, and then the Wall Street Journal. I wrote for WSJ for 12 years, initially covering banking from New York and later consumer goods from London before stepping down in May 2025 following the publication of Consumed in the UK. I’m now freelance.

Mongabay: What inspired you to write Consumed?

Saabira Chaudhuri: In 2018, while covering consumer-goods companies for WSJ I began reporting on a growing backlash against single-use plastics. Consumers were increasingly concerned about the environmental toll from products like bags, bottles, cups and straws, and the companies on my patch were scrambling to respond—touting recycling, adding recycled content, experimenting with biodegradable plastics, or switching to paper.

But the more I reported on how companies were responding, the clearer it became that each of these “solutions” was riddled with flaws. I discovered that many weren’t new at all: they were recycled campaigns from the 1980s and 90s, dusted off and rebranded as fresh fixes to allow these companies to retain a highly profitable business model founded on disposability.

The problem was too sprawling for a single article, yet it was hard to get the wordcount to do it justice. I wanted to explore how plastics have rewired our daily behavior, locked companies into a cycle they can’t seem to escape, and created trade-offs that make genuine progress elusive. Recycling has never worked at scale, so-called green alternatives come with their own costs, and gains on one metric, like carbon, often undermine another, like recyclability.

At a certain point, it became obvious that piecemeal stories weren’t enough. I needed to write a book to pull the whole picture together: how we got here, why the industry’s fixes keep failing, and what a more honest path forward might look like.

Mongabay: Why do you think plastic became so essential for big brands in the first place?

Saabira Chaudhuri: Because it brought such enormous benefits. Plastic is light, cheap, portable, durable – it can be made opaque or clear, can easily take on any color and can be molded into various forms, all at a low cost. Plastic has allowed companies to expand supply chains, slash costs and—most importantly—create new markets and consumer habits that have been hugely profitable.

One of the examples I have in my book is of the disposable coffee cup. Paper cups existed in the early 1900s to prevent disease from shared water cups, but their wax linings couldn’t handle heat, leaving coffee undrinkable. After World War II, the addition of a thin plastic lining changed everything. Suddenly coffee could be served in disposable cups. What had once been a drink confined to the breakfast table, the diner, or the office became something you could carry anywhere. By the 1950s, hot coffee was the top-selling beverage in America.

Across other industries–disposable diapers, soft drinks, shampoo, ultraprocessed foods, fast-fashion and others–plastic was similarly used to turbocharge consumption and build a culture of convenience that has served brands extraordinarily well.

Mongabay: How do marketing and branding play a role in keeping us hooked on plastic?

Saabira Chaudhuri: Our throwaway culture rests on the idea that what we already have–or the way we already do things–isn’t good enough.

Since the 1920s, plastics makers, and later the consumer-goods and retail giants who are their biggest customers, have poured money into advertising that equates disposability with modernity. Plastic was sold as a path to convenience, hygiene, freedom, desirability and self-improvement. The stories in Consumed—about companies like McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Mobil Chemical—draw from the same playbook. First, persuade us that buying disposable products makes life better. Then, reassure us that we needn’t worry about the environmental impacts, because recycling or another easy solution will supposedly take care of it.

Many of these stories are about what the industry calls “market making”: the deliberate work companies do to convince us we need their products. Becoming more aware of how we’re being manipulated to equate endless consumption with a better life can help us reclaim agency—and, in turn, reduce our impulse to keep buying and discarding.

Mongabay: In your research, was there a particular statistic or fact about plastic that shocked you most?

Saabira Chaudhuri: The most shocking thing I learned is actually the story I start the book with: 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.

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. Nobody would take its trash. It was turned away by North Carolina, Louisiana, Mexico, Belize and the Bahamas.

The barge became a nightly news story across the U.S. It sparked the first big outcry against single-use plastic. 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.

The companies didn’t keep their promises. But, helped by an $30 million a year PR campaign from the plastics industry, they successfully pulled 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.

Mongabay: You spoke with many people while writing the book. Was there one interview or story that stayed with you the most?

Saabira Chaudhuri: One of the people I interviewed for Consumed was Shelby Yastrow who is now in his late 80s. He worked as McDonald’s general counsel for decades and also became its environmental affairs head after a Mobro-induced backlash against the company’s styrofoam containers (about which I have an entire chapter!) Among the stories Yastrow told me was one about the uproar he caused internally when he wanted McDonald’s to shift from using bleached to unbleached paper for its bags. “You’d think I was asking them to burn down churches,” he said.

Once he convinced the packaging folks at McDonald’s, he ran into a new hurdle: the fast-food chain’s suppliers claimed they couldn’t make the switch. When McDonald’s eventually started sourcing its bags from a new supplier, suddenly the others all said making unbleached bags was no problem.

The story stuck with me because it shows how much power big brands have to create changes to a system that otherwise is inaccessible to the general public. The brand-owners are the conduit between the thousands of companies who make packaging, chemicals and plastic resin, and us – the end buyers of these products. We in turn have immense power over these brand-owners because they really want us to approve of them so we’ll buy their products. We just need to start using it.

Mongabay: Do you think plastic-free packaging is realistic for most products, or only in niche cases?

Saabira Chaudhuri: Simply switching from single-use plastics to another single-use material often amounts to trading one set of environmental problems for another so I’ll answer this question slightly differently.

I think reusable packaging is realistic for many more products than we use it for today – this may need to be made from plastic (perhaps in time from plastic that comes from sources other than fossil fuels) although there are instances where it can be made from other materials like stainless steel or glass. Plastic that is used for reusable containers needs to be tested to ensure it’s safe, and all containers must be part of a system that ensures they’re returned and reused many times over.

In terms of going totally packaging free, I do think there are many fruits, vegetables, and other products packaged in plastic today that could be sold unpackaged, but companies won’t do this voluntarily since it requires they make changes to their supply chains and often eliminates key benefits like slapping their brand names on products or being able to sell you six apples rather than just the two you need. For more products to be sold packaging free we need policy measures that push companies to make such changes.

Mongabay: Which product in your own daily life has been the hardest for you to avoid in plastic form?

Saabira Chaudhuri: Food packaging, dog poop bags and cosmetics.

Mongabay: What role do you see younger generations playing in changing how we use plastic?

Saabira Chaudhuri: Younger people are increasingly aware of the potential health risks linked to plastics. Microplastics have been found in brains, testes and breastmilk and some scientists think that certain chemicals used in plastics could be linked to rising cancer rates and falling fertility. Younger people are also coming of age amid constant reminders of the climate crisis, from natural disasters to record temperatures, and plastic’s role as a big driver of the fossil-fuel industry is now well known.

Shifting away from single-use plastic will require a cultural reset: making greenwashing, waste, and profit-at-all-costs approaches unacceptable. Younger generations are well placed to drive that shift. Many younger people have a big social media presence which can help them amplify messages and organize in a big way, and companies depend on winning their loyalty as the consumers of the future. By pushing for policies that hold corporations accountable and publicly calling out irresponsible practices, they can play a pivotal role in changing how we use—and think about—plastic.

Mongabay: Are you hopeful that technology alone—like biodegradable materials—can solve the plastic problem?

Saabira Chaudhuri: I’m not. I don’t think this is a technology problem so much as a business model problem.

As I mentioned earlier, simply switching from single-use plastic to any other single-use material, biodegradable or not, could cause its own string of similar problems.

Degradable plastics are very widely misunderstood – I dedicate an entire chapter in my book, and a chunk of the FAQs at the end, to these because they’ve long been used by brands as a tool for greenwashing.

While biodegradable plastic sounds green, most of the time such plastics are designed to break down in an industrial composting facility. Hardly any such facilities accept nonfood degradable packaging and even where degradable packaging is used for food and drinks many facilities don’t want this since they worry about contamination.

Degradable plastics that go to landfills either remain mummified or slowly break down to release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. If littered, they can take many years to break down and in the meantime could harm wildlife, leach chemicals into the soil and release microplastics, just like regular plastics.

Mongabay: After writing the book, has your own relationship with plastic in daily life changed? If so, how?

Saabira Chaudhuri: I researched and wrote the book over about four years. During this time, I moved from seeing plastics as being primarily a waste and biodiversity issue to also being a health concern. I had two babies over this period and 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 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 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 cognizant of those unseen costs now and am less complacent about my consumption overall.

https://news.mongabay.com/2025/09/consumed-by-convenience-the-culture-of-disposability/