Why corporations love slogans like ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’

“Reduce, reuse, recycle.” For more than 50 years, those three Rs have been the world’s go-to environmental mantra.

On the face of it, the three Rs sound like an empowering call for each of us to play our part for the planet. However, the individualist approach behind the slogan has come in for increasing criticism by climate change activists.

I am one of them. As a scholar-activist who has spent over 16 years working with climate justice movements, I have studied how movements are challenging the individualistic focus to climate change – an approach that is heavily promoted by corporate public relations campaigns.

Fossil fuel corporations have worked with public relations firms to convince the public that environmental problems are the fault of consumer behaviour. One of the main aims of these campaigns is to shift attention and blame away from the main actors responsible for ecological destruction – wealthy corporations, polluting industries and the captured governments that enable them.

Individual emissions within the average person’s direct control account for less than 20% of total emissions. The vast majority come from industrial systems and infrastructure beyond people’s control.

The fossil fuel industry’s public relations campaigns also want individuals to focus on their own environmental footprint so that they are distracted from pushing for more structural and policy driven changes....

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