After 20 Years, Iconic American Beauty’s Bag Keeps Polluting the Earth

Under the hashtag #ChileSinPlásticos and the worldwide initiative to end the use of single-use plastics (Break free from plastic), McCann Santiago de Chile presents a new communicational action.

Chile and Latin America are taking important steps to legally ban the use of plastic, but we also need to call the people to change their own behavior. This time we take advantage of the 20th anniversary of the classic movie "American Beauty", to question the iconic scene of the bag floating in the air. In the Oscar-winning film for best movie on 1999, Ricky, says “it's the most beautiful thing I've ever filmed”. 20 years later, we wonder where that bag is and where it will be in the future, considering that plastic takes more than 400 years to degrade.

For Greenpeace, it’s very important the pressure we can generate to the politicians and companies, but we also want to connect with people in a friendlier way, from closer things such as sports or cinema. In this case, the protagonist is a bag from a movie, but our ambition is to raise awareness that all the plastic we throw will end inevitably in a landfill, in a river or in the ocean, being part of the 8 million tons of plastics that reach the ocean every year.