California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the filing of a lawsuit against ExxonMobil for allegedly engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.
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In a complaint filed in the San Francisco County Superior Court, the Department of Justice alleges that ExxonMobil has been deceiving Californians for half a century through misleading public statements and slick marketing promising that recycling would address the ever-increasing amount of plastic waste ExxonMobil produces.
Through this lawsuit, the Attorney General seeks to compel ExxonMobil, which promotes and produces the largest amount of polymers—essentially the building blocks used to make single-use plastic—that become plastic waste in California, to end its deceptive practices that threaten the environment and the public.
Attorney General Bonta also seeks to secure an abatement fund, disgorgement, and civil penalties for the harm inflicted by plastics pollution upon California’s communities and the environment.
ExxonMobil is the world’s largest producer of polymers used to make single-use plastics. These materials are produced by ExxonMobil from fossil fuels and are then molded (by other companies) into single-use plastic.
For decades, ExxonMobil, one of the most powerful companies in the world, falsely promoted all plastic as recyclable, when in fact the vast majority of plastic products are not and likely cannot be recycled, either technically or economically.
This caused consumers to purchase and use more single-use plastic than they otherwise would have due to the company’s misleading public statements and advertising.
For instance, through a trade group launched to promote recycling as an alternative to reducing plastics consumption, ExxonMobil placed a 12-page editorial-style advertisement in a July 1989 edition of Time magazine titled “The URGENT NEED TO RECYCLE.”
This “advertorial” highlighted recycling as a smart solution for plastic waste and efforts to further recycling and recycling technology. Since 1970, ExxonMobil, through this trade association, also adapted and promoted the chasing arrows symbol for plastics.
This symbol is now strongly associated with recycling and consumers are led to believe that items with the symbol can and will be recycled when placed in the recycling stream.
In reality, only about 5 percent of U.S. plastic waste is recycled, and the recycling rate has never exceeded 9 percent.
More recently, ExxonMobil continues to deceive the public by touting “advanced recycling” as the solution to the plastic waste and pollution crisis.
“Advanced recycling” (also known as “chemical recycling”) is an umbrella term used by the plastics industry to describe a variety of heat or solvent-based technologies that can theoretically convert certain types of plastic waste into petrochemical feedstock, which can be used to make new plastic.
Under its “advanced recycling” program, ExxonMobil uses heat to break down plastic waste. ExxonMobil promotes its “advanced recycling” program as a breakthrough in technology that will make plastics sustainable but hides important truths about its technical limitations, including that:
• The vast majority—92 percent—of plastic waste processed through ExxonMobil’s “advanced recycling” technology does not become recycled plastic, but rather primarily fuels,
• The plastics that are produced through ExxonMobil’s “advanced recycling” process contain so little plastic waste that they are effectively virgin plastics deceptively marketed as “circular” (co-opting a term typically understood as a full circle of sustainable reuse, where waste becomes raw material) and sold at a premium,
• ExxonMobil’s “advanced recycling” process cannot handle large amounts of post-consumer plastic waste such as potato chip bags without risking the safety and performance of its equipment,
• Plastics produced through ExxonMobil’s “advanced recycling” program, in ExxonMobil’s best case scenario, will only account for less than one percent of ExxonMobil’s total virgin plastic production capacity, which continues to grow.
ExxonMobil’s “advanced recycling” program is nothing more than a public relations stunt meant to encourage the public to keep purchasing single-use plastics that are fueling the plastics pollution crisis.
ExxonMobil produces the largest amount of single-use plastic that becomes plastic waste. Since 1985, more than 26 million pounds of trash has been collected from California beaches and waterways, approximately 81 percent of which is plastic.
Most of the plastic items collected on the annual California Coastal Cleanup Day can be traced to ExxonMobil’s polymer resins.
Through its deception, ExxonMobil has caused or substantially contributed to plastic pollution that has harmed and continues to harm California’s environment, wildlife, and natural resources. ■
Predominant upper-level ridging stretching from the Southwest to the southern High Plains will allow for another day of record-breaking heat across parts of Nevada and Arizona today.