On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil, claiming the oil and petrochemical giant had engaged “in a decades-long campaign of deception” about the effectiveness of recycling. The lawsuit seeks to hold the company responsible for the plastic pollution crisis. It argues that, since at least 1988, ExxonMobil has blanketed the state in marketing and advertising to convince people plastic is being recycled, making them more likely to buy it. This includes spreading misinformation about the efficacy of plastics recycling on social media, it alleges.
The amount of plastic being recycled in the United States today is a sliver of what is produced. Recent estimates suggest that only about 9 percent of this waste is recycled worldwide, while in America it’s about 5 to 6 percent.
American cities and towns have traditionally dealt with plastic waste by sending it to recycling centers that sort it into different types and then shred and melt the material. While this works for certain bottles and jugs, the vast majority of single-use plastics are too diverse in their color and chemical composition to be refashioned into new products.
Take, for instance, two common household plastics: an orange laundry detergent bottle and a clear squeezable ketchup bottle. They are made from different resins — a petroleum product that’s the main ingredient in plastics — are different colors and contain different chemicals. They can’t be combined and resold. The makeup of each product is so specific that even green and clear soda bottles made of No. 1 plastic cannot be recycled together, which is why the Coca-Cola Co. no longer packages Sprite in its iconic green container.
Most plastic waste in the United States is dumped in landfills or incinerated. Some of it winds up on beaches, in rivers or in the ocean.
In the face of growing skepticism about plastic recycling, the industry has gone on the offensive. The Plastics Industry Association, a trade group, launched a $1 million campaign last year called “Recycling is Real.” Aimed at lawmakers and brands, the digital ads tried to bolster confidence in recycling.
Big plastic makers have promoted what they say is another solution to waste: chemical recycling. The process breaks plastic down to its molecular components with the goal of reusing them to make new plastic. But California’s lawsuit claims ExxonMobil is also misleading the public about the efficacy of this technology. The suit says nearly all of the plastic waste processed by the company has been turned into fuel instead of recycled plastic.
The suit alleges that Exxon’s recycling claims violated California’s nuisance, natural resources, water pollution, false advertisement and unfair competition laws.
California’s primary claim relies on the argument that Exxon created a “public nuisance” by overplaying the likelihood of plastic being recycled and normalizing consumption of single-use plastics. But Bruce Huber, a professor at Notre Dame Law School who specializes in environmental law, said this strategy is tricky because it depends on a judge’s willingness to take an expansive view of public nuisance laws.
Plastics “don’t match our ordinary conception of what a nuisance is,” Huber said. “It’s one thing to say an opioid or hazardous paint is a nuisance. There’s a discrete injury that you can track pretty cleanly to conduct by a perpetrating party. But plastics don’t fit that scheme nicely.”
Part of California’s argument is that once plastic enters the environment, the damages cascade. An example cited in the suit is the proliferation of microplastics — ubiquitous tiny particles that have been found everywhere from Antarctic snow to inside human bodies. A peer-reviewed study published last year that focused on a recycling facility in the United Kingdom estimated that anywhere between 6 to 13 percent of the plastic processed there could end up being released into water or the air as microplastics.
If there’s one thing experts agree on, it’s that the lawsuit probably will drag on for years.