The attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, sued Exxon Mobil on Monday alleging that the oil giant carried out a “decades-long campaign of deception” that overhyped the promise of recycling and spawned a plastic pollution crisis.
The suit, filed in superior court in San Francisco, argued that people were more likely to buy single-use plastics because of the false belief, promoted by Exxon Mobil, that they would be recycled. Mr. Bonta said the company is a leading producer of a key component used to make single-use plastics. The suit seeks unspecified damages that Mr. Bonta estimated would amount of “multiple billions of dollars.”
In an interview, Mr. Bonta said that plastic pollution was “fueled by the myth of recycling, and the leader among them in perpetuating that myth is Exxon Mobil.”
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
The case opens a new front in the legal battles against oil and gas companies over climate and environmental issues. More than two dozen state and local governments, including California, have sued the companies for their role in the climate crisis, making claims that the companies deceived the public in a quest for profit. None have gone trial yet.
The California suit filed on Monday alleged that Exxon Mobil promoted the widely used “chasing arrows” symbol on plastic products, which led buyers to believe that their bottles and other products would, in fact, be recycled if disposed of properly. But only about five percent of the plastic waste in the United States is recycled, according to Mr. Bonta’s office, citing an estimate by the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, which looked at 2021 data. At the same time, the amount of plastic manufactured, much of it single-use, grows yearly.
The suit comes after a more than two-year investigation by Mr. Bonta’s office, which issued subpoenas to Exxon Mobil and plastics industry groups in April 2022.
The attorney general said the investigation uncovered new information about misleading claims that Exxon Mobil made about its “advanced recycling” program, which claims to transform used plastics into new products. His office said the case would be the first effort by an American government official to hold a petrochemical company accountable for deception regarding plastics.
Most of the waste processed through the company’s advanced-recycling program is made into fuel, and the new products contain little material that was actually recycled, but they are marketed and sold at a premium, the suit alleges. In a statement, Mr. Bonta’s office called the advanced-recycling program “a public relations stunt.”
The suit pointed to the deleterious effects of plastic utensils, cups, straws and other everyday objects, noting that they break down into “microplastics” that can escape into the environment and contaminate drinking water and soil. Researchers have found evidence of microplastics inside the human body. The lawsuit called for the establishment of an “abatement fund” and other financial penalties.
In a report entitled “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling” earlier this year, the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group, concluded that fossil-fuel and other petrochemical companies had used the “false promise” of recycling to “exponentially increase virgin plastic production over the last six decades.” Plastics are made from fossil fuels, and are part of a category of products called petrochemicals.
The report concluded that recycling plastics has failed because of technical and economic limitations. Even when recycling is technically possible, it can be more expensive than producing new plastic and thus economically not viable, it said.
Mr. Bonta said that the concerns about recycling’s effectiveness could lead to a greater emphasis on reusing items like water bottles and shopping bags for people who want to curb their contribution to pollution. “I think people need to know the limits of recycling and the fact that what they thought they had been recycling for years, has not really been recycled,” he said.
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