The California attorney general announced a lawsuit against ExxonMobil on Monday, alleging it engaged in a decadeslong deception about whether the plastics it manufactured can be recycled.
“Plastics are everywhere, from the deepest parts of our oceans, the highest peaks on earth, and even in our bodies, causing irreversible damage — in ways known and unknown — to our environment and potentially our health,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Monday in a news release. “For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible. ExxonMobil lied to further its recording-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health.”
Bonta said in April that he would investigate fossil fuel and petrochemical companies for their role in causing the plastic pollution crisis, but Monday’s action was solely against Exxon. Bonta said in a news conference Monday announcing the suit that there may be others added, but Exxon was the largest producer of the building blocks of plastics.
While some plastics can be recycled, many are difficult to recycle. The attorney general’s office pointed to industry documents from the 1970s calling plastics recycling “infeasible” and casting doubt that recycling plastic could ever be economically viable, according to the April announcement.
Bonta specifically named Exxon’s advanced recycling program as being misleading Monday. “92% of plastics in advanced recycling become transportation fuel — only a very small amount is recycled,” he said. “Exxon can only recycle about 1% of its own plastic.”
A representative for ExxonMobil did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This past August, CBS News sat down with ExxonMobil and asked about the California attorney general’s investigation, but the company declined to comment at the time. Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for advanced recycling, did respond to the claim that recycling is a myth by saying Exxon’s Baytown plant near Houston has “already processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste through our facility. We have ambitions to go even further to 1 billion pounds. And so to say that’s a myth, when we’re actually doing it, um, I’m not sure I’m aligned with that.”
The lawsuit aims to hold a plastics producer responsible, said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, and uses consumer law to do it.
“Exxon spends money lying to the public and we have data that shows it’s not accurate,” she said. “This is the most significant plastics lawsuit in the nation.”
The majority of plastic products can’t be recycled and the U.S. plastic recycling rate has never broken 9%, the April announcement said. California has already banned all plastic shopping bags, in a move signed into law this weekend by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
