Opinion: California Exxon lawsuit is exposing the truth about plastics and what we can recycle
Richard Wiles and Judith Enck | The San Diego Union-Tribune | October 24, 2024
Plastic pollution has become an unprecedented crisis. Plastics contaminate our drinking water, pile up in our communities and leach into the soil. Tiny pieces of plastics, so-called microplastics, have been found in Antarctica, on Mount Everest, in clouds, rain and in human heart arteries, breast milk, blood, testicles, and placentas.
This problem did not happen overnight, or by accident: The plastics industry has spent decades selling and marketing single-use products while falsely promising that we can recycle our way out of the problem, even though they’ve known for decades that wasn’t true.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is now suing ExxonMobil, the largest producer of single-use plastic polymers, for its role in deceiving the public about plastic recycling. This groundbreaking lawsuit seeks to hold major players in the plastics industry accountable for the harm their fraud has caused. “ExxonMobil not only promotes and produces the largest amount of plastic that becomes plastic waste in California,” Bonta’s lawsuit argues, “it has also deceived Californians for almost half a century by promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis.”
While plastic production soared to record highs and Americans dutifully put their plastic into recycling bins, the plastic recycling rate in the U.S. remained stuck in the single digits. That’s because recycling plastic has never been technically or economically viable — and the leading plastics producers and industry groups knew it all along, even as they spent millions on lobbying and ad campaigns to persuade the public and policymakers otherwise. Unlike paper, cardboard, metal and glass, plastic is made from thousands of different chemicals, additives and colors, combined in hundreds of different ways to create different types of plastics that can’t all be recycled together. That bright orange hard plastic bottle holding your laundry soap cannot be recycled along with a clear plastic squeezable ketchup bottle.
California’s lawsuit matters because of who it names and what it argues. While other governments have brought legal action against consumer brands for their plastic pollution, California’s case is the first to target a major plastic producer for falsely promoting recycling as a solution. The label on a plastic bottle may say Pepsi or Coca-Cola, but the polymers that make that bottle are produced by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell, which have made major investments in plastic production in part to hedge against eventual losses in their core fossil fuel business. These Big Oil companies are already facing a flood of lawsuits from communities and attorneys general — including Bonta — for allegedly lying about the role their products play in causing and perpetuating climate change. California’s lawsuit argues that Exxon concocted the same playbook to lie to the public and policymakers about the non-recyclability of its plastic products.