California Attorney General Rob Bonta has announced that the state has filed a lawsuit against oil major ExxonMobil for its alleged engagement in “a decades-long campaign of deception,” which led to and exacerbated the worldwide plastics pollution crisis, a press release from the California Department of Justice said.
By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
The complaint, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleges that over the past half century, ExxonMobil has been misleading Californians through public statements and “slick marketing” that promised recycling would tackle the continuously increasing plastic waste the oil company produces.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to compel ExxonMobil to stop its deceptive practices, which threaten both the public and the environment. ExxonMobil is the largest promoter and producer of polymers — the building blocks of single-use plastics — in California.
“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,” Bonta said in the press release.
Bonta is seeking an abatement fund, as well as disgorgement — a legal remedy requiring the relinquishment of profits made by illegal or unethical means — and civil penalties for harm inflicted upon the environment and California communities by plastic pollution.
“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 record-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health,” Bonta said in the press release. “Today’s lawsuit shows the fullest picture to date of ExxonMobil’s decades-long deception, and we are asking the court to hold ExxonMobil fully accountable for its role in actively creating and exacerbating the plastics pollution crisis through its campaign of deception.”
Since 1970, the oil company’s trade association adapted and promoted its “chasing arrows” symbol, which has become strongly associated with recycling. It has led consumers to believe items containing the symbol are able to be and will be recycled if placed in a recycling bin. The reality is that just roughly five percent of plastic waste in the United States gets recycled, and the rate of recycling has never been more than nine percent.
“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,” the press release said.
Recently, the company has continued to deceive the public by promoting “advanced recycling,” a plastics industry umbrella term for a variety of solvent- or heat-based technologies that are able to theoretically convert particular kinds of plastic waste to become petrochemical feedstock that is then used in the making of new plastic.
ExxonMobil promotes the “advanced recycling” program as a technological breakthrough that will result in plastics becoming sustainable while concealing important truths regarding technical limitations of the process.
One of these limitations is that most plastic waste — 92 percent — produced through “advanced recycling” technology primarily becomes fuels rather than recycled plastic. The plastics produced through the process are also essentially virgin plastics because they contain such a small amount of plastic waste, but are deceptively marketed as “circular.”
Under the company’s best case scenario, the production of plastics through the “advanced recycling” program will only make up less than a percent of its total production capacity of virgin plastic, which keeps on growing.
The program is also not able to handle large volumes of post-consumer plastics like potato chip bags without equipment safety and performance risks.
“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,” the press release said.
ExxonMobil is the largest producer of plastic waste from single-use plastics. In excess of 26 million pounds of garbage has been collected from waterways and beaches in California since 1985, and roughly 81 percent of this waste is plastic. Most plastics collected yearly on California Coastal Cleanup Day are traceable to the polymer resins produced by ExxonMobil.
“The global plastics waste and pollution crisis has been driven by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. Around the world each year, an estimated 12.1 million tons of plastic waste become aquatic pollution, and 19.8 million tons are polluted to land,” the press release said. “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.”
Single-use plastics — such as those used to make plastic bags, straws, packaging, disposable utensils and plasticware and other products — make up most plastic waste that pollutes the environment. Plastic is not biodegradable, but breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics. These tiny plastic pieces have been found in food, drinking water and the air we breathe. Most recently, they have been found in the blood, lungs and breast milk of the human body.
Bonta estimated the lawsuit’s unspecified damages would amount to “multiple billions of dollars,” reported The New York Times.
In an interview, Bonta commented that plastic pollution was “fueled by the myth of recycling, and the leader among them in perpetuating that myth is Exxon Mobil.”
The Surfrider Foundation, Sierra Club, Heal the Bay and Baykeeper have each filed their own lawsuits that raise similar issues regarding the role of ExxonMobil in the world’s plastics pollution crisis.
Cristen is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She holds a JD and an Ocean & Coastal Law Certificate from University of Oregon School of Law and an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of the short story collection The Smallest of Entryways, as well as the travel biography, Ernest’s Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway’s Life.
