California is pursuing ExxonMobil for what it calls a “campaign of deception” over plastic recycling.
The Golden State filed a lawsuit This week, the oil company filed a lawsuit against the oil giant, alleging that it has misled consumers for years by promoting recycling as a way to prevent plastic pollution. Plastic is difficult and relatively expensive to recycle, and very little of it is recycled again, but the industry sold recycling as a feasible solution anyway.
That's why California wants to hold ExxonMobil accountable for the role it says it played in filling landfills and waterways with plastic. Plastics are made from fossil fuels, and California says ExxonMobil is the largest producer of single-use plastic polymers.
California wants to hold ExxonMobil accountable
ExxonMobil defended itself in an emailed response to The edgewriting: “For decades, California officials have known their recycling system is ineffective. They failed to act and now they are looking to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills.”
The edge I spoke with California Attorney General Rob Bonta about plastic recycling and the allegations California makes in the landmark lawsuit.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
I think a lot of people my age grew up thinking that recycling plastic is a good thing. Why attack ExxonMobil for recycling?
It's a difficult confrontation with truth, especially since ExxonMobil and others have been so successful in perpetuating the lie.
A 14-year-old girl I met yesterday was distressed by the fact that all the plastic items she carefully selected to make sure they had the chase arrows and then made sure that after she used them, she carefully and diligently placed them in the blue recycling bin, that 95 percent of the time, that item was not recycled.. Instead, it ended up in a landfill, in the environment, or incinerated. And that's why she was having a hard time, and I'm sure she's not the only one, and others will have the same difficulty understanding the real truth.
In my opinion, it is very important for us to confront the problems. They have to be confronted in order to solve them. One of them is a major problem created by ExxonMobil. They have perpetuated the myth of recycling. They have been engaged in a campaign of deception for a decade in which they have tried to convince the public that recycling plastics, including single-use plastics, is sustainable, when it is not. When they know that only 5 percent is recycled (in the US).
Why would they say that if they knew it wasn't true? Well, because it increases their profits. It makes people buy more. If people buy plastics and believe that no matter how much they use, how often they use it, if they adopt a throwaway lifestyle, they are still good stewards of the environment because it's all recyclable and will be reused somewhere in someone else's house as a plastic product, they are much more likely to buy more. And that's exactly what has happened.
Your office says it “discovered previously unseen documents” as part of its investigation into the role fossil fuel companies play in plastic pollution. Can you give examples of what you found? Were you surprised by anything?
What some of the new documents that haven't been seen before really address is this kind of image-laundering by ExxonMobil called advanced recycling.
The documents reveal that this new, latest, and supposedly best form of recycling is neither advanced nor recyclable. It's an old technology. Basically, they heat the plastic so that it melts into its smallest components, and that was used before Exxon and Mobil merged. Each experimented with it and then decided not to do it anymore.
And the process doesn't actually recycle plastic into other plastic, which is what people think they mean when they say they recycle plastic. But 92 percent of what advanced recycling turns into plastic waste is transportation fuel and other chemicals, resins and materials. It's mostly fuel for your car, fuel for your boat, fuel for your plane. It's burned once and it's emitted into the air, into the environment. That's not recycling.
What would California gain by winning this case?
Right now, the damage to California caused by ExxonMobil's lies and deceptions and the recycling myth is $1 billion a year in taxpayer-funded cleanup and damage in terms of the plastic pollution crisis we face.
These are the things we would get if we win this case, and we believe we will. We will get a court order saying that ExxonMobil can no longer lie and perpetuate the recycling myth. That they must tell the truth in the future: they cannot say that things can be recycled when they cannot.
We'll also have an emissions reduction fund, which will be funded by billions of dollars from ExxonMobil. It will pay for the plastic pollution that continues to exist in California and harms our people, our environment, and our natural resources. It will pay for a re-education campaign so that people know that recycling accounts for only 5 percent of plastic waste — 95 percent of it is not recycled. It could also be used to do more research on microplastics, which are invisible plastic particles that are in our bodies, in the air, in our food, in our water, and to see what the human impact of that is.
We will also be given back our profits, meaning that all the profits ExxonMobil improperly obtained because of its lies would have to be returned. We are also asking for some civil penalties and fees to be imposed on us.
You are the first Filipino-American Attorney General in California, the state with the most Filipino Americans in the United States. I lived in Long Beach, California, where there is a large Southeast Asian community and also a lot of air pollution due to boat and truck traffic. surrounding the port in that area. Does this ever get personal to you – the impact that pollution from oil and gas operations has on health? has a disproportionate effect on immigrant communities?
My oldest daughter, when she was in high school, came up to me and said, “Dad, is this weird?” “My friends and I have been talking and we’ve decided that we don’t want to have kids because we don’t want to bring new life to a dying planet,” she replied. I’ll always remember that. It was a punch in the gut.
That made me think a lot. It worried me. It kept me up at night. It made me question whether we were on track to do our duty as elected officials, to pass on to the next generation a better society and a better world than we've had. I thought maybe we are certainly behind and maybe we're at risk of failing when it comes to protecting our climate and making sure that there's a planet for tomorrow. So that's personal.
Our lived experiences, our values, drive us. But we will also always do our duty, our ethical obligations, and make sure that we present strong, compelling cases, based on facts and the law. It is consistent with my values, my lived experiences. The law and the facts all point in the same direction in this case.
