Why California is suing ExxonMobil for ‘perpetuating the lie’ of plastic recycling

California is going after ExxonMobil over what it calls a “campaign of deception” about plastic recycling.

The Golden State filed suit against the oil giant this week, alleging that it has misled consumers for years by marketing recycling as a way to prevent plastic pollution. Plastic is difficult and relatively costly to recycle, and very little of it ever gets rehashed, but the industry sold recycling as a feasible solution anyway.

That’s why California wants to hold ExxonMobil accountable for the role it says the company played in filling landfills and waterways with plastic. Plastics are made with fossil fuels, and California says ExxonMobil is the biggest producer of single-use plastic polymers.

ExxonMobil defended itself in an emailed response to The Verge, writing: “For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective. They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills.”

The Verge 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 length and clarity.

I think a lot of people around my age grew up thinking that recycling plastic is a good thing. Why go after ExxonMobil over recycling? 

It’s a difficult confrontation of a truth, especially since ExxonMobil and others have been so successful at perpetuating the lie.

A 14-year-old who I met yesterday was just distraught over the fact that all of the plastic items that she carefully selected to make sure they have the chasing arrows on it and then make sure that after she used it, she placed it thoughtfully and diligently in the blue container for recycling — that 95 percent of the time, that item was not recycled. Instead, it went into the landfill, the environment, or incinerated. And so she was having a hard time, and I’m sure she’s not alone, and others will have the same difficulty getting their head around the actual truth.

It’s really important for us, in my view, to confront problems. You need to face problems to fix them. One of them is a major problem created by ExxonMobil. They have perpetuated the myth of recycling. They have been engaged in a decadelong campaign of deception in which they have tried to convince the public that recycling of plastics, including single-use plastics, is sustainable when it’s not. When they know that only 5 percent is recycled [in the US].

Why would they say that if they knew that 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 frequently they use it, if they engage in a single-use throwaway lifestyle, they’re still being good stewards of the environment because it’s all recyclable and will be reused again somewhere in someone else’s household as a plastic product — they’re much more likely to buy more. And that’s exactly what’s happened. 

Your office says it “uncovered never-before-seen documents” as part of its investigation into the role fossil fuel companies play in causing plastic pollution. Can you give examples of what you found? Did anything surprise you? 

What some of the new documents that have not been seen before really get at is this type of greenwashing by ExxonMobil called advanced recycling.

The documents reveal to us that this newest, latest, purportedly greatest form of recycling is neither advanced nor is it recycling. It’s an old technology. They basically heat the plastic so that it melts into its smallest component parts, and that’s been used before Exxon and Mobil merged. Each experimented with it and then decided to no longer pursue it.

And the process doesn’t actually recycle plastic into other plastic, which is what people think they mean when their plastic is being recycled. But 92 percent of what advanced recycling turns plastic waste into is transportation fuel and other chemicals and resins and materials. It’s mostly fuel for your car, fuel for your boat, fuel for your plane. It’s burned once and emitted into the air, into the environment. That is not recycling.

What would California get out of winning this case? 

Right now, the harm to California from ExxonMobil’s lies and deception and the myth of recycling are a billion dollars a year in taxpayer-funded cleanup and damage in terms of the plastic pollution crisis that we’re facing. 

Here are the things that we would get if we win this case, and we believe we will. We will get an injunction that says ExxonMobil can no longer lie and can no longer perpetuate the myth of recycling. That they need to tell the truth going forward — they can’t say that things can be recycled when they can’t. 

We’ll also get an abatement fund, which will be funded by billions of dollars from ExxonMobil. It will pay for ongoing plastic pollution in California that harms our people, our environment, our natural resources. It will pay for a re-education campaign so that people can learn that recycling is only 5 percent of plastic waste, 95 percent is not recycled. It could also be used to further 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 is of that. 

We’ll also get a disgorgement of profits, which means that any profits that were wrongly secured by ExxonMobil because of their lies would have to be turned over. We also have some civil penalties and some fees that we’re seeking.

You’re the first Filipino American attorney general in California, the state with the most FilAms in the US. I used to live in Long Beach, California, where there’s a big Southeast Asian community and also a lot of air pollution from all the vessel and truck traffic surrounding the port in that area. Does this ever get personal for you — the impact that pollution from oil and gas operations disproportionately has on immigrant communities? 

My oldest daughter, when she was in high school, she came up to me and she said, “Dad is this weird?” She said, “My friends and I have been talking, and we decided that we don’t want to have kids because we don’t want to bring a new life into a dying planet.” And I will always remember that. That was a gut punch. 

That one made me really think. It made me worry. It kept me up at night. It made me question whether we were on pace to fulfill our duty as elected officials, to pass on to the next generation a better society and world than we’ve had. I thought we might be certainly behind schedule and maybe at the 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 fulfill our duty, our ethical obligations, and make sure that we’re bringing cases that are strong and sound, based on facts and law. It’s consistent with my values, my lived experiences. The law and the facts all point in the same direction on this case.