California calls ExxonMobil’s recycling program a ‘campaign of deception’

In a lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta alleges ExxonMobil has engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception” to convince consumers that recycling is a viable solution to plastic waste, despite knowing it is in fact a “nonviable” way to handle the sheer volume of plastic it produces. “This campaign of deception continues to this day,” the lawsuit states.

Bonta further alleges that ExxonMobil breached state water pollution regulations, and engaged in misleading environmental marketing, misleading advertising, unlawful, unfair, or fraudulent business practices, and more.

“ExxonMobil knew that 95% of the plastic in the blue bin was going to be incinerated, go into the environment or go into a landfill,” Bonta told CNBC of the lawsuit Tuesday. “They knew and they lied.”

In a follow-up statement after the lawsuit went public, Bonta claimed that 92% of the plastic waste processed through ExxonMobil’s so-called “advanced recycling” technology does not become recycled plastic, but fuel. And the plastics that are produced “contain so little plastic waste that they are effectively virgin plastics deceptively marketed as ‘circular.’”

The Attorney General also said that plastics produced through ExxonMobil’s advanced recycling program account for less than 1% of the company’s total virgin plastic production capacity.

In response, ExxonMobil blamed government officials for the broken recycling system in the state of California in a statement to Fortune.

“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,” ExxonMobil representative Lauren Kight said.

Knight added that ExxonMobil has processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials to date using advanced recycling. 

That’s a lot. But it’s well short of ExxonMobil’s publicly stated goal of “about 1 billion pounds of annual advanced recycling capacity by year-end 2026, assuming supportive public policy.” 

It’s also a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly 400 million tonnes—tonnes, not pounds—of plastic waste that is produced globally each year. ExxonMobil alone produced 6 million tonnes of new single-use plastics in 2021, more than any of its competitors, according to a recent report from the Austrian philanthropic group Minderoo Foundation.

The California attorney general’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil may also have opened the oil & gas giant up to a new stream of legal battles that focus on false advertising and false marketing claims. Multiple nonprofit organizations, including the Sierra Club and the Surfrider Foundation, filed a separate, but similar suit against ExxonMobil in San Francisco this week.

 “As alleged in our complaint, Exxon profited by claiming plastics are safe and recyclable. But we know better now—our environment and health were being sacrificed just to protect Exxon’s bottom line,” Allison Chin, president of the Sierra Club’s board of directors, said in a statement describing the suit on Monday.