Alleging Decades of Lies, California Sues ExxonMobil Over Plastic Pollution Crisis

California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil on Monday, accusing the oil and gas giant of knowingly contributing to “one of the most devastating global environmental crises of our time” while misleading the public about recycling as a solution.

The much-anticipated lawsuit is the first in which a state has gone after a big plastics manufacturer for environmental harm. It claims ExxonMobil is substantially responsible for “the deluge of plastic pollution that has harmed and continues to harm California’s environment, wildlife, natural resources, and people.” 

The company “deceived Californians for almost half a century by promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis,” and Exxon’s new claims around “advanced” or “chemical” recycling are more of the same, according to the lawsuit. It cites investigative reporting from Inside Climate News and a raft of other sources, including internal company documents.

As many as 100 other, yet-to-be-named defendants could be added as Bonta’s investigation continues.

The lawsuit joins dozens that have been filed nationally since 2015, targeting the plastics industry, mostly by citizens or environmental groups. More recently, the offices of state attorneys general have filed their own, including Minnesota, Connecticut and New York, suing companies that use or sell plastic products. In August, Walmart and Reynolds Consumer Products agreed to stop selling certain plastic bags in Minnesota for two-and-a-half years, after that state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, argued in court that the companies had falsely marketed them as recyclable. 

But the California lawsuit stands apart, stepping up the attack by throwing the legal weight of the largest state in the country against Exxon, described by Bonta as the largest producer in the world of the polymers used to make the most troublesome of plastics: single-use packaging or products that often end up as waterway-choking litter.

Bonta said he’s seeking billions of dollars from Exxon to fund the abatement of a host of harms from plastic pollution in California. 

Potentially triggering a First Amendment free speech fight, the lawsuit, filed in state Superior Court in San Francisco, also seeks an order to stop Exxon from using such terms as “advanced recycling,” “chemical recycling,” “circular,” “certified circular polymers” or even “recyclable” when describing any of its products or operations. 

“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 a press release. “ExxonMobil lied to further its record-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health. 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.”

Exxon responded with a written statement, blaming California for failed plastics recycling, and doubling down on chemical recycling technology as a solution.

“For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective,” the company said. “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 first step would be to acknowledge what their counterparts across the U.S. know: advanced recycling works. To date, we’ve processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills.”

The United Nations estimates that the world produces about 400 million metric tons of plastic waste a year, or roughly 882 billion pounds.

Legal Expert Sees ‘Mountain of Evidence’

Bonta announced an investigation into Exxon and plastic pollution in April 2022. He is also suing Exxon and other oil companies over alleged deception regarding climate change.

The plastics lawsuit is 147 pages and was described by legal scholar Patrick Parenteau, senior professor emeritus at Vermont Law School, as a “nuclear bomb aimed at Exxon.”

“It is incredibly detailed with factual allegations backed up by documents,” Parenteau said. “It has serious quantitative analysis about how manifestly deceptive” Exxon’s recycling claims have been, he said.

California “is the state that can take them on,” he added. “They have the muscle and the money and the staying power to do it.”

He cited the sought-after injunction on certain environmental claims, words or phrases as especially surprising. He said that part of the lawsuit would likely test legal precedence over the definitions of commercial speech and political speech and what is protected or unprotected speech. Parenteau added that he wouldn’t be surprised if those questions end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But overall, Parenteau said, California has “marshaled a mountain of evidence of wrongdoing. What it all adds up to, we will have to see.”

Environmental groups working to curtail plastic pollution praised the lawsuit.

“This is the single most consequential lawsuit filed against the plastics industry for its persistent and continued lying about plastics recycling,” said Judith Enck, president of the group Beyond Plastics and a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator. “The plastics industry has known for decades that unlike paper, glass and metal, plastics are not designed to be recycled and therefore do not achieve a high recycling rate. Yet the industry made every effort to convince the public otherwise while profiting off the planetary crisis it created.”

Her group has calculated that less than 6 percent of plastic waste is currently recycled.

She predicted the lawsuit would encourage similar actions from other states.

“This is the single most consequential lawsuit filed against the plastics industry.”

Judith Enck, Beyond Plastics president

Four environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, filed their own civil action against Exxon over plastic pollution on Monday in the same San Francisco court. That suit alleges that Exxon systematically led the public to believe that plastic waste is easily and safely disposable through recycling, incineration or landfills, when in reality, plastic persists in the environment for thousands of years, leaking toxic chemicals that are known to harm human health and the environment. 

“Plastic is choking the life out of our ocean,” said Tracy Quinn, president and CEO of Los Angeles-based nonprofit Heal the Bay, one of four plaintiffs in the second lawsuit. “It’s turning California shorelines into waste dumps. California taxpayers shell out an estimated $420 million each year to clean up and prevent plastic pollution from fouling our public places. Public money should be used for public good, not subsidizing big profits for Big Plastic.”

The American Chemistry Council, a lobbying arm of the plastic industry, and the Plastics Industry Association earlier this year sued Bonta to block his subpoenas of their association records. That case, in federal court in Washington, D.C., is still ongoing. 

ACC on Monday declined to comment on California’s Exxon lawsuit, noting that it was not named as a defendant. But ACC was mentioned several times in the lawsuit, described as working closely with Exxon to “spread deceptive ‘advanced recycling’ messages.”

Bonta Calls ‘Advanced’ Recycling a ‘PR Stunt’

The lawsuit sections dealing with advanced or chemical recycling were notable for their technical detail and references to internal company documents.

Advanced recycling is an umbrella term used to describe various industrial processes that seek to turn waste plastic back into the chemical feedstocks for new plastics. The lawsuit hit hard at Exxon’s chemical recycling facility that launched commercial operations in 2022 at its Baytown petrochemical plant near Houston.

Marketing materials give the impression that Exxon is able to recycle all plastic waste through its advanced recycling techniques, the lawsuit alleges. But in fact, the company’s chemical recycling facility in Baytown has a yield of only 8 percent, the lawsuit claims.

If that is the case, it means that no more than 8 percent of the incoming plastic waste to the Baytown plant is converted to feedstocks to make new plastic.

“The remaining 92 percent of the plastic waste co-processed becomes primarily fuels, which are ultimately destroyed after they are combusted,” according to the lawsuit. “Therefore, ExxonMobil’s claims that there are no limitations to endlessly recycling plastic waste are false because 92 percent of the plastic waste is destroyed (not made into new plastics) in each processing cycle.”

The company markets its Baytown plant as “advanced” recycling that produces “certified circular plastics,” using accounting methods that deceptively suggest those recycled plastics contain significant amounts of recycled polymers, the lawsuit claims. But they don’t, according to the lawsuit.

“ExxonMobil is correct that its ‘certified circular polymers’ are, in fact, identical to its virgin polymers. But this is not because co-processing magically transforms plastic waste into virgin-like plastics. They are identical because … ExxonMobil’s ‘certified circular polymers’ actually contain virtually no waste plastic,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit cites internal company documents that reference the technical processes at the company’s Baytown plant to make its assertion. Oil and gas refinery and petrochemical units are not designed to process large volumes of plastic waste, so it places limits on those materials, the lawsuit claims.

The company uses a pyrolysis process to break down plastic waste, yielding an oil and an ethane gas in the process, and then uses the ethane to make new plastic feedstocks, according to the lawsuit.

But the amount of ethane from pyrolysis is dwarfed by the virgin ethane that Exxon uses to make the building blocks for plastic, ethylene and propylene, the lawsuit claims.

“According to internal documents, the amount of plastic-derived ethane only constitutes 0.09 percent of the total ethane stream fed into the ethane steam cracker at Baytown,” the lawsuit claims. “This means that any plastic made from the resulting ethylene and propylene could only be composed of a maximum of 0.09 percent plastic waste.”

The plastic Exxon makes “contains so little plastic they are effectively new plastic, but Exxon calls them circular,” Bonta said during a press conference on Monday. “It’s a PR stunt to distract the public. ExxonMobil spends millions to market the sham. The one thing ExxonMobil actually does recycle is lies.”

In a July interview for a joint reporting project by Inside Climate News and CBS News, an Exxon official defended the company’s chemical recycling efforts. 

“We’ve already processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste through our facility,” said Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for advanced recycling, while declining to comment on Bonta’s investigation. “We have ambitions to go even further to 1 billion pounds. And so to say that’s a myth when we’re actually doing it, I’m not sure I’m aligned with that.”

The lawsuit cited reporting by Inside Climate News three times as support for its allegations.

Inside Climate News in November 2023 reported on Exxon’s role in the Houston Recycling Collaboration, a public-private partnership launched in 2022 that was designed to scale up plastic recycling to 90 percent from 10 percent or less, with a big emphasis on chemical recycling.

But Inside Climate News found that electronic tracking of plastic waste collected for the collaboration in 2023 showed it wasn’t getting recycled after all, and instead was being piled up on a five-acre lot outside of Houston; that construction of a planned sorting facility touted as necessary for the program was behind schedule; and that ExxonMobil was declining to reveal basic information about its Baytown chemical recycling facility, including details that could support or undermine its environmental claims.

The California lawsuit noted specifically that Exxon declined to provide a copy of a lifecycle analysis of its chemical recycling technology to Inside Climate News for its reporting last year.

After the Houston Recycling Collaboration doubled down on its “all plastics” collection program, CBS News and Inside Climate found in August that the plastic waste stockpile had grown. The business holding the material had failed three inspections by the Harris County fire marshal and was still waiting for approval of its application to operate a municipal solid waste recycling facility. 

Bonta credited investigative reporting by journalists for helping to spur the lawsuit. He acknowledged the lawsuit could take two or three years to resolve, but added: “Today we are saying enough, no more greenwashing, no more Californians footing the bill for the enduring deception. It’s time to pay for the damages its lies have cost.”