(CN) — California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced he would begin investigating major petrochemical companies for their role in creating global plastic pollution problems. His first target: ExxonMobil.
On Thursday, Bonta's office subpoenaed to ExxonMobil, one of the largest oil and gas corporations, in an effort to understand the extent to which it knew recycling plastic was an ineffective means of waste management but pursued it anyway to trick consumers into thinking single-use plastics have little to no environmental repercussions.
“We’re launching an investigation into the plastics industry for its role in causing the global plastic pollution crisis and deceiving the public,” Bonta said. “Plastic pollution is seeping into our water, poisoning our environment and blighting our landscapes.”
While those in the plastics industry and beverage industry are eager to point to the benefits of recycling plastic, the reality on the ground is that most plastics are never recycled and end up in landfills in the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, they are strewn along waterways and end up littered in landscapes and along beaches.
About halfway between Los Angeles and Hawaii, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of floating trash comprised primarily of discarded plastic, floats in the open water.
The gyre of discarded rubbish has grown exponentially, increasing ten-fold every single decade since 1945, to its present dimensions of 600,000 square miles — roughly the size of Alaska. It weighs an estimated 87,000 tons.
Bonta’s office made it clear while it is only an investigation at this point, the case could mirror those that claimed companies knew they were contributing to climate problems, but withheld that evidence from the public.
Those investigations and lawsuits focus on what the companies knew, when they knew it and how their internal knowledge differed from their public professions.
Bonta’s investigation would be the first of its kind into plastic pollution, as public awareness about the ineffectiveness of plastic recycling has yet to catch up to the data and the facts on the ground.
But Bonta said unequivocally Thursday that recycling is not effective.
“The truth is: The vast majority of plastic cannot be recycled, and the recycling rate has never surpassed 9%,” he said in a statement.
Other entities have taken similarly novel legal approaches to hold large corporations responsible for plastic pollution.
Last year, the Earth Island Institute filed a lawsuit against large corporations — Crystal Geyser Water Company, Clorox, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Nestlé USA, Mars, Danone North America, Mondelez International, Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble — saying their use of the recycle symbol on their products misled consumers.
“The misrepresentation claims are premised on the fact that when consumers see the recycle symbol on the plastic packaging, they think that when they put it in a little blue bin it will be recycled,” Noor Rahman, an attorney for Earth Island, told Courthouse News last year. “But 90% of the time it can’t be.”
ExxonMobil said California's confrontational approach is counterproductive, as the company is actively working toward making plastic recycling more pervasive and efficient.
"We are focused on solutions and meritless allegations like these distract from the important collaborative work that is underway to enhance waste management and improve circularity," the company said in an emailed statement.
Plastic is a petroleum-based product, so when oil and gas prices plummeted precipitously in 2020, the price of creating virgin plastic fell as well. Making a plastic bottle from recycled rather than virgin material is about 83% to 93% more expensive, according to market analysts at the Independent Commodity Intelligence Services.
As such, most plastics produced are collected but few of it is recycled.
Jenna Jambeck, a researcher with the University of Georgia who investigates plastic collection and recycling systems, published a study in 2017 that found less than 10% of the 6.3 billion tons of produced plastics have ever been recycled.
“There are people alive today who remember a world without plastics,” said Jambeck when she published the study. “But they have become so ubiquitous that you can’t go anywhere without finding plastic waste in our environment, including our oceans.”
The pollution has grown worse in recent years, particularly after China stopped accepting plastics and other materials from foreign countries in 2018. Previously, China served as the main destination for American recycling efforts. While much of the plastics sent to China ended up in landfills or discarded into the ocean, the situation has gotten worse.
The United States started shipping its recyclable waste to Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia in 2018, but those countries began to institute bans on recycling as well. Presently, the United States ships most of its recyclable items to Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Laos, Ethiopia, Kenya and Senegal, countries with lax or nonexistent environmental laws. Much of the material is simply dumped, finding its way into the environment.
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