California sues ExxonMobil, alleging a 'campaign of deception' about plastics recycling

California’s attorney general sued ExxonMobil on Monday, alleging that the company had waged a “campaign of deception” for decades to mislead consumers and convince them that recycling was a viable solution for plastic waste. 

The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court of California in San Francisco, says ExxonMobil promoted recycling as a “cure-all for plastic waste,” even though the company knew that plastic would be difficult to eradicate and that certain methods of recycling could not process much of the waste produced.  

It further alleges that ExxonMobil violated state regulations over water pollution and misleading marketing, among others.  

"ExxonMobil promoted and vastly increased its production of single-use plastic while doling out false promises that its plastics are sustainable and recyclable and false promises that recycling would take care of ensuing plastic waste," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference.

He added: "The company has propped up sham solutions, manipulated the public and lied to consumers. ... It's time ExxonMobil is held accountable."

ExxonMobil said in a statement responding to the lawsuit that "advanced recycling" is effective and that the company has kept more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste out of landfills using the method. The term refers to chemical recycling: a process that breaks plastic down to its basic chemical components for potential reuse.

"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," ExxonMobil said.

The lawsuit represents a new avenue in the legal fight to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for pollution and their aggressive marketing practices. In other lawsuits, state attorneys general and environmental nonprofits have sued oil and gas giants over carbon pollution and its role in climate change and extreme weather disasters. 

The new suit, which the attorney general’s office is billing as the first of its kind, will put the lifecycle of plastics and the potential harms of microplastics at center stage. 

The state is requesting a jury trial and seeking to make ExxonMobil hand over some of its profits along with other civil penalties. Bonta said that he hopes to create an abatement fund to clean up pollution.

Environmental groups cheered the announcement. 

"This is the big one. I hope this is going to open the floodgates," said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, a nationwide project seeking to end plastic pollution.

Enck said that previous lawsuits have targeted individual plastic products or companies that sell them, but "this is the first to go upstream and make an effort to hold the production companies accountable."

She added that she is skeptical of claims about the benefits of chemical recycling because the process often turns plastic into transportation fuel.

The lawsuit says ExxonMobil is the world’s largest producer of polymers used to make single-use plastics, which are derived from fossil fuels. 

It alleges that ExxonMobil and its predecessor companies, Exxon and Mobil, for decades promoted single-use plastics through industry groups, advertising campaigns and other marketing initiatives, at one point even using Boy Scouts to sell plastic kitchen and trash bags as a fundraiser. 

The industry groups encouraged Americans to pursue a "throw-away lifestyle" and downplayed public concerns about plastics’ ecological risks, the lawsuit says. In 1973, industry leaders called those concerned about plastic waste “enemies,” according to internal communications from the Society of the Plastics Industry (now known as the Plastics Industry Association), which are cited in the lawsuit. 

When public concerns grew, ExxonMobil and its predecessors pushed mechanical recycling as a solution, despite internal industry warnings that it was not a permanent or feasible fix. One example cited in the suit: Exxon, Mobil and other petrochemical groups formed the Council for Solid Waste Solutions in 1988, which took out a 12-page advertisement in Time magazine urging recycling. 

In the U.S., the plastic recycling rate has never exceeded 9%, the lawsuit says. 

It also calls microplastic pollution a “crisis.”

Scientists have found microplastics in fresh snowfall in Antarctica, near the summit of Everest and in the Marianas Trench — evidence of how ubiquitous this type of pollution has become. 

Microplastics can have harmful effects on both the environment and human health, some scientists say. Early studies suggest they could cause inflammatory responses and cell damage in the human body.

A study published earlier this year showed that people who have microplastics and nanoplastics in the plaque lining a major blood vessel in the neck may have a higher risk of heart attack, stroke or death.

Still, more research is needed to understand the risks microplastics may pose to human health. 

Leehi Yona, an assistant professor of environmental and climate law at Cornell University, said the lawsuit opens a second front in the fight to hold fossil fuel companies accountable. 

“We’ve seen quite a few lawsuits that have been based on the evidence around what these companies knew about climate change and how they deceived the public,” Yona said. (California is one of many states and localities that have sued the companies over their contributions to climate change.)

But the new lawsuit expands that approach to claims about plastics, she said. 

“In my mind, these lawsuits are incredibly important not only for their legal merits, but also to draw attention to the misrepresentations of some of these companies in the same way lawsuits against the tobacco industry were about the way they misrepresented connections between smoking and lung cancer,” Yona said.

Several nonprofit organizations, including the Sierra Club, the Surfrider Foundation, Heal the Bay and Baykeeper, together filed a separate lawsuit against ExxonMobil on Monday, also in San Francisco. The attorney general’s office and the nonprofits are coordinating their legal approach and both lawsuits make similar claims.