Plastics manufacturers accused of lying about recycling

“The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of the fossil fuel liability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they caused.”

According to The Guardian, plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. This requires careful sorting because most of the thousands of chemically different varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. This makes an already expensive process even more expensive. Another problem: the material degrades with each reuse, meaning it can typically only be used once or twice.

The industry has known about these existential issues for decades but has hidden the information in its marketing campaigns, the report says.

The investigation builds on previous investigations as well as recently released internal documents illustrating the extent of the decade-long campaign.

Industry insiders over the past few decades have variously called plastic recycling “uneconomical,” said it “cannot be seen as a permanent solution to the solid waste problem,” and said it “cannot continue indefinitely,” the revelations show.

The authors say the evidence suggests oil and petrochemical companies and their trade associations may have violated laws designed to protect the public from misleading marketing and environmental pollution.

In the 1950s, plastics manufacturers came up with an idea to provide an ever-growing market for their products: disposability. “They knew that if they focused on disposables [пластмассах]people will buy and buy and buy,” said Davis Allen, CCI investigative researcher and lead author of the report.

At a 1956 industry conference, the Plastics Industry Society, a trade group, recommended that manufacturers focus on “low cost, high volume” and “consumability” and aim for materials to end up “in the dumpster.” (The Society is now known as the Plastics Industry Association)

Over the ensuing decades, the industry told the public that plastic could easily be disposed of in landfills or burned in incinerators. But in the 1980s, as municipalities began considering bans on grocery bags and other plastic products, the industry began promoting a new solution: recycling.

The report shows that the industry has long known that recycling plastics is not economically or practically feasible. A 1986 internal report by the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solution to the solid waste problem.” [пластмасс]as this simply extends the time until the product is disposed of.”

In 1989, the founding director of the Vinyl Institute told a trade conference, “Recycling cannot continue indefinitely and does not solve the solid waste problem.”

Despite this knowledge, the Plastics Industry Society established the Plastics Recycling Fund in 1984, bringing together petrochemical companies and bottlers, and launched a campaign to increase the sector’s commitment to recycling.

In 1988, the trade group released a widely accepted symbol for recyclable plastics – and began using it on packaging. Experts have long said the symbol is misleading, and federal regulators recently echoed their concerns.

The Plastics Industry Society also created a plastics recycling research center at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1985, a year after state legislators passed mandatory recycling legislation. In 1988, the industry group the Council for Solid Waste Solutions launched a recycling pilot project in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the city council had just voted to ban the use of polystyrene plastic, or expanded polystyrene foam.

And in the early 1990s, another industry group ran an ad in Ladies’ Home Journal that said, “A bottle can come back like a bottle, again and again.”

All this time, behind closed doors, industry leaders have argued that recycling is not a real solution, The Guardian notes.

In 1994, a representative from Eastman Chemical spoke at an industry conference about the need for adequate plastics recycling infrastructure. “While this may become a reality someday,” he said, “it’s more likely that we’ll wake up and realize we’re not going to recycle the way we solve the solid waste problem.” That same year, an Exxon employee told American Plastics Council staff: “We are committed to [по переработке пластмасс]but we don’t strive for results.”

“It’s obvious they’re committing fraud,” Wiles said.

The report does not allege that the companies violated specific laws. But Alyssa Joel, a report co-author and attorney, said she suspects they violated protections against public disorder, racketeering and consumer fraud.

Industry misconduct continues today, the report claims. Over the past few years, industry lobbying groups have promoted so-called chemical recycling, which breaks down plastic polymers into tiny molecules to make new plastics, synthetic fuels and other products. But the process creates pollution and is even more energy-intensive than traditional plastic recycling.

The plastics sector has long known that chemical recycling is also not a true solution to the plastic waste problem, the report says. At a trade meeting in 1994, Exxon Chemical vice president Irwin Levovitz called one common form of chemical recycling “a fundamentally uneconomical process.” And in 2003, a longtime trade consultant criticized the industry for promoting chemical recycling, calling it “yet another example of how unscientific has infiltrated the minds of both industry and environmental activists.”

“This is just another example, a new version of deception that we have seen before,” Allen emphasizes.

The report comes amid growing public scrutiny of the plastics industry and its recycling. Two years ago, California Attorney General Rob Bonta publicly launched an investigation into fossil fuel and petrochemical producers “for their role in creating and worsening the global plastics pollution crisis.”

A toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last February also sparked a movement to ban vinyl chloride, a carcinogen used to make plastic. Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a health review of the chemical, the first step toward a potential ban.

The public is also increasingly concerned about the climate impact of the production and disposal of plastics, which account for 3.4% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years, two dozen American cities and states have sued the oil industry for covering up the dangers of the climate crisis. Likewise, Wiles said, taking the oil and petrochemical industries to court for “consciously deceiving” the public could force them to change their business models.

“I think the first step in solving the problem is holding companies accountable,” he said.