California Is Investigating Big Oil for Allegedly Misleading the Public On Plastic Recyclinghttps://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095305949/california-is-investigating-big-oil-for-allegedly-misleading-the-public-on-recycAccusing the country's largest oil and gas companies of "a half-century campaign of deception," California's attorney general opened an investigation Thursday into the possible role the companies played promoting the idea that plastics could be recycled, in an effort to manipulate the public to buy more of it.Attorney General Rob Bonta said the fossil fuel industry benefited financially from the industry's misleading statements which he said go back decades. Bonta has so far subpoenaed ExxonMobil seeking information and documents.
... "For more than half a century, the plastics industry has engaged in an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis," ... "The truth is: The vast majority of plastic cannot be recycled."
The announcement cited NPR and the PBS series Frontline's 2020 investigation into the oil and gas industry which uncovered documents showing top officials knew that recycling plastic was unlikely to work but spent tens of millions of dollars telling the public the opposite.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycledStarting in the 1980s, the industry launched dozens of ads, nonprofits, and campaigns touting the benefits of recycling plastic – and placing the responsibility on consumers – even as their own documents warned that recycling was "infeasible" and that there was "serious doubt" that plastic recycling "can ever be made viable on an economic basis," the investigation found.
... Industry officials have told NPR in the past that the industry has never misled the public and believes it can make plastic recycling work, though they were not able to specify how. In 40 years, no more than 10 percent of all plastic has ever been recycled.
At a press conference, Bonta said his office's preliminary findings have provided them with enough information to proceed with an investigation.
"We are not prejudging this, but there is information, significant amounts of it, that is compelling and in the public sphere that has led us to a good faith belief that we should be subpoenaing ExxonMobil to get more information," Bonta said.
"There is a broad belief that plastics are recyclable. That has been the result of the misinformation campaign, of the deception, that consumers have been manipulated to believe that plastic is recyclable. It was a strategy as far as we can tell."Officials say the investigation also hopes to determine whether any deception is still ongoing. Critics of the oil industry have raised concerns about the industry's current $1.5 billion effort, which launched in 2019 under the banner "The Alliance to End Plastic Waste" and is made up of the country's largest oil and plastic producers. Through glossy ads and small demonstration projects, the group promotes plastic recycling and clean up efforts rather than using less plastic.
Bonta said his office is eager to move quickly with the investigation and get hold of the documents they are looking for.
-------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycledhttps://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycledNPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.
The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.
Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.
"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.
... It may have sounded like an environmentalist's message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.
Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.
Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s.
... At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for top industry executives.
Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.
"There is no recovery from obsolete products," it says.
It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.
"A degradation of resin properties and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through aging, and in any reclamation process," the report told executives.
Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."
And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "can't yet be justified economically."
... NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed by the mid-1990s. Mobil's Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for example. Amoco's project to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Dow and Huntsman's highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in national parks made it to seven out of 419 parks before the companies cut funding.
None of them was able to get past the economics: Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash.
Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that. ... "They knew that the infrastructure wasn't there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot."
... Lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith's community too. A report given to top officials at the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the problems.
"The [recycling] code is being misused," it says bluntly. "Companies are using it as a 'green' marketing tool."The code is creating "unrealistic expectations" about how much plastic can actually be recycled, it told them.
... "It's pure manipulation of the consumer," ... Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.------------------------------------------------
Plastics Industry Insiders Reveal the Truth About Recyclinghttps://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/plastics-industry-insiders-reveal-the-truth-about-recycling/
