ExxonMobil isn’t any stranger to environmental lawsuits, however the newest assault on the oil & gasoline big’s recycling advertising and marketing practices might open it as much as a brand new period of authorized battles.
In a lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Courtroom, California’s Lawyer Basic Rob Bonta alleges ExxonMobil has engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception” to persuade shoppers that recycling is a viable answer to plastic waste, regardless of realizing it’s in actual fact a “nonviable” option to deal with the sheer quantity of plastic it produces. “This campaign of deception continues to this day,” the lawsuit states.
Bonta additional alleges that ExxonMobil breached state water air pollution laws, and engaged in deceptive environmental advertising and marketing, deceptive promoting, illegal, unfair, or fraudulent enterprise practices, and extra.
“ExxonMobil knew that 95% of the plastic in the blue bin was going to be incinerated, go into the environment or go into a landfill,” Bonta instructed CNBC of the lawsuit Tuesday. “They knew and they lied.”
In a follow-up assertion after the lawsuit went public, Bonta claimed that 92% of the plastic waste processed by ExxonMobil’s so-called “advanced recycling” expertise doesn’t change into recycled plastic, however gas. And the plastics which might be produced “contain so little plastic waste that they are effectively virgin plastics deceptively marketed as ‘circular.’”
The Lawyer Basic additionally stated that plastics produced by ExxonMobil’s superior recycling program account for lower than 1% of the corporate’s complete virgin plastic manufacturing capability.
In response, ExxonMobil blamed authorities officers for the damaged recycling system within the state of California in a press release to Fortune.
“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 and keep plastic out of landfills,” ExxonMobil consultant Lauren Kight stated.
Knight added that ExxonMobil has processed greater than 60 million kilos of plastic waste into usable uncooked supplies to this point utilizing superior recycling.
That’s quite a bit. However it’s properly in need of ExxonMobil’s publicly acknowledged aim of “about 1 billion pounds of annual advanced recycling capacity by year-end 2026, assuming supportive public policy.”
It’s additionally a drop within the bucket in comparison with the roughly 400 million tonnes—tonnes, not kilos—of plastic waste that’s produced globally every year. ExxonMobil alone produced 6 million tonnes of latest single-use plastics in 2021, greater than any of its rivals, in accordance with a current report from the Austrian philanthropic group Minderoo Basis.
The California legal professional basic’s lawsuit towards ExxonMobil might also have opened the oil & gasoline big as much as a brand new stream of authorized battles that concentrate on false promoting and false advertising and marketing claims. A number of nonprofit organizations, together with the Sierra Membership and the Surfrider Basis, filed a separate, however comparable go well with towards ExxonMobil in San Francisco this week.
“As alleged in our complaint, Exxon profited by claiming plastics are safe and recyclable. But we know better now—our environment and health were being sacrificed just to protect Exxon’s bottom line,” Allison Chin, president of the Sierra Membership’s board of administrators, stated in a press release describing the go well with on Monday.
