Concerns about plastic pollution have grown over the years as scientists have learned more about its damaging impact on the environment. Much of the effort so far has focused on recycling, but it turns out that much of the waste material cannot be recycled.
And a couple of lawsuits said the people who manufacture it knew it all along.
On Saturday many people showed up for CA Coastal Cleanup Dayand in Berkeley it wasn’t hard to find trash stuck in the nooks and crannies of the rocky coastline.
“Our biggest focus right now is on plastic,” said Sammi Orth, organizer of the cleanup. “Because plastic doesn’t break down. It breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re left with microplastics, the famous stuff that all our wildlife mistakes for food.”
Despite all the efforts to recycle, microplastics are now everywhere, on land, in water. They have even been found in the snowpack of the Sierra. Environmentalists said enough was enough, and they, along with the California attorney general, filed lawsuits in San Francisco on Monday against ExxonMobil, the world’s largest plastics producer.
“We know that Exxon has known for decades — because we’ve seen their internal documents — that plastics are not recyclable,” attorney Niall McCarthy said. “Despite that fact, they’re promoting to the California public that plastics are recyclable and misleading consumers into using their products, when in fact only five percent of plastics are recyclable.”
The biggest problem is the lightweight plastic films and bags. At Recology’s massive San Francisco plant, they have a mountain of material to recycle, and despite spending tens of millions on sorting equipment, spokesman Robert Reed said they still don’t have a way to process the plastic bags.
“When plastic bags are thrown into a recycling bin, they get mixed with other materials,” he said. “And when they get mixed like that, it’s very difficult to impossible to recycle them.”
“Exxon profited from the claim that plastic is disposable, safe and recyclable. And that’s just not true,” said Martha Kreeger, president of Sierra Club’s SF. “Exxon perpetuated the myth of recyclability to get consumers to buy more and more.”
In a written statement, Exxon refuted the claims, saying: “For decades, California officials have known their recycling system is ineffective. They failed to take action, and now they are trying to blame others.”
The company says it has had some success with a process called “advanced recycling,” which breaks down plastic film using heat or chemicals.
“Advanced recycling works,” they said in the statement. “To date, we’ve turned more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable resources, diverting it from landfills.”
But according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, this is merely a continuation of what many now call “the recycling myth.”
“What solution does Exxonmobil offer us? Plastic recycling, a farce, a lie, a deception,” Bonta said. “Since the 1970s, Exxonmobil has known the truth about plastic pollution and recycling and still publicly promotes the myth that plastic recycling is the answer.”
“What happened here,” said attorney McCarthy, “is that their deceptive marketing gave California residents a false sense of security, a belief that the plastic they were buying would actually be recycled. And in fact, it wasn’t.”
The environmentalists and the attorney general have each filed separate lawsuits in San Francisco federal court, but they expect them to be consolidated into one case.
They are asking the court to hold Exxon accountable for cleaning up what is an impossible mess to clean up. By doing so, they hope to make progress in the larger fight to force companies to stop generating so much plastic waste in the first place.
