ExxonMobil isn’t any stranger to environmental lawsuits, however the newest assault on the oil & gasoline large’s recycling advertising and marketing practices may open it as much as a brand new period of authorized battles.
In a lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court docket, California’s Lawyer Basic Rob Bonta alleges ExxonMobil has engaged in a “decades-long marketing campaign of deception” to persuade shoppers that recycling is a viable answer to plastic waste, regardless of understanding it’s actually a “nonviable” method to deal with the sheer quantity of plastic it produces. “This marketing campaign of deception continues to this present 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 within the blue bin was going to be incinerated, go into the atmosphere or go right into a landfill,” Bonta advised CNBC of the lawsuit Tuesday. “They knew and so they lied.”
In a follow-up assertion after the lawsuit went public, Bonta claimed that 92% of the plastic waste processed by way of ExxonMobil’s so-called “superior recycling” expertise doesn’t turn into recycled plastic, however gas. And the plastics which can be produced “comprise so little plastic waste that they’re successfully virgin plastics deceptively marketed as ‘round.’”
The Lawyer Basic additionally mentioned that plastics produced by way of 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 an announcement to Fortune.
“For many years, California officers have identified their recycling system isn’t efficient. They did not act, and now they search accountable others. As a substitute of suing us, they may have labored with us to repair the issue and maintain plastic out of landfills,” ExxonMobil consultant Lauren Kight mentioned.
Knight added that ExxonMobil has processed greater than 60 million kilos of plastic waste into usable uncooked supplies so far utilizing superior recycling.
That’s so much. Nevertheless it’s effectively in need of ExxonMobil’s publicly acknowledged aim of “about 1 billion kilos of annual superior recycling capability by year-end 2026, assuming supportive public coverage.”
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 opponents, in line with a latest report from the Austrian philanthropic group Minderoo Basis.
The California lawyer common’s lawsuit towards ExxonMobil might also have opened the oil & gasoline large 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 swimsuit towards ExxonMobil in San Francisco this week.
“As alleged in our grievance, Exxon profited by claiming plastics are secure and recyclable. However we all know higher now—the environment and well being have been being sacrificed simply to guard Exxon’s backside line,” Allison Chin, president of the Sierra Membership’s board of administrators, mentioned in an announcement describing the swimsuit on Monday.