Click the link to read the report on the Center for Climate Integrity website (Hat tip to H2ORadio). Here’s the introduction:
Plastic pollution is one of the most serious environmental crises facing the world today. Between 1950 and 2015, over 90% of plastics were landfilled, incinerated, or leaked into the environment. Plastic waste is ubiquitous—from our rivers, lakes, and oceans to roadways and coastlines. It is in “the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink.” One study estimates that humans ingest up to five grams or the equivalent of one credit card worth of plastic per week. Some of the largest oil and gas companies are among the 20 petrochemical companies responsible for more than half of all single-use plastics generated globally. ExxonMobil, for example, is the world’s top producer of single-use plastic polymers.
Underpinning this plastic waste crisis is a decades-long campaign of fraud and deception about the recyclability of plastics. Despite their long-standing knowledge that recycling plastic is neither technically nor economically viable, petrochemical companies—independently and through their industry trade associations and front groups—have engaged in fraudulent marketing and public education campaigns designed to mislead the public about the viability of plastic recycling as a solution to plastic waste. These efforts have effectively protected and expanded plastic markets, while stalling legislative or regulatory action that would meaningfully address plastic waste and pollution. Fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies have used the false promise of plastic recycling to exponentially increase virgin plastic production over the last six decades, creating and perpetuating the global plastic waste crisis and imposing significant costs on communities that are left to pay for the consequences.
Big Oil and the plastics industry—which includes petrochemical companies, their trade associations, and the front groups that represent their interests—should be held accountable for their campaign of deception much like the producers of tobacco, opioids, and toxic chemicals that engaged in similar schemes. This report lays the foundation for such a claim.
• Part II provides an overview of the well-established technical and economic limitations of plastic recycling.
• Part III describes how—in response to repeated waves of public backlash against plastic waste and subsequent threats of regulation—the plastics industry has “sold” plastic recycling to the American public to sell plastic.
• Part IV outlines the evidence of the plastics industry’s fraudulent and deceptive campaigns, which are more fully detailed in Appendix C.
Petrochemical companies and the plastics industry should be held liable for their coordinated campaign of deception and the resulting harms that communities are now facing. True accountability will put an end to the industry’s fraud of plastic recycling and open the door to real solutions to the plastic waste crisis that are currently out of reach.