California Praised for Probe Into Plastics Industry’s 50-Year Misinformation Campaign

California Attorney General Rob Bonta received applause Thursday for the launch of a probe into whether the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries engaged in an “aggressive” decades-long campaign to deceptively convince the public “that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.”

As part of its probe, Bonta also announced he’d issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil over its alleged disinformation campaign.

His office pointed to research showing that ExxonMobil’s polymers, the manufacturing of which requires fossil fuels, “account for more single-use plastic waste than any other company.” The AG also said the firm was “an active participant in the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, which spent millions of dollars in the 1980s to convince the public we could recycle our way out of the plastics problem.”

Emily Jeffers of the Center for Biological Diversity stated that “California is taking a crucial step toward holding oil companies responsible for the vast volume of plastic trash that’s contaminating almost every corner of our planet.”

The attorney general, in his statement, pointed to data showing the rate of recycling far out of pace with that of plastics produced.

“The vast majority of plastic cannot be recycled, and the recycling rate has never surpassed 9%. Every week, we consume the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic through the water we drink, the food we eat, and the air we breathe,” he noted.

Bonta described the probe as a “first-of-its-kind investigation [that] will examine the fossil fuel industry’s role in creating and exacerbating the plastics pollution crisis,” which is on track to worsen, “and what laws, if any, have been broken in the process.”

Targeted companies will be those “that have caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.” The probe will center on their “role in perpetuating myths around recycling and the extent to which this deception is still ongoing.”

Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, said that “as the AG’s subpoena of ExxonMobil demonstrates, the parallels to climate deception are far from coincidental. Plastics are fossil fuels in another form. Many of the same companies whose products drive the climate crisis are also leading producers of plastics.”

“Against the mountains of evidence these same companies misled the public for decades about the climate impacts of their products,” Muffett said that “it is reasonable and appropriate to investigate whether and how they used a similar playbook for plastics.”

Noting that the plastic industry’s impacts are “diverse, widespread, and accelerating,” he added that “while California’s action is the first of its kind, it is unlikely to be the last.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org, written by Andrea Germanos.