For 40 years, plastic and petrochemical companies have tried to convince the public that plastic can be recycled. But they have known for so long that plastic recycling will never work.
A report released last week by the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, or CCI, describes a “decade-long campaign of deception and deception” by Big Oil and the plastics industry to promote recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. New documents show that industry executives have pushed plastic recycling despite knowing since the 1980s that it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution,” and that recycled plastic will never be able to compete economically with unhealthy materials.
Today, the US recycling rate for plastics is up about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent.
The authors of the report compare the plastics industry’s recycling campaign to Big Oil’s tactics to convince the public that its products do not cause climate change. Many companies have been involved in both efforts, as plastics are made from fossil fuels. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement.
CCI traces industry support for plastic recycling back to the 1980s, when it was proposed as a response to widespread public concern about the material’s distribution—particularly as litter. With the threat of regulation looming large, industry representatives felt they had little choice but to “recycle or be banned.”
Even then, the industry recognized huge and potentially insurmountable obstacles to plastic recycling. Most importantly, there was no market for recycled plastic – it was too expensive and of low quality to compete with unhealthy materials. One document uncovered by CCI—a 1986 report from the plastics industry trade group the Vinyl Institute—noted that “purity and quality requirements imposed for many applications preclude the use of recycled materials.” In the end, the report concluded that recycling “only prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”
Representatives of plastics and petrochemical companies have repeatedly shared similar concerns at industry conferences, in meeting notes and elsewhere: that plastic recycling consumes too much energy, that it would only work for a small fraction of plastic waste, and that a rapidly growing supply of unusual materials would “kick the s–t out” of recycled plastics prices, as one official of the now-defunct American Plastics Council wrote in meeting notes obtained by CCI.
Davis Allen, an investigative researcher for CCI and the lead author of the report, said many of the new documents came from a former staff member of the American Plastics Council. Others came from industry document databases maintained by Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, San Francisco.
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The documents, Allen said, strongly suggest that the plastics and petrochemical industries see recycling as just a way to tame public outrage and stave off anti-plastic legislation. One document from 1994 quotes an Eastman Chemical representative as saying that while plastic recycling may one day become a reality, “it is more likely that we will wake up and realize that we are not going to recycle our way out of the solid waste problem ” Another document — handwritten notes from a meeting between Exxon Chemical and the American Plastics Council — quotes Exxon Chemical’s then-vice president as saying that, when it comes to recycling plastics, “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”
Still, trade groups and major petrochemical companies have invested heavily in public relations to improve plastic recycling’s image. They presented ambitious goals to increase the recycling rate, then remained silent when they failed, or changed the way they measured their progress. Ads “simply repeated the same lies about the viability of plastic recycling,” according to CCI. For example, one 1991 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed that “a bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again.” Meanwhile, educational materials created for use in schools have implied that recycling can ease students’ feelings of guilt about using disposable plastic foodware.
By the mid-1990s, the results seemed to be paying off. Industry polls have shown that public opinion about plastics has improved significantly and state-level efforts to ban or limit plastic production have decreased significantly – even though the dismal state of plastic recycling has not significantly improved.
Today, most plastic waste is incinerated or sent to landfills, where it creates dangerous air and water pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, environmental advocates say the “myth” of plastic recycling has facilitated the industry’s limitless expansion – plastic production has grown by almost 230 times since 1950. Plastic is expected to ride almost half of the growth in global demand for oil between 2017 and 2050.
CCI is not the first group to document the plastics industry’s misleading communication practices around recycling. A 2020 investigation of NPR and Frontline found ample evidence that the plastics industry and its trade groups promoted plastic recycling despite knowing it was “expensive” and “impractical.” Two former industry executives told the outlets that recycling was used to advertise “our way out” of negative PR.
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Since the mid-2010s, a second wave of anti-plastic outrage has prompted the plastics industry and its lobby groups to once again promote the promise of plastic recycling – only this time they are pushing so-called “chemical recycling,” which is believed to be able to melt plastic into its constituent polymers so that it can be turned back into new products. Although chemical recycling technology has been around for decades, most existing existing facilities – and there are only a few – are still unable to create new plastic products; they mostly turn plastic into chemicals or fossil fuels to be burned.
Lew Freeman, the Association of the Plastics Industry’s former vice president of government affairs, told Grist in an interview last year that there were “serious questions” about the extent to which chemical recycling could ever work. “The industry seems to be doing the same thing it did 30 years ago,” Freeman said.
Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers — a subgroup of the petrochemical industry trade organization the American Chemistry Council, which absorbed the American Plastics Council in 2002 — criticized the CCI report as “flawed.” In a statement, he said it “works against our goals of being more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today’s recycling technology.” Eisenberg did not specifically refute any of the claims made by CCI.
In response to Grist’s request for comment, the Vinyl Institute did not address any of the report’s claims, but said it is “committed to increasing” the amount of polyvinyl chloride — a type of plastic — that is recycled each year. Eastman Chemical and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment in time for publication.
CCI hopes its report “lays the groundwork” for more ambitious legal challenges against the plastics and petrochemical industries. According to Alyssa Johl, CCI’s vice president of legal and general counsel, most of the lawsuits to date have aimed the makers of specific products – for example, Neatwhich misleadingly placed the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on coffee pods that could not actually be recycled.
These lawsuits “don’t go far enough,” Johl said. In her view, future cases should target the entire industry — including the fossil fuel producers themselves and their trade organizations, highlighting the integral role they have played in promoting recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Such lawsuits would mostly be brought by cities or state attorneys general, Johl said, and could invoke public nuisance, consumer fraud, racketeering or conspiracy laws — similar to successful legal challenges brought against the tobacco and opioid industries.
The most promising push so far has come from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who in 2022 start investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for their role in what he called an “aggressive campaign to mislead the public” about the viability of plastic recycling. This investigation is ongoing.
