The Plastic Crisis in California

We are currently living through a plastic waste and pollution crisis. Since the 1950s, the world has continued to produce more and more plastic – but the necessary solutions for dealing with plastic waste have not been able to keep pace with ever-increasing production. Today, more than 400 million tons of plastic waste are produced worldwide each year, but only 5-6 percent is recycled.

This is not an accident. For decades, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries have promoted the myth that we can recycle our way out of the plastic pollution problem. Even though they knew widespread recycling was not technically feasible or economically viable, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries told the public that recycling worked in order to deflect public concern. Across the globe, we are seeing the catastrophic results of this historic and ongoing campaign of public deception.

Here in California, plastic pollution is seeping into our waterways, poisoning our environment, and blighting our landscapes. We are ingesting and absorbing microplastics into our bodies. We are breathing air contaminated with hundreds of millions of tons of toxic pollutants and greenhouse gases, thanks to the production of oil and plastic. Plus, government efforts to curb plastic pollution costs California taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

To investigate the petrochemical and plastic industries’ role in perpetuating myths around recycling and determine if these actions violate the law, in 2022, Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a first-of-its-kind investigation into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries for their role in causing and exacerbating the global plastic crisis through their campaign of deception.

Attorney General Bonta addressed the petrochemical industry’s role in the plastic pollution crisis head on by filing a lawsuit against ExxonMobil for allegedly engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastic pollution crisis. In a complaint filed in the San Francisco County Superior Court on September 23, 2024, the Department of Justice alleges that ExxonMobil has been deceiving Californians for half a century through misleading public statements and slick marketing promising that recycling would address the ever-increasing amount of plastic waste ExxonMobil produces.

How Plastic Harm California

The rapidly increasing production of single-use plastic products has long overwhelmed the world’s ability to manage the resulting waste. Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean. According to a recently published study, there is a direct relationship between the rise in plastic production and the rise in plastic pollution. Plastic pollution in our oceans is expected to triple by 2040, without significant action to address the plastic waste and pollution crisis.

Plastic pollution is pervasive in California, polluting the state’s rivers, beaches, bays, and ocean waters, including national marine sanctuaries and state marine protected areas, and new research suggests the cost of litter management to city governments have more than doubled over the past 10 years, and now stand at approximately $1 billion per year total across the state. Plastic waste also harms California wildlife. Plastic-related wildlife fatalities were documented as early as the 1970s.

Plastic pollution may also be harming our health. Plastic does not fully degrade, instead breaking down into smaller pieces called microplastics. Microplastics have been found in our drinking water, our food, and even the air we breathe. Recently, two studies found microplastics in human blood and living lung tissues for the first time.

Plastic manufacturing itself is highly hazardous, with the pollution burden being primarily borne by low-income communities and communities of color. plastic manufacturing plants and materials recovery facilities, which are often sited in or near marginalized communities, generate hundreds of millions of tons of toxic air pollution each year. Ninety-nine percent of plastic is made from fossil fuels. The process of making plastic — from the extraction of oil and gas through the stages of manufacturing polymers — is a highly polluting process and a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. The plastic industry’s greenhouse gas emissions are expected to surpass those of coal-fired power in the United States by 2030. While California has aggressive programs in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a clean economy, plastic production remains on the rise, threatening state climate goals and exacerbating the impacts of the climate crisis.

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Campaign of Deception

In the 1980s, in the wake of images of landfills overflowing with plastic waste and widespread plastic litter, state legislatures and local governments began considering bills restricting or banning plastic products. In response, the plastic industry, comprised of major fossil fuel and petrochemical companies, began an aggressive – and deceptive – marketing and advertising campaign to convince the public that we could recycle our way out of the plastic waste and pollution crisis.

In the 1980s, the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, a special project formed by the Society of Plastic Industry, which was comprised of all the major petrochemical companies including Exxon, Mobil, Dow, DuPont, Chevron, and Phillips 66, spent millions of dollars to combat the plastic “image” problem, placing ads in major magazines like Time touting the benefits of recycling and portraying plastic as the solution, not the problem.

The Society of the Plastic Industry also adapted the chasing arrows symbol, widely used by the environmental community, and added numerals in its center, assigning various polymers grades 1 through 7. The symbol was successfully promoted to state governments as a “coding system” to be adopted in lieu of restrictions like plastic bans, deposit laws, and mandatory recycling standards, even if there was no way to economically recycle the products.

This has led to the current misunderstanding by a majority of Americans that any plastic bearing the chasing arrows symbol can be recycled. The California Legislature has recently responded to one form of deception by adopting legislation, Senate Bill 343, outlawing the use of the chasing arrows symbol to represent that a product is not environmentally harmful without substantial documentation supporting the claim.

Executives at major fossil fuel companies have long known the truth. In 2020, reporting by NPR revealed internal documents as early as the 1970s showing that executives were warned that plastic recycling was “infeasible” and that there was “serious doubt” that plastic recycling “can ever be made viable on an economic basis.”

• “There was never an enthusiastic belief that recycling was ultimately going to work in a significant way.” (Lew Freeman, former SPI VP)


• “The feeling was the plastic industry was under fire we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products … If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they’re not going to be as concerned about the environment.” (Larry Thomas, former SPI president)

In reality, despite the industry’s decades’ long recycling campaign, the vast majority of plastic products, by design, are not being recycled and the U.S. plastic recycling rate has never broken 9%. Today, the U.S. recycling rate has slipped even lower, with a rate hovering around 5% according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The remaining 95% is landfilled, incinerated, or otherwise released into the environment.

As fossil fuels continue to be replaced by clean energy sources, fossil fuel and petrochemical companies invested an additional $208 billion to expand plastic production worldwide, which will only exacerbate the growing pollution problem.

The campaign of deception has also continued. The plastic industry continues to push the myth of broad-based plastic recycling as a tidy solution to the plastic crisis with a modern twist. The pressure on the plastic industry to come up with new ways to cover up plastic pollution is especially high now that China banned plastic waste imports in 2018. The industry's campaign of deception is now focused on chemical recycling, or "advanced recycling."

“Advanced recycling” is an industry-coined term that uses heat or chemicals to reduce plastic back to oil. It is neither advanced nor recycling. “Advanced recycling” is not new – pyrolysis and gasification, the methods used to convert plastic waste to its chemical building blocks, have been around for decades. The waste is heated into pyrolysis oil, or fuel. Many facilities stop here. At some facilities, the pyrolysis oil is then diluted with virgin crude oil through the refinery process to make new plastic and other non-circular products such as fuels. The resulting yield contains a small percentage of the plastic waste feedstock, if any. Overall, “advanced recycling” looks nothing like recycling in the traditional sense – waste is mostly diluted rather than transformed into new material.

Further, “advanced recycling” facilities pose safety and health risks to workers and nearby communities. Contaminants in plastic waste feedstocks leach into the environment through the facility's waste streams, and pyrolysis (plastic melting) units are prone to fire accidents. Nevertheless, the plastic industry continues to push for “advanced recycling” and tout it as an innovative solution for the plastic pollution crisis.

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People of California v. ExxonMobil

California Attorney General Rob Bonta addressed the petrochemical industry’s role in the plastic pollution crisis head on by filing a lawsuit on September 23, 2024 in San Francisco County Superior Court against ExxonMobil for allegedly engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastic pollution crisis. ExxonMobil promotes and produces the largest amount of polymers—the basic ingredient used to make plastic—that become single-use plastic waste in California. Through this lawsuit, the Attorney General seeks to end its deceptive practices that threaten the environment and the public. Attorney General Bonta also seeks to secure an abatement fund, disgorgement, and civil penalties for the harm inflicted by plastic pollution upon California’s communities and the environment.

The lawsuit is designed to hold ExxonMobil accountable for the immense harm to the California environment and people of California caused by the company’s misleading public statements and slick marketing promises related to recycling. Throughout the half century during which ExxonMobil promised that recycling would provide the solution to the increasing amount of plastic waste generated by its ever-increasing plastic production, the rate of plastic recycling in the United States has never exceeded nine percent, and currently hovers at around five percent. Now, ExxonMobil continues to deceive the public by touting “advanced recycling” as a solution to the plastic waste and pollution crisis, even though ExxonMobil’s “advanced recycling” uses less than one percent plastic waste as inputs to make new plastic. ExxonMobil promotes “advanced recycling” (also known as “chemical recycling”) as new technology that can address all plastic recycling beyond what mechanical recycling can handle. However, “advanced recycling,” or “chemical recycling,” technology has been around for decades and cannot process high volumes of mixed post-consumer plastic waste like potato chip bags and candy wrappers.

Through the increased production of single-use plastic, ExxonMobil has been jeopardizing the California environment and public health, all the while also deceiving consumers for half a century by promising that recycling would solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis through misleading public statements and marketing.

The Complaint is linked here.

Investigation & California State Actions on Plastic

The Attorney General continues to investigate the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries' role in misleading the public about plastic recycling and the ongoing harm caused to the state, our residents, and our natural resources. Specifically, the Attorney General is:

• Investigating the companies that have caused and exacerbated the global plastic pollution crisis;


• Investigating these companies’ role in perpetuating myths around plastic and recycling and the extent to which this deception is still ongoing; and


• Determining if these actions violate the law.

Here is a timeline of the Attorney General's additional actions concerning plastic industry deception and its role in the plastic waste and pollution crisis:

• November 2, 2022 – Investigated Plastic Bag Compliance Under SB 270:   SB 270 requires reusable plastic bags sold in California to be "recyclable in the state." However, many plastic bags are labeled with the “chasing arrows” symbol or other symbols that suggest recyclability, despite the reality that many California curbside recyclability programs neither have the infrastructure nor the markets to recycle plastic bags. The Attorney General sent six plastic manufacturers demand letters to substantiate their recyclability claims under various consumer protection laws.


• April 25, 2023 – Urged the Federal Trade Commission to Strengthen Its Green Guides:   In a letter sent to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, the Attorney General co-led the effort by 15 attorneys general in calling for updates to the federal Green Guides to bolster consumer protection laws against advertising that overstates environmental benefits, often called “greenwashing.” The states urged the FTC to make explicit in the Green Guides that “recyclable” means what the FTC has intended it to mean and what consumers understand it to mean: that when the consumer properly disposes of a “recyclable” item, it is actually recycled as a matter of course rather than simply accepted by a recycling facility but not actually recycled. Additionally, in May 2023, the Attorney General participated in the FTC's workshop on plastic pollution called "Talking Trash at the FTC: Recyclable Claims and the Green Guides." The Attorney General continued to urge the FTC to develop its Green Guides to protect consumers from plastic waste greenwashing.

Attorney General Bonta has supported regulations and policies designed to address the plastic waste and pollution crisis:

• September 6, 2022 – Asked the Federal Government to Reduce Single-Use Plastic:   The Attorney General, along with 11 states and D.C., commented on an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Reducing Single-Use Plastic initiated by the General Services Administration (GSA). Currently, the federal government is one of the largest consumers of single-use plastic in the United States. The Attorney General asked the GSA, which is in charge of procurement for the federal government, to change its policies to reduce and eventually phase out purchasing single-use plastic and packaging in favor of sustainable alternatives, with exceptions for health and safety uses. In February 2024, the Attorney General joined a coalition of 11 attorneys general in submitting a second comment letter to GSA supporting the proposed rule to reduce federal purchases of unnecessary single-use plastic packaging, commending the recommendation that GSA implement a mandatory phase-out of all single-use plastic products.


• May 8, 2023 – Asked Federal Agencies to Address Microfiber Pollution:   Attorneys general from sixteen states, including California, sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to urge them to address microfiber pollution in the nation's waters. Microfibers are almost invisible strands of synthetic clothing and are a major source of microplastic pollution. The states asked the federal agencies to consider their authority under the Clean Water Act, develop microfiber filtration systems, and pursue research on microfiber harms to the environment and human health.


• July 31, 2023 – Urged the EPA to Prevent Plastic Pollution:  The Attorney General participated in a multistate comment letter to the EPA regarding its Draft National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution, calling for regulation at all stages of the plastic life cycle. At the production stage, the Attorney General asked the EPA to focus on solutions to reduce virgin plastic production instead of only plastic waste and management. One key suggestion the Attorney General made was that the EPA should establish a voluntary national plastic product labeling standard to address the issue of consumer deception surrounding recyclability marketing claims. At the plastic waste management stage, the Attorney General asked the EPA to limit "recycling" to include only mechanical recycling and to prevent other recycling methods (such as “advanced recycling” or “chemical recycling”) from qualifying as recycling unless the method meets six criteria involving public health and the environmental impact. Finally, the Attorney General suggested that the EPA should build off of existing regulatory frameworks to assist states to manage plastic pollution in waterways and the ocean.


• August 18, 2023 - Provided Comments on EPA’s Proposed Significant New Use Rules for 18 chemicals made from plastic waste via chemical recycling under the Toxic Substances Control Act:   The Attorney General participated in a multistate comment letter on an EPA proposed rule that would require “advanced recycling” facilities to report when their plastic waste feedstocks contain certain impurities. The comment noted that the rule did not cover the broad range of plastic waste contaminants, encouraged the EPA to ensure the rule was enforceable through certification requirements, and highlighted environmental justice concerns regarding “advanced recycling” facilities.


• January 16, 2024 – Supported EPA’s Revision of Safer Choice Standard Program:  The Attorney General, alongside a coalition of 12 attorneys general, submitted a comment letter supporting the EPA’s proposed revisions to the Safer Choice Standard program, which will strengthen requirements that products and their ingredients must meet for the program. The attorneys general commended the proposed revisions and urged the EPA to exclude products with plastic primary packaging from using the label and logo. However, the comment letter recommended that if the EPA instead finalizes its proposal to allow plastic packaging with a minimum percentage of recycled content, that EPA exclude packaging with recycled content obtained from the highly polluting and inefficient process known as “chemical recycling.”


• July 19, 2024 – Commended White House Action on Strategy to Fight Plastic Pollution:  The Attorney General commended the Biden-Harris Administration on its new strategy to tackle plastic pollution and action to reduce single-use plastic in federal operations. Recognizing the harmful pollution that can occur at every stage throughout the plastic lifecycle, the strategy, entitled Mobilizing Federal Action on Plastic Pollution: Progress, Principles, and Priorities, outlines existing and new federal actions to reduce the impact of plastic pollution throughout the plastic lifecycle. This action responds, in part, to the Attorney General’s requests to the federal government to take comprehensive action to tackle plastic pollution at the source.

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Other Legal Actions on Plastic

Several other states, municipalities, non-profit organizations and citizen classes have taken action against plastic pollution through litigation in state and federal court. For a chronological list of relevant litigation, check out the Plastic Litigation Tracker developed by New York University Law School: https://plasticslitigationtracker.org/.

What California's Consumers Can Do

As the Attorney General works to hold the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries accountable for their role in causing the global plastic waste and pollution crisis, consumers in California can also take steps to reduce plastic waste and mitigate exposure to harmful chemicals.

By better understanding the global plastic waste and pollution crisis, consumers can make informed choices as they go about their daily lives – and that includes reducing consumption of plastic, reusing plastic, and recycling plastic products that are designed to be recyclable.

1. Reduce Consumption of Single-Use Plastic
   Reducing all plastic consumption is beneficial, but focusing on reducing consumption of non-recyclable plastic and single-use plastic is a particularly effective first step towards reducing plastic consumption and pollution. Many packaging labels can be misleading and updates on product packaging are needed, according to the EPA. For instance, many products include the chasing arrow symbol, but that does not necessarily mean that the product can be recycled. While bottles and cans are recyclable, many single-use products cannot functionally be recycled or do not have viable end markets to enable recycling.


2. Switch to Reusable Products
   Instead of buying new plastic, switch to reusable products whenever possible, including stainless steel and BPA-free bottles for beverages and reusable dining ware and cutlery. Some stores also allow shoppers to buy in bulk using their own containers. Restaurants must accept reusable cups and containers for to-go orders or leftovers under Assembly Bill 619. See if you can safely reuse plastic to reduce your overall plastic consumption and keep non-recyclable plastic out of landfills. According to the United Nations, we must transition from a "throwaway economy" to a "reuse society" to make the necessary shift away from plastic pollution. For policymakers and businesses looking to promote reusable items, check out this Reusables Toolkit: Roadmap to Reuse from UPSTREAM to learn more about reducing single-use plastic and advancing the use of reusables in food service operations.


3. Fight Back Against Plastic Deception
   Keep an eye out for greenwashing and reduce your plastic usage, including by carrying reusable bottles and foodware with you and refusing any single-use plastic. For plastic products that you must purchase and plan to recycle, note that many plastic products are not recyclable via standard recycling bins. Plastic packaging marked with "How2Recycle" labels that identify in-store locations where consumers can drop-off their plastic packaging are likely not actually being recycled. A 2023 investigation traced plastic bags dropped off at such locations, and found that many of the bags ended up in landfills. Instead, refer to your local recycling program's information on what can and can be recycled. Also, be wary of "advanced recycling" and "chemical recycling" plans from the plastics industry, as reports have found these recycling plants do not actually recycle plastic and instead generate hazardous waste and fossil fuels.


4. Recycle Plastic That Is Designed To Be Recyclable
   Recycling programs vary by locality. Be sure to check your local recycling programs to determine what products can be recycled at curbside bins and drop-off centers near you. This What Can I Recycle? guide from I Recycle Smart provides a general list of products that can be recycled via curbside programs or via collection site drop-off. The guide also provides a database of local recycling information and can take you to your local city's recycling website.


5. Avoid Microplastics by Avoiding Consumer Plastic Products
   Simply opening a plastic container releases microplastics into the air, food, or beverages it contains. Microplastics are present throughout our lives, in personal care products, water, dust, and air. Experts recommend to avoid heating food in plastic containers, to avoid highly processed food and plastic-packaged food, to opt for tap water over plastic bottled water, and to vacuum often. But the best way to limit exposure is to reduce overall plastic consumption. This interactive tool sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme explains how common personal care products contribute to microplastics pollution and recommends alternatives, and this article by National Geographic tells how to avoid microplastics in the home.


6. Learn More About California Programs Addressing Plastic Pollution
   To learn more about some of the laws that California has passed to address the plastic waste and pollution crisis, check out these resources below:
   
   • Statewide Microplastics Strategy: SB 1263, passed in 2018, tasked the California Ocean Protection Council with adopting a strategy to identify solutions and preventative action to address microplastics pollution in California's marine environment.
   
   
   • Accurate Recyclability Labeling: In 2022, California lawmakers passed SB 343, or the Truth in Labeling Act, to address the issue of misleading recyclability claims labeling.
   
   
   • Addressing Plastic Single-Use Plastic and Packaging Waste: SB 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, was passed in 2022. The law sets plastic food container reduction goals and shifts the burden of addressing plastic pollution from consumers to producers.

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