What A Day - The Plastic Recycling Long Con

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

The California Attorney General sued Exxon Mobil this week for misleading the public on the sustainability of single use plastics. How did plastics recycling go from an exciting promise to a scam perpetuated by Big Oil? Max and Erin tear into Exxon’s decades-long campaign to unwrap the truth—with help from journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis and the AG himself, Rob Bonta. Why is it so hard to recycle plastic? Who actually processes our waste? Will the lawsuit work? Listen to this week’s How We Got Here to find out.

Max, this week I had a very specific memory from elementary school returned to my brain in mint condition. Erin, again with the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers? I remember in one of our weekly reader newspapers that there was a little tutorial on recycling, specifically what the numbers on the bottom of plastic containers meant. Oh, funny. I remember that, too. They were guides for how to recycle the different types of plastic. Number one or two would go in one bin, numbers three and four would go in another, and I forget what we were supposed to do with number five.

It's actually fine that you mostly forgot what they meant, because it turns out they were probably all going to the same place anyway. The dump. Oh, all those well-honed sorting skills wasted. I'm Erin Ryan. And I'm Max Fisher, and this is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. This week, how did plastics recycling go from an exciting promise to, well, a scam perpetuated by big oil meant to mislead the public into continuing to buy and use single-use plastics? That sounds both incredibly paranoid, Erin, but also sadly feasible.

That is the accusation made by a lawsuit filed this week by the state of California against ExxonMobil. Ooh, courtroom drama. We've probably all suspected that plastic recycling might be fake, but the story of where that lie came from and how it got sold is a wild one. It's got everything. Corporate malfeasance, a campaign of deception, billions of dollars on the line, China, a claim that plastic recycling doesn't actually exist. Wait, California is claiming that almost all plastic recycling is fake?

That all these years of dutifully rinsing out takeout containers were a waste? I feel like a real dupe. You're not a dupe, Max. You were lied to. Well, my own consumer habits aside, this sounds like a big deal, legally speaking. It is. And to get more information on this, I went to the source, California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Here he is. I don't think I'm on ExxonMobil's holiday card list. But I'm doing what's right. I'm doing what the facts and the law, in my view, obligate me to do for the people of California, for our values, for our natural resources, for our future,

for our children's future. And these lies are just completely unacceptable. They are shocking and beyond the pale and sadly, not surprising. I will say if you're getting holiday cards from ExxonMobil, you've got to re-examine how you're living your life. Yeah, for sure. Well, here's Bonta again with what the lawsuit alleges. On Monday, September 23rd, the state of California sued ExxonMobil for its decades-long campaign of deception to convince the public that the recycling of plastics, including single-use plastics, is sustainable. It is not. They have perpetuated the myth of recycling. They have known that only about 5% of U.S. plastic waste is actually recycled.

95% goes into our environment, our rivers, streams, oceans, beaches, or the landfill, or is incinerated. So how did Big Oil pull this off, Erin? So the case the lawsuit lays out is pretty insidious. It was a full-on media blitz. Here's Bonta again. They had a 1989 Time magazine spread, 12 pages, called The Urgent Need to Recycle. And it talked about the sustainability of recycling plastic products. They also used the chasing arrow symbol to make people think that plastic products that are absolutely not recyclable are recyclable.

They were simply using a resin code designation and they decided to surround that number with the chasing arrow symbol, something that was co-opted from paper recycling. Many consumers to this day look for when they shop the chasing arrow symbol and then they recycle those plastic products with the belief that that product is going to be recycled when it's not. And today they continue to greenwash and gaslight. They have something called advanced recycling, which they say is the newest, best, greatest approach to plastic recycling. And it's neither advanced nor recycling. It's an old technology. They're applying heat to plastic.

And it doesn't turn plastic into new plastic products. It turns 92% of it into transportation fuel and other materials, but not new plastic. So we should say a lot of this was first uncovered a few years ago by NPR and PBS Frontline. What they found is that back in the 80s, the oil and gas industry realized it had a problem. They were making a fortune turning fossil fuels into plastics. Today, they make about $400 billion per year doing this. But all that single-use plastic was piling up in landfills. And piling up on beaches and in oceans and inside the bodies of wildlife and alongside the side of my street in my neighborhood. Right. The world was burying itself in plastic trash.

Public backlash was building toward legislation to ban or curb plastic. So the industry spent millions trying to find a way to recycle it. But they mostly failed. Plastic comes in many different forms. Some of them are possible to efficiently recycle, but a lot of them aren't. So the plastics industry quietly closed down its recycling plants and replaced them with basically a lot of make-believe. They lobbied state governments to stamp the little recycling symbol in all plastic, even though they knew it wasn't recyclable. And they blanketed TV with ads telling people to recycle it. Here's one of those ads from 1990. The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash.

It's full of potential. And at DuPont, we're making sure that the potential isn't thrown away. We've pioneered the country's largest most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles instead of filling valuable land.

I like the wacky sound effects that are playing in the background of this ad, which is all just bullshit. Yeah, what could be wackier than being lied to by giant corporations? So Frontline interviewed this one guy, Coy Smith, who ran a bunch of recycling centers in the 90s. And he said that this scheme of stamping the recycling label on plastic was such an empty PR stunt that the recycling industry didn't even know it was happening. One day, tons and tons of plastic started showing up at the recycling centers, and it's been that way ever since. The average person saw the symbol, they know the symbol,

and said, well, it's recyclable, right? Got three arrows. I'm like, well, all of a sudden, our own customers, they would bring it in and not only say it has a triangle, but they would flat out say, it says it's recyclable right on it. And I'd be like, I can tell you, I can't give this away. There's no one that would even take it if I paid them to take it. That's how unrecyclable it was.

Rob Bonta, the California AG, claims that they have a, quote, robust body of evidence to back their claims up. But what's extra interesting about this particular lawsuit is that it's a new way to go after polluters. Here's the AG again. It's the first time a public entity has sued a petrochemical company for its role in perpetuating the myth of recycling and lying to the public and also in creating a public nuisance. It's not just any public entity, it's the state of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, largest state in the nation. And so this is unique and groundbreaking in that regard. Public nuisance laws, that's interesting. Totally. And there are parallels in the way government started taking on other dangers

to public health, like big tobacco and the manufacturers of opioids and lead paint. So Bonta is arguing that ExxonMobil made a concerted effort to trick the public into thinking that plastics were an environmentally benign thing to buy and use once, because when you're done with them, you could just toss them into a blue bin. And, you know, I'm no environmental scientist, but I believe that blue means good. Yes, Max, blue good. But in this case, blue bad. Because according to the lawsuit, the harm that this big little lie, see what I did there, caused the state of California and its residents is pretty serious. Here's the AG again. We are drowning in plastic.

In the state of California, we have our wildlife being strangled by plastic. We have plastic in our drinking water, in our streams, our beaches, our oceans. California taxpayers pay a billion dollars a year to clean up plastic waste in our state. As part of this claim, they're seeking an abatement fund, which would be funded by ExxonMobil, to the tune of billions of dollars. Okay, love that. They also want Exxon to fund a re-education campaign. Huh. They're also asking for a disgorgement of profits claim so that ExxonMobil would have to turn over some of the profits

that they made off their lies. Hmm. And because this is the first lawsuit of its kind, if they're successful, I'd imagine the repercussions could be huge. That's the hope. Here's Bonta once more. We hope and believe that while we are the first public entity to bring a case of this type, we will not be the last.

Others will join us, perhaps other states, maybe other local governments will join in, maybe national governments will read our complaint and see the case we made and the causes of action we brought and feel that they need to protect their people and their natural resources as well from the harms created by ExxonMobil. So your DMs are open to other AGs that want to get some notes on notifying. Absolutely. DMs open. Well, I for sure wish him luck. Erin, what do you make of his odds here? I like him.

Okay. I like him. Make the case. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, they're looking for a jury trial in this. The state of California is seeking a jury trial. I don't think that juries tend to be super sympathetic to polluters. And we also, you know, as people living in the state of California, I live in California,

I see plastic everywhere. You know, you can't go to a beach without seeing some plastic washed up. You can't go down a highway without seeing plastic. And it's like that all over the place, but specifically in California where there's so much beautiful nature, mountains, oceans, deserts. People are really attached to it. Yeah. They feel strongly about it. And plastic's strewn everywhere.

And I think it'll be difficult for ExxonMobil to argue in front of people who see the evidence before their eyes that people were misled into buying plastics and those plastics are never going to go away. So I am not a lawyer, although sometimes I play one on a podcast. But from what I have read from comments from lawyers who study environmental law, they sound a little skeptical about the public nuisance charge that I guess is at the center of the suit because it requires proving that ExxonMobil is indirectly responsible for a lot of the plastic that's been produced. And it's like, you can make the case that ExxonMobil lied for sure. And there's a false advertising and unfair competition charge in the lawsuit, which like feels like a pretty strong case to make, but it might be a slightly tougher sell according to these lawyers to convince people that that also makes ExxonMobil legally responsible for the second order consequences

of that lie. And let me push back with a glass half full thing for a rare bout of optimism for me. I think that everything has a first time, you know, and maybe even if this doesn't succeed, people who want to hold big oil companies accountable will go back to the drawing board and do some tinkering and get it ready and bring it again. Because the first lawsuits against big tobacco, I don't think many legal experts would have thought were slam dunks. You know, there's always going to be a first time and it's not always going to succeed. But I think that this is a great first step, even if it doesn't. Well, we all love an Erin Brockovich story of taking on big polluters in court. But, you know, the idea that plastic recycling is a lie, whatever happens to this lawsuit,

it bums me out. Yeah. Not only is plastic recycling on a large scale basically a lie, it's a lie that was absolutely essential to the proliferation of the use of single-use plastics in the first place. That makes it even worse. And as it turns out, we weren't always drowning in plastic. In fact, we didn't start using single-use plastics until after the Second World War. Back then, plastics were sold to the public as durable and perpetually reusable, which in a capitalist economy that relies on constant consumption isn't good for sales. A planned obsolescence, the great American innovation.

So plastics manufacturers started making their products more cheaply, but then kids started suffocating themselves on plastic bags. Yikes. Which caused a PR crisis, if you will, for the plastic industry. Yeah, this product might suffocate your toddler is not great for sales, I have to imagine. No, not at all. The industry responded by blaming the moms. Yuck. Saying that they shouldn't have let their kids play with plastic bags and that the responsible thing for them to do would have been to throw them away.

And so people dutifully started throwing their plastics away. Oh, so that's how they started telling people, throw all your plastics in the garbage. Yeah, otherwise your kids could get strangled. But it didn't take long before plastic had another PR crisis on its hands. Our producer Emma Illich-Frank spoke to Oliver Franklin Wallace, a magazine journalist and author of the 2023 book Wasteland, the dirty truth about what we throw away. So initially, a lot of this stuff is going in landfills, and it would end up on the side of the road. And so what happened was, they became very unpopular.

And in the early 60s, you get these movements like Keep America Beautiful, these big campaigns where the packaging and the plastics industries come together and form these action groups that spend a huge amount of money on advertising, essentially blaming individuals, consumers for the waste problem. And they say, look, it's not our fault that our products are kind of everywhere. It's because, you know, litter bugs, you know, they coined this term the litter bug and the idea of irresponsible people. But very quickly, we all became convinced that these companies could make billions of dollars producing these products that are environmentally pretty damaging, catastrophic, some would say. And they can kind of flood our society with them, but then play almost no role in cleaning up after themselves, which is basically unheard of.

So not to sound like a plastics industry show, Aaron, but plastics are kind of cool. They gave us electronics and modern medicine, insulation, computer chips, film. Plastics replace steel in cars, making them lighter and ironically reducing our reliance on oil. But we did fall a little too in love with plastic. And the industry, rather than making less plastic, formed these astroturf environmental cleanup groups to tell us it was our job to clean up all that trash that they had sold us. Correct. And a lot of things that are made of plastic absolutely do not need to be made of plastic. Water bottles, food packaging, furniture, the grocery bag,

which many states and municipalities have banned over the fact that there's such garbage menaces. And when it comes to plastics recycling, the only way it would work is if the plastics were cleaned out beforehand. Contaminated plastic is harder and costlier to recycle. And guess whose responsibility it was to prepare those plastics to possibly maybe be recycled? Me, scrubbing out all my takeout containers. Exactly. It was the consumer's responsibility to clean out the food packaging after they were done using it so that the packaging could be recycled.

Franklin Wallace referred to it as free labor performed by the consumers for the polluters. I have never thought about it that way before. Okay, now that the plastic industry has successfully moralized single-use plastics by promoting recycling, are they actually recycling? The answer may not surprise you. Here's more Oliver. It's certainly true that for a long time, the plastics industry has known that not a lot of recycling is actually happening. They've known that a lot of these products are not very easily recyclable and that when they are recyclable, they degrade so that they're not, you know, infinite closed loop things where you can keep doing it forever and ever.

And a lot of these cases that these products are so low value or they're so difficult to recycle that what you're producing is essentially worthless. One of the things that really shocked me was the way in which a lot of these companies have, over the decades, systematically made promises about recycling, knowing that they were going to break them. In the book, I give the example of the Coca-Cola company, which in the 1990s was making these big pledges that it was going to make its bottles out of recycled plastic. And then a couple of years go by and the economy takes a downturn and they kind of quietly shelve this promise. They never do it.

And then it happens again in the early 2000s. You know, they make a big recycling promise and everybody reports on it. And then it quietly doesn't happen. At least four or five times in the past two decades, they've done this and they've never actually followed through. So plastic makers kept making big promises about cleaning up the plastic and then just not doing those things. Hollywood and big plastic both run on announcements it seems. Because like we learned earlier it turns out that plastic is often not actually recyclable right? Right it's actually cheaper to just make new plastic than it is to recycle old plastic in many cases. And even plastics that can truly be recycled can only be melted down and reused so many times before they're basically useless.

So it's not like a perfectly closed system. And all this plastic isn't just a threat to the environment. It's a threat to us. Plastic breaks down into tiny fragments called microplastic, a very scary word, which we ingest through food and water and even in the air. Microplastics are now found in basically every part of the human body. They even show up in human placentas, so we're exposed to them before birth. Yeah, not very fun fact. Scientists have tried to study the impacts of microplastics on people, but they can't find a control group of people who do not have microplastics in their bodies. Everybody is full of microplastics now. Yeah.

That's gross. I know. I hate that. I know. I hate it so much. And other recyclable materials don't degrade in quality as quickly as plastic and are more expensive to make in the first place. So on those other materials, just to be clear here, it is totally worthwhile to recycle

things like glass and aluminum. Just not plastic, or at least not most forms of it. So some of it is recyclable. Let's go back to those misleading polymer-chasing arrow numbers on the bottom of some single-use plastics. Those indicate the type of plastic in the material. So some are more recyclable than others. Generally, things stamped with a 1 or 2 are the easiest to recycle.

But that's only a fraction of the millions and millions of tons of plastic that gets dumped every year. Okay, let's come back later to how I can figure out which plastics to recycle and which not to. But for now, I take your point that most of the quote-unquote recyclable plastic, it just isn't. Yes, and yet oil companies convinced us that we need to wash out our used sour cream containers, or we might as well take a sledgehammer to the Great Barrier Reef. That's so sinister. So when I innocently tossed an unrecyclable plastic shampoo bottle into recycling, it goes to a dump? Well, actually, for a long time,

there was a good chance it was being sent to a dump in China. Right. China, huge growing economy, needed lots of raw materials, but for a long time, they couldn't make enough of it or in high enough quality to fill their needs. Yeah, this is a pretty wild story. Here's Oliver again. Starting in the 1980s, but particularly kicking off when China joins the World Trade Organization in I think like 2001, this went really into kind of overdrive. Because China was sending container ships full of goods, and then America was sending almost nothing back, right? Or very little, they had a lot of space left over. And at some point, some smart people realized that they could send them

trash, right? They could send them trash, because one of the things that the Chinese economy needed at that time was raw materials. In theory, the idea was that it would be being recycled and made into new stuff for us to buy later on down the line. We now know that in a lot of cases, that wasn't happening. And in some of the most egregious cases, you know, when we're sending things like secondhand electronics, they would ending up in places like Guiyu in southern China, which was a town known for having one of the highest levels of lead concentration and lead poisoning in the world so much that the children had learning and reading difficulties because we poisoned the groundwater with the recycling industry there. So around a decade ago or so, China kind of realized how big the problem this was. And in 2018, they passed this big piece of legislation called National Sword. I love that

name. It's like how dramatic a piece of recycling legislation can be. And they massively cut the types of waste that you're allowed to import. Pretty much overnight, the entire waste industry internationally kind of collapsed because they're like, oh my god, like, where are we going to put this stuff? And after that, what happened was that a lot of the Chinese companies and organized crime and other people set up in different Southeast Asian countries to receive this waste that needed to go somewhere, right? So places like Thailand and Malaysia and India and Indonesia, and there was this kind of like whack-a-mole situation that played out over the last few years in Southeast Asia, where these illegal recycling facilities or semi-legal recycling facilities were popping up, sorting

waste that was probably ending up in China. So for a long time, we thought recycling plastic was quote unquote working because it was being shipped far away to Asia out of sight, out of mind. Or in this case, out of hemisphere, out of mind. Right. And now it's piling up over here again, which has made us all of a sudden very aware that we have been scammed. But we are absolutely still trying to make our trash someone else's problem. As Oliver alluded to before, here's some more grim stuff. I spoke to activists in Malaysia who would turn up at these farms where these informal recycling facilities would kind of pop up overnight. And anything that couldn't be recycled, they would just dump in the ditches. And so there would be, you know, these rivers and streams and ditch sides just absolutely

covered in it. There'd be entire fields packed, like towering with plastic waste from the UK and from the US that were just kind of being left there, or sometimes burned because they wanted to get rid of the evidence quickly. But at least we've been recycling our glass and metals this whole time, right? Oh, no, really? I'll let Oliver be the bearer of bad news. I hate to say this, but America sucks at recycling, right? You guys are the actual worst. And so this idea that the terrible recycling rate in the US and worldwide is solely because of the plastics company, I think we need to take a moment and look at that. Because you guys do it worse than almost anywhere, right? If you look at companies like Germany here in the UK, if you look at some countries like South Korea, there are places

doing recycling. It is possible. The fact that you don't is not just the responsibility of companies, but also policymakers going back decades. And it's because, in part, you guys are a massive petro-state. You produce a lot of oil, so virgin plastic is incredibly cheap there. Landfill is incredibly cheap. There are all of these other reasons why recycling in America is so low. And to combat that is going to take political choice. It's going to take a concerted effort at the state and federal level over an extended period of time.

And it's going to take buy-in from companies and individuals and taxpayers and all of those things. So just to be clear, things like glass and metal are recyclable. Oliver's just saying that individual Americans could be better about putting that stuff in the blue bin. Like the EPA estimates, for example, that we recycle about 70% of our cans, which is decent, but only about a third of our glass, which is not as good. Anyway, Erin, what do you think? What would it take to solve our plastics problem? Okay. Do good. Anyway, Erin, what do you think? What would it take to solve our plastics problem? Okay. Do you remember the old cartoon, The Far Side?

I do, of course. Okay. There's this one that sticks in my mind because I think it was on like a desk calendar I had, and it showed a guy coming out of a bathroom and there was a sign above the bathroom that said, didn't wash hands, that was lighting up. I think we need something like that for when someone throws a glass bottle into the garbage can. You mentioned individual consumer responsibility, and that is absolutely true. It needs to be normalized to recycle everything that can reliably be recycled. And it needs to be, on the other side, kind of like shamed socially to not recycle. Then what do we do about the plastics? I don't know what we're going to do about the plastics. I think individual consumers can use less in their household. When I was

pregnant with my first daughter, I went insane. And I ended up just going through and being like, look at all these chemicals in my house. Look at all of these plastics in my house. How do I get rid of as many of them as possible? So we've slowly been transitioning to getting rid of single-use plastics for household items. And it actually feels nice. Everything comes in a little aluminum container, and I refill a glass container of soap, and it's much easier. We're not 100% perfect, but we're getting there.

I've been trying to do this for a few years, and I will say it is a lot easier than it sounds. And it's not for nothing that Americans produce way more plastic waste than anybody else in the world, which is just to say that like it is possible to live a very nice, comfortable life and still not use nearly as much plastic. 40% of the plastic that we produce is single use materials. So you don't have to be like living off the land Robinson Caruso to cut down your plastics use it's very easy do stuff like carrying your own water bottle like just a metal reusable water bottle instead of buying the plastic water bottles single best thing you can do to reduce a huge amount of plastic

comes from those water bottles yes the grocery bags are a real thing it really does help if you use a reusable bag honestly the best thing you can do to convince people in your life to use less plastic is just to tell them how unhealthy it is. It's hard to make the choice for like the abstract greater good, knowing that other people might not be switching away from plastics as much.

But when you know how any plastic you use, most plastic is in the bathroom or in the kitchen. So that is places where it is close to your skin, where it's close to things you're consuming, it's close to food. You really want to get plastic out of that space because you don't want to be putting that plastic inside your body. And it's so easy to switch to, you know, use a reusable

safety razor instead of disposable razors. There's so many little choices you can make that are so easy. And the other thing I would recommend is check what your local city or state government will or won't recycle. Just do a quick Google. If you live in LA, LA takes one, two, or five. Anything else, they will not recycle. New York City, this goes to show you how fake these numbers are, does not even address the numbers, but New York City Recycling 311 will tell you which materials they recycle. It is important to clean your food out of any recycling you put in the bin. And I was kind of surprised by this, but the CEO of Recycling Partnership, a woman named Keith Harrison, said, when in doubt, leave it out. If you're not sure if it's recyclable or not, don't put it into the blue bin because then someone just has to take the time, energy, and money to sort that out.

I do want to caution us away from putting this all on individual consumers because there is a policy piece of this that needs to happen as well like i would love to see local and state governments move away from using single-use plastics in all of their office spaces in public universities in public university cafeterias like i would love for there to be laws passed that like taxpayer money is not buying single-use plastics in, you know, maybe you have to specifically petition and have like a very good reason for why. Maybe there's no other alternative available. Or lobby your employer. Lobby your employer.

I realized today that my contact lenses, I use daily contacts. They come in a little plastic like blister pack. And I'm like, I should just like email them and be like, can you guys put it in something else, like an aluminum pack or something like that? I think that if enough consumers made a stink, then companies would change the packaging that they use. But I don't want to fall into the trap of the big oil trying to put it all on individual choice. Individual choice matters, and it definitely makes a difference. And you definitely don't want to be part of the problem. But the solution doesn't just involve individual choices. It involves policies, it involves manufacturers, it involves a buy-in from

big polluters, or it involves a giant lawsuit that a big polluter loses to scare people back into line. But I think that it's really important for it to come from both directions. That brings us to the end of the show. And to play us out, a familiar face and voice to 80s and 90s kids, Rex the Dinosaur. Recycle, reduce, reuse. And close the loop. We can close the loop. Plastic bottles, aluminum foil, glass containers, and motor oil.

Papers, cans, and old magazines. We got one. Len, let's keep it clean. So bug your neighbor. Rex is taking money from big plastics. Don't just toss it. Keep it new. We can do it.

So can you. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and Aaron Ryan. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Vatopoulos. Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, and Adrian Hill.