Dive Brief:

• A small Kansas county filed a lawsuit last week against major oil and chemical companies, alleging the companies made “profit-driven” decisions for decades to deceive consumers about plastics recycling’s effectiveness.
• Ford County, Kansas, filed the federal suit against companies including Celanese, Chevron, Dupont, Dow Chemical, Eastman, ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell, along with industry trade association the American Chemistry Council.
• The class-action lawsuit says the companies promoted plastic recycling as a solution for waste, but their actions did not improve recycling. Instead, they increased production and demand for new plastic products while increasing “issues with the remediation of plastic waste,” the suit says. ACC said the lawsuit is based on information that is “inaccurate, misleading and out of date.”

Dive Insight:

The lawsuit comes after California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil in September, alleging deceptive marketing claims related to the viability of certain kinds of plastic recycling. Environmental groups in the state also filed a parallel lawsuit.

The suit in Ford County is the first of its kind to include other major fossil fuel and petrochemical companies and trade associations as defendants, according to the Center For Climate Integrity. 

The lawsuit alleges the named companies and trade group used misleading marketing and public education campaigns about recycling, which were designed to expand plastic markets, increase virgin plastic production, and block “legislative or regulatory action that would meaningfully address plastic waste and pollution.”

The suit also alleges these actions left communities like Ford County to pay waste and pollution costs. The county seeks damages, cleanup and abatement services and and injunction to prevent further “deceptive, unfair, unconscionable, and unlawful business practices.” 

The lawsuit draws heavily from a recent Center for Climate Integrity report that alleges petrochemical companies have “deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years despite long-standing internal knowledge that it is not technically or economically viable at scale.”

“Every community in the United States has been harmed by the fraud of plastic recycling, and as this lawsuit shows, every community has the power to take Big Oil and the plastics industry to court to hold them accountable,” said CCI President Richard Wiles in a statement. “If a small Kansas county can sue these giant fossil fuel and petrochemical interests based on publicly available evidence, other communities can too.” 

ACC criticized the lawsuit, saying it “pulls text straight from activist action plans and cites extremist groups such as Greenpeace and Beyond Plastics as sources,” said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers at ACC, in an emailed statement. Other companies named in the suit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Eisenberg added that the plastics industry has invested in numerous recycling design, collection and infrastructure improvements. “It would be far more helpful to its citizens and the environment if Ford County invested more in its own recycling infrastructure instead of bringing a misguided lawsuit,” he said.

The lawsuit comes as some of the defendants are investing in new chemical recycling efforts.The companies say such technologies provide a way to better manage plastic that’s not commonly recycled, but some environmental groups have criticized the projects for potential pollution issues while expressing skepticism that they can scale effectively.