News & Analysis
May 8, 2025
For decades, Big Oil and the plastics industry have deceived the public about the viability of plastic recycling. Under renewed pressure to address the plastic waste crisis, plastics producers now claim to have finally found a solution: “advanced recycling.” But a new report from CCI exposes how the industry’s public claims about “advanced recycling” — a marketing term that describes various ways to use chemicals or heat to break down plastics — are simply more deception.
“The Fraud of Advanced Recycling” breaks down some of the plastic industry’s most common claims about advanced recycling and shows how each of them are misleading or outright false. Don’t just take our word for it — the evidence in the report comes entirely from the words and conclusions of the people most familiar with the plastics industry’s claims: their own experts, consultants, and trade associations, as well as recyclers and plastics producers themselves. As one industry consultant explained at a 2023 conference sponsored by the American Chemistry Council, “the concerns of industry critics are, in many cases, justified."
The new report expands on CCI’s blockbuster 2024 report, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling,” which exposed how plastics producers have known for decades that traditional, or mechanical, recycling practices are not technically or economically viable at scale. Evidence first published in that report has since been cited in a lawsuit the California attorney general filed against ExxonMobil for its role in the plastic pollution crisis.
“The Fraud of Advanced Recycling” presents five key claims that Big Oil and the plastics industry make in support of advanced recycling in advertisements and other public statements and explains how each is deceptive:
The plastics industry presents advanced recycling as new and groundbreaking, despite the industry’s decades-long efforts to make the technologies, also known as chemical recycling, work at scale.
The plastics industry promises that advanced recycling is scaling up and will soon be sufficiently developed to address the plastic waste crisis, despite its knowledge that the economic and technical limitations that have plagued chemical recycling for decades have not been resolved.
The plastics industry argues that advanced recycling can address hard-to-recycle mixed plastics – specifically the more than 90 percent of plastics that are not recycled through mechanical recycling – despite clear technical limitations.
The plastics industry positions advanced recycling as an environmentally-friendly solution for plastic waste, despite the fact that chemical recycling processes produce a host of hazardous pollutants, are extremely energy-intensive, and serve to perpetuate the extraction of ever-greater amounts of fossil fuels.
The plastics industry defines advanced recycling as "circular," even though these processes do not keep plastic in the production cycle and do not reduce or offset the production of virgin plastic made from fossil fuels.
“[W]e’ve had a few successes and a ton of failures,” one industry consultant explained about the state of chemical recycling in 2024. “[C]apacity has not developed as major projects have been delayed or cancelled. … From where I sit, things look grim: The fact that we don’t have a really successful case study at this point makes me think it’s going to be all uphill to make [advanced recycling] work.”
Faced with the enormity of the plastic waste crisis, the idea of a straightforward solution is appealing for the public, policymakers, and plastics producers alike. The plastic industry’s large-scale disinformation campaign is intended to present advanced recycling as that solution. But — especially given the plastics industry’s long history of deceptively promoting recycling as a way to relieve public pressure to address the waste they produce — policymakers cannot ignore the overwhelming evidence that the promotion of advanced recycling does not reflect the technical or economic realities of chemical recycling technologies. Rather, it is simply the latest attempt by Big Oil and the plastics industry to deflect attention from the myriad problems with plastics and to continue producing ever-greater amounts of plastic, regardless of the consequences. The companies responsible for this coordinated campaign of deception should be held accountable.
