News & Analysis
September 3, 2024
“Advanced recycling is real. It’s happening. We’re doing it.”
That’s one of the first statements viewers heard from an ExxonMobil employee in a recent investigation by CBS and Inside Climate News into the plastics industry’s proposed solution to the plastic waste crisis. By the end of the segment it’s clear that, while Big Oil’s reliance on “advanced recycling” as a marketing tool is real, its legitimacy as a solution to the worsening plastics waste crisis is not.
The investigation, Advanced Recycling: Does Big Plastic’s Idea Work?, focuses on a new plastics recycling program in Houston, Texas, that works in partnership with ExxonMobil — the largest contributor to single use plastic waste. The program, which has yet to actually start, would, in theory, collect and recycle up to “90% of all plastic waste, dirty or clean.” It will rely heavily on so-called “advanced recycling,” also known as chemical recycling, which involves heating plastic products to break them down into their chemical components. Exxon and other members of the petrochemical industry claim that the byproducts can then be used to make new plastic products.
A recent report from CCI, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling,” showed how the Big Oil and plastics industry have known for decades that recycling plastic is not a feasible solution to the plastic waste crisis. The report, which CBS previously featured on Sunday Morning, highlights the fact that “advanced recycling” is actually decades-old technology that is being marketed as a new solution. “Contrary to industry representations, these technologies are neither ‘advanced’ nor ‘recycling,’” the report states. “They are not ‘advanced,’ given that they have been around for decades. These processes have interested chemical researchers since the 1970s, but have never proven to be a viable solution for plastic waste. They are not ‘recycling,’ because they do not result in the manufacture of new plastic products.”
Despite advanced recycling being nonviable at scale, America’s Plastic Makers — a subsidiary of the most powerful plastics lobbying group — has spent $30 million advertising advanced recycling in 2023.
“The only thing that’s new here is industry trying to put a new spin on the old recycling myth and convince people that we can recycle plastics when we really can’t,” plastics researcher and Columbia University professor Veena Singla told CBS.
Despite Exxon’s claims that plastic can be recycled into new products at scale, the recycling process in Houston has yet to begin at any scale at all. Even if Exxon meets its goal of recycling one billion pounds of plastic waste, that effort would still be dwarfed by the 13 billion pounds of plastic waste the company produces every year. Similarly, a 2023 report from Beyond Plastics found that if the 11 advanced recycling facilities that currently exist in the U.S. were operating at full capacity, they could process less than 1.2% of all U.S. plastic waste.
Earlier this year, CCI exposed how another oil giant, Shell, has quietly backed away from its own chemical recycling goals, concluding that its “ambition to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible.”
Advanced recycling wouldn’t just be used to make new plastic products. The plastic — a petroleum product — could also be used to make fuel, which CBS journalist Ben Tracy notes would be just a different form of pollution.
“Should we trust a company that makes money off of making and selling plastic telling us that there is a solution to the plastic waste problem?” Tracy asked Exxon spokesperson Ray Mastroleo.
“That’s challenging the integrity of who we are,” Mastroleo replied, “but this is just a starting point.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is already publicly investigating the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries “for their role in causing and exacerbating the global plastics pollution crisis.” His office announced that it subpoenaed oil giant ExxonMobil, the world’s top producer of single-use plastic polymers, as part of that investigation.
