News & Analysis
September 2, 2025
Big Oil and the plastics industry are facing growing public scrutiny over their role in fueling the global plastics waste crisis, including the increased discoveries of microplastics throughout the human body. A recent CNBC investigation — “Why The Microplastics Crisis Will Only Get Worse” — shined a light on how fossil fuel companies have a financial incentive to continue producing more and more plastics products, regardless of their impact on human health and the environment.
The story highlighted the 2024 CCI report “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling,” which showed how Big Oil and the plastics industry have deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste for more than 50 years, despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale. Today only about five percent of plastic is recycled in the US, with the rest ending up in landfills, incinerators, or the environment.
“I don’t think anyone was quite aware of the level of fraud the industry was perpetrating on the public,” CCI President Richard Wiles explained. “They knew from the beginning that the economics of plastic recycling would never work.”
Evidence from the CCI report has since been cited in a lawsuit the State of California filed to hold ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest producers of single use plastic polymers, accountable for plastics recycling deception.
California’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil also targets the oil giant’s promotion of “advanced recycling,” a marketing term that describes various ways to use chemicals or heat to break down plastics. CCI’s 2025 report, “The Fraud of Advanced Recycling,” examined industry insiders’ findings about the technology, showing how key claims made by plastics producers are either misleading or outright false.
During a recent panel discussion with the Environmental Law Institute, CCI Investigative Researcher Davis Allen pointed to the overwhelming evidence that the technology will do little to reduce plastic waste, but that it can offer Big Oil and the plastics industry a way to protect its ability to continue operating business as usual.
“The current discussion is driven less by the merits or feasibility of [advanced] recycling, and more by the plastic industry’s need to offer some kind of solution that doesn’t restrict the exponential growth in plastics production we’re seeing today,” Allen said.
