Kansas County Sues Big Oil, Plastics Producers for Recycling Deception

Ford County’s class action lawsuit against Exxon, Chevron, others cites internal industry evidence that the Center for Climate Integrity unearthed and published earlier this year

Press Releases

December 2, 2024

KANSAS — Ford County, Kansas, last week sued major fossil fuel and petrochemical companies — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dupont, and Dow Chemical — and a leading industry trade association, the American Chemistry Council, to hold them accountable for “a decades-long campaign of fraud and deception about the recyclability of plastics.”

The federal class-action lawsuit from the small Kansas county comes after the State of California filed a landmark lawsuit against ExxonMobil in September for deceiving the public about the viability of plastic recycling. Ford County’s lawsuit is the first of its kind to include other major fossil fuel and petrochemical companies and trade associations as defendants. 

The Kansas lawsuit directly quotes and cites extensive evidence from a Center for Climate Integrity report released earlier this year that shows how fossil fuel and 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. An August poll from Data for Progress and CCI found that 70 percent of U.S. voters — including 54 percent of Republicans — support legal action against the fossil fuel and plastics industries for deceiving the public about their role in plastic pollution. 

Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, released the following statement: 

“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. 

“Big Oil and the plastics industry have lied about the recyclability of plastics for decades, and that deception has come at a tremendous cost to communities that have invested time and money on plastic recycling efforts that the industry knew would never work. It’s time that Exxon, Chevron, and others pay for the harm their lies have caused to local governments like Ford County. 

“If a small Kansas county can sue these giant fossil fuel and petrochemical interests based on publicly available evidence, other communities can too.” 

CCI Report Provided Evidence of Deception

In February, the Center for Climate Integrity released a new report, "The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the plastics industry deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis," which laid out new and existing evidence that could provide the foundation for legal efforts to hold fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies accountable for their lies and deception.

Big Oil Companies Also Facing Lawsuits for Climate Deception

Eleven attorneys general — in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico — and dozens of municipal and tribal governments in California, Colorado, Hawai`i, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Washington, and Puerto Rico, have filed lawsuits to hold major oil and gas companies accountable for deceiving the public about their products’ role in climate change.