Press Releases
May 8, 2025
Washington, D.C. — As Big Oil and the plastics industry increasingly market “advanced recycling” as a solution to the plastic waste crisis, a new report from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) exposes how the industry’s own experts and statements undermine their claims. The report makes clear that plastic industry insiders consistently concede that there are myriad obstacles and limitations inherent to the technologies more accurately described as “chemical recycling.”
“The Fraud of Advanced Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry are Promoting a False Solution to the Plastic Waste Crisis” expands on CCI’s 2024 blockbuster report that exposed how plastics producers have known for decades that traditional 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 latest CCI report shows how, in response to growing public and governmental pressure, Big Oil and the plastics industry are now deceptively marketing “advanced” recycling to the public, even as chemical engineering experts, industry consultants, trade associations, and plastics producers themselves acknowledge its inherent technical and real world limitations. 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."
"Big Oil and the plastics industry's grand marketing claims about advanced recycling have been consistently and thoroughly undermined by the very same chemical recycling experts whom the industry hires and turns to for advice," said Davis Allen, senior investigative researcher at the Center for Climate Integrity and the report's author. "While plastics producers run ads touting advanced recycling as an innovative solution, industry insiders have made clear, again and again, that these technologies will not address plastic pollution at any meaningful scale."
"First, Big Oil and the plastics industry lied about traditional recycling, and now they're lying about so-called 'advanced' recycling — all to maintain their ability to keep producing and selling new plastic," said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity. "Instead of enabling this deception, public officials should call out the fraud of advanced recycling and hold Big Oil and the plastics industry accountable for causing and fueling the global plastic pollution crisis."
In the report, Allen and contributors document how Big Oil and the plastics industry make five key claims in support of advanced recycling in advertisements and other public statements – each of them deceptive:
The plastics industry presents advanced recycling as new and groundbreaking, despite the industry’s decades-long failed efforts to make chemical recycling work at scale.
Example: Processes for the chemical recycling of plastics were patented as early as the 1950s, and by the 1970s the industry was presenting these processes as a solution for the looming plastic waste issue.
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.
Example: The Association of Plastic Recyclers explained in a 2024 report that “much of the information promoting chemical recycling technologies overlooks the necessary design, collection, sortation, and end markets that need to be in place for any type of recycling to scale.”
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.
Example: The Flexible Packaging Association – which represents plastics producers like ExxonMobil, Chevron Phillips, and Dow – noted in 2020 that chemical recycling faced many of the same barriers that have prevented mechanical recycling from scaling up: “the process requires plastic material that is of suitable quality, with low levels of contamination and at sufficient volume to meet demand. These are some of the same challenges facing the mechanical recycling infrastructure.”
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.
Example: A report published by a consulting firm in 2024 advised the industry that “Chemical recycling processes (especially pyrolysis) are energy-intensive [and] generate substantial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”
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.
Example: One 2022 report by industry consultants highlighted that “advanced recycling output is also frequently used in fuel applications, instead of in the reproduction of plastics,” which “does not help close the plastics loop.”
One industry consultant quoted in the report describes the state of chemical recycling in 2024 with the following:
“we’ve had a few successes and a ton of failures; capacity 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 pyrolysis work.”
The full report is available here.