The West Coast state accuses the oil giant of deceiving consumers for decades into believing that single-use plastics could and would be recycled, when the overwhelming majority of them are dumped into the environment.
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ExxonMobil is one of the world’s leading producers of polymers used in plastics manufacturing. Since the 1970s, the oil company has known that the vast majority of plastic products would not be recycled.
And yet, the company has continued to publicly and slickly market the use of plastics, making consumers believe that recycling is the solution. In reality, only 5% of American plastic waste is recycled, the California attorney general said on Monday. The rest ends up in nature, where petroleum-based plastics never completely decompose, but crumble and transform into micro or nanoplastics which today pollute the ocean floor and even human breast milk.
With the lawsuit, California is not only seeking billions of dollars in damages from ExxonMobil. The state is also seeking to shift the responsibility and costs of plastic pollution from taxpayers and consumers to producers and packagers, in order to stop pollution at the source.
Also readWhy ExxonMobil is taking pro-climate shareholders to court