Exxon Mobil’s touting of ‘advanced recycling’ as the answer to plastic waste has come under scrutiny, with a lawsuit alleging the process is little more than a public relations stunt. While the oil giant claims its facility in Baytown, Texas, can transform discarded plastics into new materials, experts argue that only 8% of the plastic is actually recycled, with the rest converted into fuel. This raises questions about the true sustainability and effectiveness of Exxon Mobil’s recycling efforts, as the company continues to ramp up its virgin plastic production.
Exxon Mobil: Recycled Sailer
Exxon Mobile has aggressively pitched a new process called ‘advanced recycling’ as a game-changing solution to the plastic waste crisis. Karen McKee, the company’s president of product solutions, went as far to portray an optimistic view that items such as yogurt containers could be recycled into medical devices and car dashboards.
But the California Attorney General’s lawsuit alleges that this “advanced recycling” is simply a “public relations stunt.” In addition, the suit states that at Exxon Mobil’s sole “advanced recycling” plant located in Baytown, Texas, the company knows it turns just 8% of its plastic into new material; the remaining 92% is converted to fuel and burned. Which, in turn, causes me to seriously question how authentic Exxon Mobil’s recycling efforts are.
Advanced Recycling: advancing what could be enforced
The process called ‘advanced recycling’ is a catch-all term that can encompass heating or solvating plastic waste to produce fuel, chemicals and waxes in excess of what could be recovered from recycled plastic. In 2023 study, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory reported that the most common techniques for advanced recycling recover only 1% to 14% of the mass originally in plastic waste.
This situation is simply ‘getting oil out of the ground where it does not belong, turning it into plastic waste that we must then burn, after burning more oil to turn the plastic back into oil which we then burn,’ experts have argued. The environmental implications and sustainability of Exxon Mobil’s recycling claims are called into question. It is a claim that environmental advocates and policy experts have condemned as a ‘fraud’ for decades, dating back to the Industrial Revolution.
Problems with plastic recycling
The public has been taught to tar and feather their blue curbside bin by an increasing amount of research on the limitations of plastics recycling. ‘When it comes to plastic, what the public thinks is recyclable is not all the stuff that’s actually recyclable,’ said Daniel Coffee, a UCLA researcher who has investigated discarded plastics in Los Angeles County.
This is a problem far beyond Exxon Mobil, though; recyclers have known for years that recycling was actually considered a “carefully designed system to accept recyclable packaging full of single-use plastic”. But the notion is primarily a product of an “industry-backed misinformation campaign,” Coffee says.
California has been grappling with how to dispose of the waste as it adopts some of the country’s toughest laws to eliminate single-use plastics. Environmentalists say the state’s grand vision of a waste-free future may need to be more ambitious, and step away from single-use plastics entirely.
