Is recycling beyond fixing? Here’s why California thinks so.

On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil, claiming the oil and petrochemical giant had engaged “in a decades-long campaign of deception” about the effectiveness of recycling. The first-of-its-kind lawsuit seeks to hold the company responsible for the plastic pollution crisis. It argues that, since at least 1988, ExxonMobil has blanketed the state in marketing and advertising to convince people plastic is being recycled, making them more likely to buy it. This includes spreading misinformation about the efficacy of plastics recycling on social media, it alleges.

The amount of plastic being recycled in the United States today is a sliver of what is produced. Recent estimates suggest that only about 9% of this waste is recycled worldwide, while in America it’s about 5 to 6%.

Why is recycling broken?

American cities and towns have traditionally dealt with plastic waste by sending it to recycling centers that sort it into different types and then shred and melt the material. While this works for certain bottles and jugs, the vast majority of single-use plastics are too diverse in their color and chemical composition to be refashioned into new products.

Take, for instance, two common household plastics: an orange laundry detergent bottle and a clear squeezable ketchup bottle. They are made from different resins - a petroleum product that’s the main ingredient in plastics - are different colors and contain different chemicals. They can’t be combined and resold. The makeup of each product is so specific that even green and clear soda bottles made of No. 1 plastic cannot be recycled together, which is why the Coca-Cola Co. no longer packages Sprite in its iconic green container.

Most plastic waste in the United States is dumped in landfills or incinerated. Some of it winds up on beaches, in rivers or in the ocean.

“Fundamentally, most plastics are not recyclable,” said Judith Enck, the president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and a former regional Environmental Protection Agency administrator. “And you know who has known this for years? The companies that make and sell plastic.”

ExxonMobil responded to California’s lawsuit by alleging the state’s recycling system is broken. A spokesperson for the company said it had kept more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste out of landfills by turning it into reusable raw materials.

In the face of growing skepticism about plastic recycling, the industry has gone on the offensive. The Plastics Industry Association, a trade group, launched a $1 million campaign last year called “Recycling is Real.” Aimed at lawmakers and brands, the digital ads tried to bolster confidence in recycling.

The Association of Plastic Recyclers, an international trade group, said that as long as people use plastic products, recycling has merit.

“Recycled content can replace the use of some virgin material which is derived from petrochemicals and fossil fuels,” the group said in a statement. “But proliferation of new, inexpensive virgin plastic can undermine the demand for recycled materials.”

Big plastic makers have promoted what they say is another solution to waste: chemical recycling. The process breaks plastic down to its molecular components with the goal of reusing them to make new plastic. But California’s lawsuit claims ExxonMobil is also misleading the public about the efficacy of this technology. The suit says nearly all of the plastic waste processed by the company has been turned into fuel instead of recycled plastic.

What makes California’s lawsuit unique?

There have been many efforts to target big companies that use plastic packaging, but California’s lawsuit is the first to allege deception by a major plastic maker, experts said.

Last year, the state of New York sued PepsiCo, accusing the snack and soda company of choking a river running through the city of Buffalo with single-use plastic packaging from the company’s products. Attorneys general in Minnesota and Connecticut have sued Reynolds Consumer Products, the maker of Hefty bags, alleging the company misled customers by marketing some bags as recyclable when they were not.

Earlier this month, Keurig Dr Pepper reached a $1.5 million settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over the company’s claims that its single-serve coffee pods, or K-Cups, could be “effectively recycled.” According to the SEC, Keurig had not disclosed that two of the country’s biggest recycling companies doubted the product’s recyclability and said they did not intend to accept the pods.

In suing Exxon, California is taking on the world’s largest producer of resins used for single-use plastics, according to a report published last year by the Minderoo Foundation. It is also replicating an approach it has used against the oil industry. Last year, the state sued Exxon, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, accusing them of downplaying the risks of fossil fuels and misleading the public about climate change.

Is California’s lawsuit likely to succeed?

The suit alleges that Exxon’s recycling claims violated California’s nuisance, natural resources, water pollution, false advertisement and unfair competition laws. That gives the attorney general multiple avenues to prove the company was in the wrong, yet experts said the case will be an uphill battle.

California’s primary claim relies on the argument that Exxon created a “public nuisance” by overplaying the likelihood of plastic being recycled and normalizing consumption of single-use plastics. But Bruce Huber, a professor at Notre Dame Law School who specializes in environmental law, said this strategy is tricky because it depends on a judge’s willingness to take an expansive view of public nuisance laws.

Plastics “don’t match our ordinary conception of what a nuisance is,” Huber said. “It’s one thing to say an opioid or hazardous paint is a nuisance. There’s a discrete injury that you can track pretty cleanly to conduct by a perpetrating party. But plastics don’t fit that scheme nicely.”

Part of California’s argument is that once plastic enters the environment, the damages cascade. An example cited in the suit is the proliferation of microplastics - ubiquitous tiny particles smaller than five millimeters that have been found everywhere from Antarctic snow to inside human bodies. A peer-reviewed study published last year that focused on a recycling facility in the United Kingdom estimated that anywhere between 6 to 13% of the plastic processed there could end up being released into water or the air as microplastics.

If there’s one thing experts agree on, it’s that the lawsuit probably will drag on for years.

For her part, Enck is optimistic. “The math is the math,” she said, referring to government estimates showing very little plastic recycling is taking place in the United States.

She is already thinking about what California could do with the money. The state is seeking billions of dollars from Exxon, which it hopes to spend on public education and research and development into ways to effectively recycle plastics. Enck wants to see the state get behind refill and reuse - a growing movement to cut back on plastics consumption by using refillable containers for household cleaners and other products. California could help public schools and hospitals install dishwashing equipment so they don’t have to serve food on single-use plastic, she said. Cities could use the money to install public water bottle filling stations.

“The solution is making less plastic,” she said.

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Allyson Chiu contributed to this report