Why Big Oil and the Chemical Lobby Are Blasting Us With “Advanced” Recycling Ads
Emily Sanders | March 28, 2023 | ExxonKnews
The disturbing reports on plastic pollution just keep coming: toxic plastic waste is filling up our oceans, our landfills, and even our bodies. But if you’ve seen a recent surge of ads from the companies that produce this garbage, you might be forgiven for thinking they’re working on solutions to the problem.
“America’s Plastic Makers” is the brand promoting a slew of ads about a new “solution” to plastic pollution that experts and evidence say creates new climate and environmental harms, and doesn’t actually work. It’s called “advanced” or chemical recycling, and refers to various processes for repurposing plastic waste. Some of those would use chemicals to break down used plastic and supposedly turn it into new plastic. But far more frequently, chemical recycling refers to combusting fossil fuels to turn plastics into chemicals or more oil and gas to be burned (also known as pyrolisis or gasification, which isn’t recycling at all).
Big Oil companies are opening new chemical recycling facilities across the country, which they’re selling as the silver bullet to dealing with hard-to-recycle plastic waste. And they’re advertising these facilities with the help of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade association for chemical producers and the main lobbying arm for the plastics industry.
Chemical recycling is one of the fossil fuel industry’s newest strategies to greenwash its harmful products.
As far back as the 1970s, major oil and petrochemical companies like Exxon and Chevron — members of the ACC and some of the world’s largest producers of single-use plastic — knew that the majority of plastic products could never be effectively recycled. But instead of acting on that knowledge, they ran a coordinated campaign to convince consumers of the opposite in order to sell their products. (Sound familiar?)
“Recycling has for 50 years been [the oil and chemical industry’s] pseudo solution to the plastic pollution crisis, and society has started to realize the truth behind this,” said Melissa Valliant, communications director at Beyond Plastics, an organization that works to fight plastic pollution. “They needed a new smokescreen so that consumers could be reassured, falsely, deceptively, that this problem was being curbed.”
Enter chemical recycling.
Here’s the thing: chemical recycling is inefficient and unproven, and it exacerbates climate and environmental injustices, according to a series of nonprofit, journalistic, and government analyses. The process is extremely energy and emissions-intensive because it requires burning more fossil fuels, using and emitting more neurotoxic or carcinogenic chemicals like benzene, or both. Hazardous waste created during chemical recycling is either burned in copious amounts on site or, in many cases, shipped across the country to multiple locations to be burned. And a large majority of these facilities are sited in communities of color and low-income communities.
But that hasn’t stopped the industry from widely marketing the technology as an environmentally sound solution.
The American Chemistry Council is spending more and more on ads that promote the idea that chemical recycling makes plastics a-okay.
Since the beginning of the year, the American Chemistry Council has spent more than $526,000 running Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns about “advanced” or chemical recycling, according to an analysis of Meta data by the Center for Climate Integrity’s digital team.*
In 2022, the group spent more than $265,000 on the ads — more than double the $97,000 it spent on the issue the year prior, and six times its spending the year before that. And ACC’s brand, “America’s Plastic Makers,” has consistently outpaced Facebook and Instagram ad spending by other groups on energy and environment issues in recent months, according to tracking by Climate Monitor.
The ads profess the benefits of chemical recycling and applaud industry’s efforts to recycle plastics. Many of them claim that chemical recycling keeps plastics in the “circular economy,” a term that has been co-opted to convince consumers that plastics are being sent back into the same production cycle. But that’s not the case, according to a newly published paper on the subject from the Center for International Environmental Law.
“The ‘circular’ label is often misapplied to the burning and inadequate recycling of plastic waste, contrary to the principles of circularity,” the brief explains. “Technical processes that require the continuation and expansion of plastics production cannot be labeled circular, and they should thus not be considered solutions to the global plastics crisis.”
