A major oil company has responded to California Attorney General Rob Bonta with a lawsuit alleging defamation after he accused them of misleading customers.
Exxon Mobil sued Bonta on Monday, months after he sued the company “for allegedly engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.”
Now, Exxon is “claiming Bonta falsely accused the company of deceiving the public about the potential for plastic recycling,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
The issue centers on whether plastic products are truly as recyclable as some claim. Bonta and the state Department of Justice claim “that ExxonMobil has been deceiving Californians for half a century through misleading public statements and slick marketing promising that recycling would address the ever-increasing amount of plastic waste ExxonMobil produces.”
As the Times points out, less than 10% of plastics are recycled in the U.S.
Exxon, however, says the issue is with the recycling systems, not the products.
In September, Exxon issued a statement to KTLA claiming that “for decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective.”
“They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others,” the statement read. “Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills. The first step would be to acknowledge what their counterparts across the U.S. know: advanced recycling works. To date, we’ve processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills. We’re bringing real solutions, recycling plastic waste that couldn’t be recycled by traditional methods.”
