Earlier this month, The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff wrote about the emerging evidence that some fossil fuel companies, faced with grim economic and environmental realities surrounding oil sales, are pouring their efforts into a deeply questionable Hail Mary: plastics. Despite optimistic early projections that led to significant petrochemical plant investments to transform fossil fuels into plastic, there’s insufficient evidence that demand for virgin plastics is growing. And there are increasingly few options for dealing with the mountain of plastic after it’s used, now that China has closed its gates to U.S. plastic waste.
 
It’s odd to look back on that piece now. There was a conversation among editors over whether the headline “Big Oil’s Evil, Stupid Plan to Drown the World in Plastic” was too much. Was calling it “evil” excessive—falsely implying knowledge of fossil fuel executives’ intentions and souls? Or was it an accurate description of a plan to profit from a product people don’t want until plastic covers Kenya from border to border, strangles sea mammals out of existence, and leaches chemicals into everyday life? In Kate’s persuasive analysis of the publicly available information, fossil fuel companies don’t come out looking good.

And yet. Fossil fuel companies came out looking much, much worse after NPR and PBS Frontline published their remarkable investigation into decades of corporate misinformation on plastics last Friday. The piece alleges that oil and petrochemical companies knew plastic recycling was probably never going to be economically feasible but organized campaigns to convince customers otherwise—largely so that they would buy more plastics. “The industry spent millions telling people to recycle,” NPR’s Laura Sullivan wrote, “because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn’t true.”

The nitty-gritty of the campaigns boggle the mind. Since its widespread adoption, “less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled,” according to publicly available Environmental Protection Agency data. “But the public has known little about these difficulties,” Sullivan reported:
 
Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.
 
“The bottle may look empty, yet it’s anything but trash,” says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. “It’s full of potential.… We’ve pioneered the country’s largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles.”
 
These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.
 
It may have sounded like an environmentalist’s message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.

This kind of extended misinformation campaign almost beggars belief—and that’s not the end of it. The piece also details how the recycling logo—a triangle of three arrows with a number in it—started appearing on plastics following industry lobbying, causing recycling businesses to be inundated with products they couldn’t process because all plastic products now looked recyclable.
 
Amazingly, the week still wasn’t over for news of corporate malfeasance. Only a day after the NPR piece, The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi reported on a leaked tape of oil and gas industry groups last summer privately contradicting their public stance that the emissions released when fossil fuel extraction sites burn off excess natural gas were under control. In the recording, industry spokespeople openly acknowledged the industry’s flaring problem. They also discussed how to improve their messaging—to “stick with those young people and make them support oil and gas.”
 
Holy planet-fracking cannoli: Don’t these CEOs know some editors are trying to persuade other editors not to call them evil?


—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor