California and environmental groups sued Exxon over plastics. Now Exxon is striking back.

On Monday, Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of environmental groups over their criticism of the company’s plastics recycling initiatives.

In the complaint filed in federal court in Beaumont, Texas, the oil giant accuses Bonta and the advocacy groups of mounting a “smear campaign” motivated by “foreign influence, personal ambition, and a murky source of financing rife with conflicting business interests.” 

“This is a suit … about the corrupting influence of foreign money in the American legal system,” Exxon writes in the suit’s introduction, “and the sordid for-profit incentives and outright greed that tries to hide behind so-called public impact litigation.”

Exxon’s new lawsuit is a response to two legal complaints brought last September by Bonta and four environmental groups — Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, the Sierra Club, and Surfrider Foundation — in which the plaintiffs alleged that Exxon Mobil had engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.” 

Drawing on a trove of internal industry documents and other evidence, the two initial lawsuits suggested that Exxon and lobbying groups that it belonged to had known for decades that, due to technical and economic limitations, plastics recycling couldn’t manage the waste resulting from rapidly growing plastic production, yet the company promoted it anyway in order to defuse calls for reduced plastic manufacturing. 

One such document quoted an Exxon executive at a 1994 meeting with the American Plastics Council. “We are committed to the activities” of recycling, the executive said, “but not committed to the results.” 

In its counter lawsuit, Exxon alleges an untoward financial connection between the environmental groups and an Australian metals mining company called Fortescue, which “is presently competing with Exxon Mobil in the low carbon solutions and energy transition sector.” 

As Exxon describes it, Fortescue funds an Australian environmental organization called the Minderoo Foundation, which reportedly owns a subsidiary called the Intergenerational Environment Justice Fund, or IEJF, created in 2022 to support research and litigation “aimed at combatting the harms of single-use plastic waste.” According to Exxon Mobil, IEJF did not want to sue Exxon in its own name, so it asked the American law firm Cotchett, Pitre, & McCarthy, LLP to “recruit and enlist willing plaintiffs to stand in for the foreign interests’ agenda.”

IEJF is the only one of those entities targeted in the lawsuit. Neither that organization nor Fortescue responded to Grist’s requests for comment. Minderoo said Exxon’s complaint refers to its relationship with IEJF “incorrectly.”

Tyson Redenbarger, an attorney for Cotchett, Pitre, & McCarthy, said the lawsuit is a “distraction” from the environmental groups’ claims in California. “The Sierra Club, Surfrider, Heal the Bay, and Baykeeper have been exposing the harmful effects of plastic pollution for decades,” he told Grist. “Suggesting these highly regarded nonprofits are anyone’s ‘stand in’ is baseless, and fails to recognize that these nonprofits have been at the forefront of the battle over plastics.” 

The main argument in Exxon’s new lawsuit, however, is about Bonta and the environmental groups’ attacks on so-called “advanced recycling,” also known as chemical recycling. The term refers to a controversial suite of technologies to process plastic trash using high heat and pressure, theoretically turning it back into its constituent polymers so it can be reincorporated into new products again and again. 

According to its industry proponents, chemical recycling can reprocess plastic that is unrecyclable using conventional methods. But despite decades of research and investment, the technology has not lived up to its promise — a 2022 report found that fewer than a dozen chemical recycling facilities existed in the U.S., and most were only operating at a “pilot” or “demonstration” capacity. At least two facilities have closed altogether since then. 

In press releases and public appearances, Bonta and the environmental groups have called Exxon Mobil a “liar” for promoting chemical recycling, and said that chemical recycling is a “myth” and a “sham” — claims that Exxon Mobil now says were defamatory. To meet the standard for defamation in the U.S., a statement must be false, cause some kind of economic or reputational harm to a person or entity, and have been made negligently or maliciously.

In an ironic reversal of the arguments leveraged against it, Exxon Mobil claims in its recent lawsuit that Bonta and the environmental groups knew that their criticisms of chemical recycling were false, but they made them anyway “with reckless disregard for their falsity.” To support this claim, Exxon cites two reports published 21 and 33 years ago, respectively, in which California’s recycling agency and its predecessor noted that chemical recycling “holds significant potential” and “is becoming one of the most attractive recycling technologies for plastic wastes.” 

Exxon Mobil’s lawsuit says that Bonta and the environmental groups’ disparaging comments had “interfered with contracts and business relationships,” causing “a number of entities to back out of memoranda of understanding for advanced recycling” and resulting in “prospective business arrangements falling through.” 

“Advanced recycling works,” the suit says, requesting damages and relief, including an injunction that defendants “cease to interfere with Exxon’s prospective advanced recycling contracts.” It also spends three and a half pages highlighting how Bonta and the environmental groups’ claims specifically affect Exxon Mobil’s operations in Texas, making a case for the lawsuit to be heard by federal judges there.

Exxon owns one of the United States’ only functioning chemical recycling facilities — at a chemical plant in Baytown, Texas — and in November, the company said it would invest $200 million to double that facility’s capacity and add chemical recycling equipment to another facility in Beaumont, Texas. According to a 2023 analysis by the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, Exxon’s existing Baytown facility can process up to 40,000 metric tons of waste plastic per year — a tiny fraction of the 36 million metric tons of waste generated in the U.S. annually. 

Judith Enck, Beyond Plastics’ president and a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, said Exxon’s lawsuit was without merit. “There is consistent data showing that plastics recycling does not achieve a high level of recycling and that chemical recycling is not a real solution to the growing problem of plastic waste,” she said. “It would be so much more productive if Exxon Mobil simply told the truth and refrained from attempting to intimidate elected officials and advocates who are working to actually solve the problem.”

A spokesperson for the California Department of Justice shrugged off the lawsuit. “This is another attempt from Exxon Mobil to deflect attention from its own unlawful deception,” they said. “The attorney general is proud to advance his lawsuit against Exxon Mobil and looks forward to vigorously litigating this case in court.”

Surfrider said it was reviewing the lawsuit and declined to comment, and Heal the Bay said it was still preparing a statement. Baykeeper did not respond in time for publication.

The Sierra Club called the suit “a shameless attempt at intimidation.” “Exxon is clearly confused about the difference between defamation and accountability,” Jonathan Berman, the organization’s deputy chief of communications, told Grist. “The Sierra Club will not sit back as Exxon Mobil attempts to use their billions to bully those standing up for the health of working families.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California and environmental groups sued Exxon over plastics. Now Exxon is striking back. on Jan 7, 2025.