The attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, sued Exxon Mobil on Monday, alleging that the oil giant carried out a “decades-long campaign of deception” that overhyped the promise of recycling and spawned a plastic pollution crisis.

The lawsuit, filed in superior court in San Francisco, argued that people were more likely to buy single-use plastics because of a false belief, promoted by Exxon Mobil, that they would be recycled.

Bonta said the company is a leading producer of a key component used to make single-use plastics. The suit seeks unspecified damages that Bonta estimated would amount of “multiple billions of dollars.”

In an interview, Bonta said plastic pollution was “fueled by the myth of recycling, and the leader among them in perpetuating that myth is Exxon Mobil.”

Exxon Mobil responded sharply, saying California officials knew for decades that their recycling system was ineffective. “They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others,” the company said in a statement. “Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills.”

The case opens a new front in the legal battles against oil and gas companies over climate and environmental issues. More than two dozen state and local governments, including California, have sued companies for their role in the climate crisis, making claims that the companies deceived the public in a quest for profit. None have gone trial yet.

Several environmental groups hailed Monday’s suit as breaking new ground for government action against a company over alleged deception related to plastic recycling. It came after a more than two-year investigation that included subpoenas to Exxon Mobil and industry groups.

Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said the lawsuit was “the most important legal action to date in the global fight against plastic pollution.”

Four other environmental groups — the Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, Heal the Bay and San Francisco Baykeeper — also on Monday said they had filed a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil alleging violations of state nuisance law and unfair-competition laws.

Both suits alleged that Exxon Mobil promoted the widely used “chasing arrows” symbol on plastic products, which led buyers to believe that their bottles and other products would be recycled if disposed of properly. But only about 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States is recycled, according to Bonta’s office, citing an estimate by the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, which looked at 2021 data.

The attorney general said the investigation uncovered information about misleading claims that Exxon Mobil made about its “advanced recycling” program, which claims to transform used plastics into new products.

Most of the waste processed through the company’s advanced-recycling program is made into fuel, and the new products contain little material that was actually recycled, but they are marketed and sold at a premium, the suit alleges. Bonta’s office called the advanced-recycling program “a public relations stunt.”

Exxon said on Monday that its advanced-recycling program was effective and that it had processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into “usable raw materials,” keeping it out of landfills.

The suit noted that plastics can break down into “microplastics” in the environment, potentially contaminating drinking water and soil. Researchers have found evidence of microplastics inside the human body. The lawsuit called for the establishment of an “abatement fund” and other financial penalties.

Bruce Huber, a professor at Notre Dame Law School who specializes in environmental and energy law, said Bonta’s lawsuit faces “an uphill battle” because of the murky nature of public-nuisance laws, even if there is evidence that plastics makers had not “been forthright” about the challenges of recycling. “It could be difficult for a court to grant California relief here without opening a Pandora’s box of other, similar claims,” Huber said.

In a report entitled “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling” this year, the Center for Climate Integrity concluded that fossil-fuel and other petrochemical companies had used the “false promise” of recycling to “exponentially increase virgin plastic production over the last six decades.” Plastics are made from fossil fuels.

The report said that recycling plastics has failed because of technical and economic limitations: Even when recycling is technically possible, it can be more expensive than producing new plastic and thus economically not viable, the report said.

Jane Patton, a campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, said she expects to see other cities and states file suits similar to California’s and noted that many of the lawsuits by state and local governments over climate change were built on similar claims about deception. “We’re seeing a tide change in the pursuit of corporate accountability through the courts for damage to the environment,” she said in an interview.

Bonta said that the concerns about recycling’s effectiveness could lead to a greater emphasis on reusing items like water bottles and shopping bags. “I think people need to know the limits of recycling and the fact that what they thought they had been recycling for years, has not really been recycled,” he said.

Karen Zraick and David Gelles are reporters with The New York TImes. Copyright, 2024, The New York Times.