They knew plastics recycling was a sham from the start
By Rebecca
John
This work was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism
This new discovery also comes against the backdrop of two
pending lawsuits alleging that U.S. plastic producers have deceived the public
about the feasibility of recycling since the 1980s.
For decades, the plastics industry has publicly advocated
recycling as a strategy for managing plastic waste. But the document, a letter written in May 1974 by Charles Brelsford
McCoy, a president and board chairman of DuPont, represents the earliest
evidence to date of a top-level industry insider admitting that many
commonly used plastic products cannot be recycled due to their complex chemical
structures.
The letter contains DuPont’s response to an invitation
asking the company to join a pilot recycling scheme in honor of the U.S.’s 1976
bicentennial celebrations. DuPont refused. The reason: recycling DuPont’s
plastic products was simply “not feasible.”
Found by DeSmog, the correspondence proves that by the early
1970s the plastic industry’s knowledge regarding the limitations of recycling
existed at the highest level, not only in the lab but also the C-suite.
The discovery also casts new light on the plastic
industry’s decades-long promotion of recycling as a viable solution to the
global plastic waste crisis.
Upcoming Plastic Pollution Treaty
On December 1, 2024, the Intergovernmental Negotiating
Committee on Plastic Pollution held what was supposed to be the final
negotiating session for a global treaty against plastic pollution in Busan,
South Korea. But a coalition of fossil fuel–producing countries, led by Saudi
Arabia, Iran, and Russia, blocked progress, arguing for solutions based on
recycling and waste management.
Now, an additional negotiating session will take place in
Geneva, Switzerland, from August 5 to 14.
Despite these fossil-fuel producing nations offering
recycling as a solution, the process is neither technically nor economically
viable for many types of plastic. To date, research shows that only a small fraction — under 10 percent — of all the plastic ever
produced has actually been recycled and only 1 percent has been recycled twice.
Some are calling next week’s Geneva session a “last chance” meeting as plastic pollution is
considered a major threat to human and planetary health. Made
predominantly from fossil fuels, plastic harms the Earth’s climate,
biodiversity, and ocean ecosystems, and is also toxic to human health. Plastic
microparticles and chemicals have been found all over the globe, from the Mariana Trench to Mount Everest, as well as in human bodies, from the brain to breast milk.
“These industries are intimately linked,” Patrick Boyle, a
senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), told
DeSmog.“Plastics are oil and gas. The fundamental building blocks of plastics
as are sourced from oil, gas and coal. They are petrochemicals . . . and fossil
fuels are at their core.”
U.S. and European petrochemical companies, represented
by the International
Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA), joined the push to
exclude legally binding restrictions on plastic production from the treaty’s
final text, also advocating for recycling as a solution to the crisis and lobbying
against legally enforceable limits.
DuPont, BP, Chevron, Dow, ExxonMobil, Phillips, Shell, and
TotalEnergies, which collectively make billions of dollars a year from selling and processing
the fossil fuel by-products used to manufacture new plastics, are members of
multiple lobby groups that pushed against restrictions on plastics
production.These lobby groups include the American Chemistry Council and the European Chemistry Industry Council, which in turn
form ICCA along
with 65 other chemical industry associations from around the world.
“There is a better way to end pollution” said ICCA’s secretary, Chris Jahn, in the aftermath of the
talks’ collapse last December. Jahn, who is also the president and CEO of
the American Chemistry Council, issued a statement on behalf of
the industry-backed Global Partners for Plastics Circularity, renouncing
the imposition of restrictions on plastic supplies and advocating for more
ambitious national “recycling” plans instead of legally binding limits on
production.
Despite internal industry awareness of the technical and
economic obstacles facing recycling at scale, Big Oil and the plastics
industry have deceptively promoted
recycling as a solution to plastic pollution for nearly four decades
to avoid legal limits on production or outright bans, according to recent
reports by CIEL, NPR/PBS Frontline and the Center for
Climate Integrity (CCI).
Davis Allen, lead author of CCI’s report, The
Fraud of Plastic Recycling, published in February 2024, told DeSmog
that the newly found DuPont letter is “further proof that the plastics industry
has been actively deceiving the public for decades about the recyclability of
plastics” despite its knowledge of the inherent limitations of recycling.
“The document is striking,” said Allen, “because of its
straightforward assessment of the unique challenge of recycling plastics, and
because of how little has actually changed over the last 50 years.”
CIEL’s Boyle agrees. “It’s affirming” but also “maddening”
to see someone “that high in the company say something that we’ve been saying
for years – that plastic recycling doesn’t work,” he told DeSmog.
‘Not Feasible’: A Look Inside the Letter
In April 1974, Charles Brelsford McCoy, then chairman of
DuPont’s powerful Finance Committee, received a letter from the Great America
Foundation proposing that DuPont take part in a fledgling recycling
event as part of the foundation‘s upcoming “Let’s Make America Beautiful
for our Great American Bicentennial” celebrations, DeSmog found.
“Our program is not designed to clean up the roadsides of
public areas,” wrote the Great America Foundation’s vice president. “It is
designed to prevent beverage and other food containers from getting there
in the first place.”
Although the iron, steel, and aluminum industries were
taking part, McCoy declined the invitation.
“Du Pont supplies coatings, liners, and raw materials to
container manufacturers,” he explained. “By the time a container reaches the
market, the components which we supply have been blended with others so as
to preclude the possibility of our recycling them. Thus
we feel that Du Pont participation in your program is not feasible.”
Charles Brelsford McCoy, chairman of DuPont’s Finance
Committee, stated that recycling “is not feasible” in this 1974 letter to the.
Great America Foundation. Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library
The correspondence, contained within the DuPont archives at
the Hagley Library in Wilmington, Delaware, once the site of the
company’s 19th century gunpowder mills, adds to previous
evidence revealing the plastic industry’s early knowledge that the blending of
synthetic polymers and additives involved in plastic production meant that
recycling was virtually impossible.
Fossil fuels are used to produce 98 percent of the world’s plastics, each
variety with its own chemical composition that prevents different types of
plastics from being recycled together. Possible markets exist only for a small
number of recycled plastics such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles.
The cost of sorting and separating plastics, the addition of chemical additives
and colorants, and contamination during the recycling process further limits
recyclability. Plastic also degrades with the recycling process, leaching toxic
substances that make it unsuitable for many reuses, such as food packaging.
“Best case you’re talking about is one or two cycles of
recycling before that original plastic cannot be recycled again into a viable
product,” said Boyle. “That’s not recycling in a long-term way, that’s not a
circular economy. That’s a cul-de-sac on the way to waste.”
When asked to comment on McCoy’s letter, DuPont spokesperson
Dan Turner confirmed that McCoy was an executive with E.I. Dupont de Nemours &
Company. He said,“there is a clear difference between DuPont de Nemours and
legacy E.I. du Pont de Nemours, and as such, we cannot comment on what was
purportedly said by Mr. McCoy in his capacity with E.I. DuPont de Nemours over
50 years ago.”
Turner did not specify what the differences are between the
legacy and modern DuPont firms. However, after merging with Dow in 2015, DuPont
relinquished control over the companies’ combined plastics division to Dow when the businesses
split in 2019. Then, in 2022, DuPont sold its engineering plastics business. It still
owns plastics producers, like Donatelle Plastics Inc., a
medical device maker that DuPont acquired in 2024.
Historically, DuPont has been one of the world’s largest
plastics producers and a 2023 Market Analysis Report described the company as
one of “the leading companies in the plastic market” based on data
gathered between 2018 and 2023.
Plastic Has ‘Disposal’ Problems
In 1969, at the first U.S. National Conference on Packaging
Wastes, a representative from the Dow Chemical Company declared it “ironic”
that the molecular structure that made plastic lightweight, durable and popular
also created its “disposal problems.” Other participants told the conference,
attended by representatives from DuPont, Mobil, Chevron, and Amoco (now BP),
that “[t]he very success of package makers in marrying dissimilar materials has
made packaging materials virtually unrecoverable after use.”
Because of these challenges inherent within the recycling
process, making new plastic from freshly extracted crude oil, natural gas, or
coal is much cheaper than paying for recycled plastic.
“The best case you’re talking about is one or two cycles of
recycling before that original plastic cannot be recycled again into a viable
product … that’s not a circular economy. That’s a cul-de-sac on the way to
waste.”
Patrick Boyle, senior attorney, Center for International
Environmental Law
When DuPont and other plastics producers eventually shifted
to promoting plastic recycling in the 1980s, “it wasn’t because of some
technical breakthrough that got around the problem” Allen explains. “It
had just become increasingly clear that certain plastic products were likely to
get banned if the plastics industry couldn’t make recycling seem like a viable
solution.”
A ban on plastics would seriously limit the profit margins
of fossil fuel companies and the plastic producers.
Responding to a growing public backlash against plastic
waste and facing punitive legislation, the U.S. plastics industry began
aggressively promoting recycling as a solution, even though it was
unproven at scale. According to CCI’s report,
the largest producers, including DuPont, ExxonMobil, and Dow, spent millions of
dollars on public relations efforts selling the “myth of plastic recycling”
despite their knowledge of its practical limitations.
In 1988, Wayne Pearson, long-time marketing director for
DuPont and executive director of the Plastics Recycling Foundation (an industry
group whose members included DuPont and ExxonChemical), told the New York Times, “No doubt about it, legislation is the
single most important reason why we are looking at recycling.”
That same year, as part of a campaign to make consumers
believe in the effectiveness of plastic recycling, the industry introduced a
labelling system, grouping plastics by resin type and stamping them with a
number surrounded by a triangle of “chasing arrows.” It did this despite
internal warnings that these efforts would be “of
limited practicality,” according to The Fraud of Plastic Recycling
report.
“Recycling cannot go on indefinitely, and does not solve the
solid waste problem,” Roy Gottesman, the founder of the plastics industry group
Vinyl Institute, acknowledged in 1989.
New Lawsuits Against Major Plastic-makers
Evidence of the plastic industry’s deception over recycling
has prompted two recent lawsuits against plastic producers. In September 2024,
the state of California filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil for the company’s
alleged “decades-long campaign of fraud and deception about the recyclability
of plastics”; and in December 2024, a Missouri-based class action lawsuit, filed against DuPont,
ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dow Chemical, and the American Chemistry Council, is
seeking an injunction prohibiting these companies from advertising their
products as recyclable, court filings state.
“Fossil fuel and petrochemical companies want us to believe
recycling is the solution,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who
filed the California suit. Addressing a New York University symposium
on Plastics
and Human Health in September last year, Bonta spoke of the “myth” of
recycling. “It’s a farce, it’s a lie, it’s a deceit,” he said.
“There is no plastic recycling at scale though they want you
to believe different. Only five percent of U.S. plastic waste is actually
recycled. Ninety-five percent goes into our environment, our treasured ocean
and beloved streams, to landfill or is incinerated. It’s not recycled,” Bonta
added.
The Missouri case, Rodriguez et al. v. Exxon Mobil
Corporation et al., is still pending.
On January 6, ExxonMobil filed a defamation lawsuit against Bonta
and several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, for statements regarding ExxonMobil’s
recycling capabilities.
ExxonMobil is the world’s largest producer of plastic
polymers used to manufacture single-use plastics.
ExxonMobil has also been one of the best-represented fossil
fuel companies over the course of the international plastics treaty
negotiations, sending 14 delegates, according to analysis by the CIEL and Greenpeace. The same analysis reveals that the American Chemistry Council, supported by DuPont and Dow,
sent 22 delegates to the negotiations. In total, a record 220 fossil fuel and
chemical industry lobbyists attended the last round of talks in Busan, which
failed to achieve a deal.
“The danger here is delay,” Rachel Radvany, CIEL’s
Environmental Health Campaigner who will attend the negotiations in Geneva,
told DeSmog. “We’ve seen more and more plastics lobbyists show up at each round
of negotiations. Their ultimate goal is to not allow true solutions to happen
because it goes against their profit margins.”
According to Radvany, each delay in the negotiations is
hurting people. “All the stages of the plastics lifecycle have really serious
harms for human health, the environment, climate, biodiversity,” she said.
“Every chance the lobby gets, they delay things, and every delay means more
people are impacted and hurt by plastics.”
Overall, the seven largest plastic-producing firms in the
world are fossil-fuel companies, which increasingly see plastic
production as a highly profitable revenue stream at a time when the energy
and transportation sectors are beginning to turn away from fossil fuels.
Recent oil and industry expenditures on plants capable of
manufacturing new plastic materials is estimated to have been around $400 billion.
But producing plastic is also a major contributor to climate
change. According to the World Economic Forum, the production of four plastic
bottles alone releases the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving one mile
in car.
A spokesperson for DuPont told DeSmog that the company does
“not comment on pending litigation.”
ICCA, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dow, and the American Chemistry
Council did not respond to requests for comment by DeSmog.
“What’s needed to solve the plastics crisis is to take a
step back and focus on protecting human health and the environment, and use
that as a guiding frame for those solutions,” Radvany said. “So when you focus
on recycling without addressing both the upstream toxic impacts, and also
climate impacts, you’re never going to get to a true solution.”
Rebecca
John is a Research Fellow at the Climate Investigations Center. She is also
a freelance journalist and award-winning documentary film maker. As a Producer
and Director of the acclaimed “Extreme Oil” / “Curse
of Oil” series for PBS /BBC her work was awarded
a Cine Golden Eagle for News Analysis. Other award-winning and
nominated series and films include “Churchill” for PBS & ITV, “The
Secret World of Richard Nixon” for The History
Channel/BBC and “Ambush In Mogadishu” for PBS
Frontline/ BBC (winner of the Edward R. Murrow Overseas Press Club of America
‘Best Documentary on Foreign Affairs Award’). Follow her on X at @rebecca_John1.
