The plastic industry’s $30 million lie
Big Plastic’s “advanced recycling” ads are everywhere—and they’re part of a massive greenwashing scam.
If you’ve tuned into any major TV network in the last few months, you may have seen an ad promising a brand new way to end plastic pollution: advanced recycling.
As pastel plastic products fall like dominoes, the ad asks you to “imagine a future where plastic is not wasted, but remade over and over” to keep “our families safer, and our planet cleaner.” At the end, the discarded packaging has been transformed into a circular arrow, meant to imply that plastic recycling is infinite.
The ad is from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the plastic industry’s most powerful lobbying group, under its subsidiary America’s Plastic Makers. It’s part of one of the most expensive ad pushes in ACC’s 152-year history: So far, America’s Plastic Makers has spent nearly $30 million since 2023 to place ads touting “advanced recycling” and other sustainability measures, according to a HEATED analysis of data from ad insights firm Media Radar. That dwarfed the ACC’s lobbying spend over the same period by millions.
At least $11.9 million of that spend went directly toward placing the advanced recycling television spot, which has aired on at least 21 networks—including NBC, ABC, Fox, ESPN, and CNN—since February. Our analysis doesn’t include the cost of development and production. The ACC declined to confirm our numbers.
These “advanced recycling” ads are not trying to sell products. They’re trying to sell consumers a utopian idea: that plastic consumption can continue as is, without irreparably damaging public health and the planet.
But solid evidence for that idea is remarkably thin. In fact, numerous investigations over the last four years have found that advanced recycling not only rarely produces new plastic, but that it may be worse for the environment than regular recycling.
“This kind of marketing follows the same pattern as the industry’s past campaigns to deceive the public about the viability of plastic recycling,” said Davis Allen, an investigative researcher at the Center for Climate Integrity and co-author of “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling'' report. The plastic industry is “promising solutions in the hope of avoiding accountability and delaying tangible action.”
“Toxic, climate-damaging, and ineffective”
If there’s one thing the plastics industry gets right, it’s that plastic pollution is a massive problem—and regular recycling isn’t working. Every year, 350 million tons of plastic waste is dumped into landfills or oceans; but less than 10 percent of the world’s plastic can be recycled. And it’s only getting worse, with plastic pollution projected to double by 2030.
Matthew Kastner, an ACC spokesperson, told HEATED that advanced recycling is an important part of a future where "significantly more plastics can be reused and remade instead of being discarded.” However, "advanced recycling is not by itself a silver bullet,” he said, listing a series of solutions to plastic's recycling problems, including improving collection and sorting.
Kastner notably left out one obvious solution: using less plastic, which is made from fossil fuels. But this is unacceptable to the plastics industry, whose profits are predicated on limitless consumption. So “advanced recycling” has entered the chat.
“Advanced recycling,” also called chemical recycling, is an umbrella term for any process that can break down used plastic into its molecular parts, which are then used to make brand-new plastic products. It promises something that mechanical, aka regular, recycling cannot—a way to create plastic that can be reused over and over.
Through America’s Plastic Makers, the ACC has spent the last four years advertising chemical recycling as if recycled products are already widely available in stores. The group also claims it would be able to recycle 90 percent of the plastic in landfills with more support for advanced recycling.
But numerous investigations by environmental groups and journalists have found that the plastics industry is exaggerating both what advanced recycling has already accomplished, and what it can accomplish in the future.
A recent ProPublica investigation spent months tracking down products that the industry claimed were made from 100 percent recycled plastic. Reporter Lisa Song searched for half a dozen products, including a fruit cup made partly by Exxon; plastic-wrapped chicken made by Exxon; and plastic food wrapping by Chevron. None of those products existed as advertised; they were either produced in limited quantities or contained far less recycled plastic than the label claimed.
The lack of available products is not a surprise, because despite years of effort and billions of dollars of investment, few advanced recycling plants are up and running. In 2023, environmental nonprofits Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network reviewed the then-11 advanced recycling plants in the U.S. (one has since shut down). They found that eight plants were either still in the testing phase, or had not achieved plastic recycling at scale. At least eight plants produced mostly crude oil later refined into diesel or jet fuel, rather than recycled plastic.
One year earlier, the Natural Resources Defense Council found that, of the eight advanced recycling plants it studied, the majority were burning plastic, rather than recycling it.
In 2021, Reuters investigated 30 advanced recycling plants by two dozen companies across the world, and found that all of the plants had either closed down or were operating on a modest scale. More than half were years behind schedule on their commercial plans.
The prior year, Greenpeace similarly examined 52 advanced recycling projects endorsed by the ACC, estimated to cost $4.8 billion. Greenpeace found that many were misleadingly labeled “recycling” when they actually incinerated plastic. None of the plastic-to-plastic recycling—the kind that would actually solve the industry’s pollution problem—was commercially viable, the organization said.
These plants were a commercial failure because they faced the same obstacles as plastic mechanical recycling: the cost of collecting, separating, and washing plastic waste, and the high cost of creating brand-new plastic products from used plastic.
In fact, the main product that chemical recycling produces isn’t plastic—it’s oil and chemicals. According to a 2023 peer-reviewed study published in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, the vast majority of chemically recycled waste—86 to 99 percent—becomes fossil fuels or chemicals like styrene and benzene.
But even if all these advanced recycling plants were working as advertised, they would only be making a minor dent in plastic pollution. The 2023 Beyond Plastics report found that even at full capacity, 11 advanced recycling plants could only process 1.3 percent of the 35.7 million tons of plastic waste the U.S. generates each year.
“Like all new industries, it takes time,” said the ACC’s Kastner, who compared advanced recycling to solar power, which generated about 4 percent of U.S. electricity last year. “Just because it isn’t at the scale we need it to be today doesn’t mean we stop making progress.”
But unlike solar power, advanced recycling plants are exacerbating the climate crisis. According to one 2023 study, oil produced by a common recycling method called pyrolysis actually pollutes more than the fossil fuel industry’s usual polluting occupation—crude oil drilling. That’s because superheating plastic, and then refining its oil output, is more energy intensive.
“In general, you’re getting higher greenhouse gas emissions from pyrolysis than you would from conventional drilling,” Taylor Uekert, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the lead author of the 2023 chemical recycling study, told Yale Environment 360. And most of the people exposed to those harmful emissions are those that live near the facilities, which are more likely to be located in sacrifice zones.
Kastner disputed those results, claiming that a study of 13 lifecycle analyses showed that advanced recycling plays “a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” The study he cited was commissioned by the ACC.
In fact, fossil fuels are an inseparable part of the most common forms of chemical recycling. At least 90 percent of one of plastic’s essential ingredients, naphtha, is made from crude oil.
That may explain why the fossil fuel and chemical industries are backing advanced recycling. Reuters found that the majority of the 30 plants they investigated were the result of agreements between small recycling firms and big consumer brands, chemical companies, or fossil fuel corporations, including Exxon and Shell. Both companies are members of America’s Plastic Makers, along with Chevron Phillips Chemical, Dow, and Eastman Chemical.
“These technologies do not recycle or remake plastic in any meaningful way,” said Kevin Budris, the deputy director of environmental nonprofit Just Zero, who described advanced recycling as a “toxic, climate-damaging and ineffective” process. “Instead, they generate large amounts of toxic chemicals, and they are typically pushed into Black and Brown communities and low-income communities without giving those communities any opportunity to push back.”
This is not news to the plastics industry, which has known for decades that advanced recycling is a flop.
Decades of greenwashing
As early as 1973, an industry consultant wrote that “separation of plastics from [municipal solid waste] is neither technically nor economically feasible at the present time, and probably will not be in the future,” according to documents obtained by the Center for Climate Integrity. In 1987, an article published in Conservation & Recycling found that “destructive technologies, such as incineration and pyrolysis, are quite wasteful.”
In the intervening decades, recycling has not improved. This year, Shell walked back its pledge to chemically recycle 1 million tons of plastic a year by 2025, calling it “unfeasible.”
A few months later, ProPublica revealed that pyrolysis could at best “replace 0.2 percent of new plastic churned out in a year.” The figure came from an energy industry analyst, who explained that even three years in the future, the global investment in pyrolysis still wouldn’t produce enough plastic ingredients to replace new plastic.
“The industry has rebranded decades-old technologies as 'advanced recycling,’ hoping to convince us that processes like pyrolysis and gasification represent a silver-bullet solution,” said Allen. “But all of the evidence suggests otherwise.”
Yet advanced recycling is only failing up. The global market for advanced recycling is projected to exceed $9 billion by 2031, according to the Center for Climate Integrity. And the industry is pushing for more, with the ACC successfully lobbying for tens of millions in government funding for chemical recycling plants.
That success is thanks in large part to ACC ads that amount to little more than a greenwashing scam.
“Ultimately, this kind of messaging is meant to distract us from the best available solution: producing less plastic,” said Allen.
Catch of the day: Reader Debra says that every day her pups teach her the most important ingredient for a sustainable future—love. “We need to care about each other beyond just our family and friends. If we do that, a more sustainable future will follow,” she said.
Debra also shared voting resources and how to become an environmental changemaker.
Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? Send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.
I'm not too worried about sending some plastic to the landfill. Anything but it blowing around or ending up in the river! Second worst, burning in any way which means I'm just providing cheap fuel. I'm tempted to just stop putting my plastic in the recycle bin; it's mostly filled cardboard, box board, some newspapers and the 1000 beer cans every two weeks that I need to stay sane. We have good biowaste collection for compost, which I think is more important, emissions reduction wise and is actually done within 30 miles.
Recently I listened to a Euro windpower podcast about recycling turbine blades. There were two companies, one US and one EU. The EU one recycled them into raw materials for the next generation of blades. Actual circularity. The American one created some kind of "fuel" and spent a lot of time explaining to the somewhat befuddled Euros how this counted as recycling and how various "incentives" stacked up to make this profitable and various emissions "accounting" made this fuel "carbon negative." Didn't exactly incite my patriotic pride in American ingenuity.
"Through America’s Plastic Makers, the ACC has spent the last four years advertising chemical recycling as if recycled products are already widely available in stores. "
This is the big issue I have. Advertising this process as if it was in general use. But I do want advanced recycling to succeed because I think at any level of realistic plastic consumption, it will still be necessary to recycle it.
I'm curious if anyone at the conference asked him if anything is being done to reduce the types of plastic in use? To me that is the big obstacle that keeps coming up in all the articles about the problems of plastic recycling. The problems of sorting and discarding and having different processes for different types of plastics, all lead to the central issue that recycling is more expensive than original production of plastic.