A small county in Kansas has filed a class action lawsuit against nearly a dozen resin companies and the American Chemistry Council, accusing them of "false representations" regarding the recyclability of plastics.
The lawsuit was filed by Ford County, a county in southwest Kansas with a population of less than 35,000. About three-quarters of the county's population is in Dodge City, its county seat.
The suit alleges that the suppliers made a "profit-driven decision to promote the idea to the American consumer that plastics were recyclable and better for the environment, when in reality they had information that only a tiny fraction of plastics are ever recycled."
Defendants include ExxonMobil Corp., Chevron Corp., DuPont Co., Celanese Corp., Dow Inc., Eastman Chemical Co. and LyondellBasell, as well as the American Chemistry Council trade organization.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., and assigned to Judge Kathryn H. Vratil, who was appointed to the court in 1992 by George H. W. Bush.
The suit also alleges that the petrochemical companies' "false representations" around the recyclability of plastics have resulted in higher production levels of plastic products, more demand for them, inflated prices for plastic products and issues with plastic waste remediation.
All of this, the lawsuit alleges, has harmed the citizens of Kansas. It adds that the plastics industry "should be held accountable for their campaign of deception."
The suit cites internal plastics industry documents, reports by Greenpeace and Beyond Plastics, and news and opinion articles from the 1990s, including several from Plastics News.
The lawsuit seeks an undisclosed amount in damages as well as an injunction to enforce that the companies no longer advertise plastics as recyclable.
The Ford County filing is the third recycling-based lawsuit to be filed in the last four months. In September, the state of California filed a lawsuit alleging the plastics sector has spent decades lying to the public.
ExxonMobil is specifically named in the California lawsuit, but the state attorney general left a placeholder in the filing, also naming unknown defendants who also allegedly violated the law. Those unnamed defendants will be added to the complaint once they are discovered, the lawsuit said.
Then in October, California's Los Angeles County filed a separate lawsuit accusing PepsiCo Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. of deceiving the public about the recyclability of their plastic bottles and the environmental and health harms from the production and disposal of their plastics packaging.
That lawsuit alleges that the two companies' products are top sources of plastic litter and that they marketed recycling as a "false" solution so consumers would see plastics as an environmentally responsible choice.