New Jersey environmental groups want their state's attorney general to follow California's lead and sue the plastics industry over allegedly deceiving the public about the viability of plastics recycling.
Environment New Jersey, Clean Water Action, Beyond Plastics and others urged Attorney General Matt Platkin in a Jan. 9 letter to start his own investigation, saying that a legal settlement could provide significant money to governments to deal with plastics pollution.
"All states, including New Jersey, are suffering harm from the plastic waste crisis created by ExxonMobil and other petrochemical companies," the letter said. "These are harms that these companies should remediate — not New Jersey's taxpayers."
The letter to Platkin comes after California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit in September against ExxonMobil Corp. alleging that the company mislead the public about the potential of plastics recycling for decades.
As well, a similar lawsuit is ongoing in federal court in Missouri. A rural government in Kansas, Ford County, brought a class action lawsuit in federal court in December against several resin makers and the American Chemistry Council, alleging they lied about the potential recyclability of plastics in order to allay public worries and boost resin sales.
That Ford County lawsuit joined another class action case against resin makers in mid-January, brought in federal court in Missouri.
ExxonMobil and plastics industry groups have responded to the various lawsuits by saying that they're being blamed for failures of recycling policies in California and other states, and that the legal complaints against them are without merit and are distractions from innovations and investments the industry is making to improve recycling.
As well, ExxonMobil countersued Bonta and other environmental groups in early January, accusing them of defaming the company's chemical recycling technologies for their own political or financial gains.