Exxon Knew! First Warming and Climate, Now Plastics

By Paul Driessen Oct 27, 2024

“Exxon Knew!” The battle cry has inflamed and inspired climate activists for decades. Since the 1970s, they allege, Exxon Knew that human-caused climate change is “real” – but lied about it, claimed there wasn’t a “crisis,” and kept marketing its “planet-killing” fuels and petrochemical feed stocks. 

Now activists say Exxon Knew for years that very little plastic waste is actually recycled. The oil giant is deceiving regulators and consumers with claims that all plastics are recyclable and its “advanced recycling” processes keep enormous amounts of plastics out of landfills. 

ExxonMobil “campaign of deception” demands a lawsuit, says California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “Exxon Knew” that 95% of plastics in recycling bins are incinerated, get tossed onto roadways, or end up in landfills and oceans. 

“Exxon knew” it was peddling lies when it promoted recycling as a “cure-all for plastic waste” – because eradicating all plastic use and disposal is impossible and many plastics can’t be recycled. 

This is Mr. Bonta’s latest attack on fossil fuels. He wants a jury trial, to help ensure big lawfare payouts. But he’s ignoring inconvenient realities and engaging in rampant deceptions of his own. 

Plastics are ubiquitous: from eyeglass frames and lenses, to television, computer and cell phone housings, wind turbine blades and nacelles, solar panel frames, medical equipment, devices and garments, car and airplane interiors, backpacks, skis, football helmets, shoes, grocery bags and infinitely more. Plastic packaging preserves and protects products that involve long, expensive, resource-intensive processes to grow or manufacture; it helps keep foods from spoiling or becoming bacteria-infested. 

Plastics are cheap to produce, can be molded into infinite shapes and sizes, are corrosion-resistant, and don’t break easily (imagine shampoo and body wash in glass bottles). They’re lighter than glass and even paper alternatives, meaning more can be packed on trucks and transported using less fuel. In many cases, there are no viable alternatives. 

Plastics are essential for our living standards, safety and modern world. 

But what happens when they break, wear out or get tossed? For years they were thrown out with other trash. But environmentalists, politicians and consumers increasingly demanded that cans, glass and other throwaways be recycled. For many of us, recycling became a habit. 

Recycling turns low-value plastic garbage into valuable materials: window frames, boards for siding decks and fences, pipes to replace copper tubing that thieves steal, toys and toothbrushes, plates and utensils, diapers and clothing, carpeting and lawn furniture, soccer fields, bottles, cabinets, and  more. 

Neither ExxonMobil nor any other company promoted recycling as a magic solution or cure-all. It’s more expensive than virgin plastic, especially when transportation and sorting costs are factored in. Smaller items can clog sorting screens. Colored plastics have fewer recycling options than clear or white ones. 

Most important, many types of plastics have little post-use demand or simply cannot be recycled. Others are integrated with electrical circuitry (motherboards and keyboards) or with paper or metal (laminates for food containers), making it impossible to separate and recycle them. 

Thermoplastics can be heated, melted and reshaped or re-extruded into new products. These are the familiar #1 (PET) soda and water bottles, #2 (HDPE) milk and detergent containers, many #4 (LDPE) grocery bags and squeezable bottles, and some #5 (PP) yogurt and butter containers. 

Thermoset plastics contain polymers that form irreversible chemical bonds that make strong products that cannot be remelted: vulcanized rubber for tires, Bakelite kitchenware, jewelry and circuit boards, epoxy resins, Duroplast car bodies and toilet seats, polyurethane cushions, insulation and windshields, et cetera. 

Styrofoam cups and egg cartons cannot be recycled without (rare) specialized equipment and processes. 

Moreover, even thermoplastics can be recycled only 2-3 times, before their polymer chains get shortened to the point where quality and durability become so low that the products are unusable. 

(Newspaper, magazines, copying paper and Kraft paper bags have the same degradation problem: 6-7 trips to the recycler, and the cellulose fibers are too shortened, damaged and degraded to be reused. Steel, aluminum and glass, by contrast, can generally be recycled endless times.) 

All these complexities explain why only a small fraction of plastics are recycled. ExxonMobil recycling 60,000,00-80,000,000 pounds of plastics per year may seem minuscule, compared to 73,000,000 tons of annual US plastic waste. However, it’s equivalent to 430-570 offshore wind turbine blades (350 feet long; 140,000 pounds apiece) that only end up in Grand-Canyonesque landfills. 

Plus, plastic wastes can also be converted into diesel, aviation and gasoline fuels, and even electricity. 

An excellent solution is to turn plastics and most other garbage into electricity for our increasingly power-hungry society – especially as AI and data centers proliferate, and politicians mandate that we convert our gas stoves, ovens, furnaces and water heaters to electric models. 

A municipal waste-to-energy (WTE) / resource recovery facility operated by Reworld/Covanta performs these wondrous conversions just a few miles from my home. Enormous quantities of normally landfilled, nonrecyclable home, business, industrial, government and agricultural waste are dumped into a receiving area, sorted for unacceptable materials (eg, rocks), mixed thoroughly and emptied into the combustion chamber, where everything is burned with natural gas at 2000 degrees F, until it’s totally combusted. 

Process heat is converted to steam, to drive turbines that generate 80 megawatts of electricity, enough for about 52,000 homes. Since 1990, the plant’s electricity has replaced the equivalent of some 2,000,000 barrels of crude oil each year. Dust and odor are contained within the facility; water from the wastes is recovered, treated and used as coolant; and air and water pollutants are kept well below EPA standards. 

Even plastic-and-metal e-wastes (computers, monitors, keyboards, printers, and AI and data center machines) and “clean, green” energy equipment like solar panels can be “recycled” this way. 

Enough iron, steel, aluminum, copper and other metals are recovered from the resultant ash to build 20,000 automobiles annually. The process also melts and recovers glass – and even recovers metals from e-wastes, light bulb bases, paper clips, staples, and metal bottoms from cardboard juice containers. 

By the time the entire process is over, only nontoxic ash is left – about 5% of the original bulk mass of trash – and it gets used in cement and other applications or sent to landfills. 

It reminds me of the old stockyard claim: The only part of the pig that isn’t used is the squeal. 

So I have a couple questions for Mr. Bonta. 

* Which plastics and vital plastic products do you intend to eradicate? What will doctors, pharmacists, optometrists, computer and cell phone users do without them? What will replace them? 

* Recognizing that California has closed most of its nuclear, coal and gas power plants; that its net-zero, all-electricity mandates will soon double the state’s electricity needs; and that the state already imports one third of its electricity from neighboring states – why aren’t you suing to fast-track WTE plants? 

It’s time to recognize that “progressive” policies, mandates and lawsuits have enormous costs that hammer consumers – while politicians feed citizens a steady diet of lies. 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.

Greens refuse to discuss recycling renewables and restoring mining locations to pristine condition

By Ronald Stein |March 19th, 2023 46 Comments @ CFACT

The reality is that all the mineral products and metals needed to make wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control. Decommissioning and restoration of those mining landscapes back to their original pristine condition is not in the cards in developing countries. Recycling of worn-out turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries, in wealthy countries is also not in the cards.

The sites for the mining of materials required to build wind, solar, and EV batteries are under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mere extraction of those exotic minerals presents social challenges, human rights abuses, and environmental degradations worldwide, but are of no significance to the wealthy countries benefiting from those “green” materials.

The climate cult COULD seek decommissioning and restoration standards in those developing countries down to the last dandelion, just like we have for decommissioned mines, oil, and nuclear sites in America, but the climate cult avoids the same in developing countries.

The life cycle for renewable electricity like wind and solar runs from design, procurement, and construction, through operations and maintenance, and repair, as well as the life ending decommissioning and disposal, but again, recycling and restoration of the landscaping back to its original pristine condition, is also not in the cards in the wealthy countries that are going green.

Since the blades and panels and EV batteries are very difficult to recycle, the waste stream created by them is a mounting problem. According to a 2017 study published in the scientific journal Waste Management, the world’s wind industry alone will be producing 43 million tons of blade waste annually by 2050.

Those worn out wind turbines will be the equivalent weight of 215,000 locomotives. The demand of the wealthy economies for more wind turbines are projected to cause 43 million tons of blade waste worldwide by 2050 with China possessing 40 percent of the waste, Europe 25 percent, the United States 16 percent, and the rest of the world 19 percent.

The size and weight of the blades vary, but the average length is around 120 feet, and they weigh around five tons. Some of the largest can be as long as a football field and weigh 20 tons.  Currently, there are no scalable, cost-effective technologies to recycle the blades, and most of them are going to landfills.

Those 1,000-pound EV batteries present similar challenges. With more than 40 percent of all EV’s in America being located in California, there are no EV-battery recycling plants in California, and only five up and running nationwide, according to CalEPA. That’s even though used lithium-ion batteries contain valuable minerals that otherwise must be mined from the earth, mostly from overseas operations in developing countries. The” throw away” society is alive and well in America.

With wealthy countries obsessed with a “green” society, it looks like decommissioning, recycling, and restoration of the mining landscapes in developing countries and renewable generating sites in developed countries back to their original pristine conditions is not in the cards for the foreseeable future.

The vast majority of these critical minerals and elements are mined abroad, and almost all the refining of them is done by China alone.

What’s more, China is the largest single provider of most of the critical minerals and rare earths used around the globe, and is almost the only refiner of such products. This means minerals and rare earth elements mined elsewhere, often with Chinese funding, are shipped to China for processing into usable materials. Much of the mining and refining of materials in China is produced by forced or slave labor, often of persecuted religious minorities, like Falun Gong followers and Uighurs.

The Biden administration declared October 4, 2022 that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, yet the American government continues to enforce mandates, subsidies, and tax breaks to go green, that provides financial incentives for developing countries to continue their current practices of inflicting environmental degradation to their local landscapes, force labor atrocities upon their workforce.

Concerning China, the Biden administration acknowledged the problem of slave labor, having signed the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021.  Now, the Biden administration is leaning more on Africa to counter China’s control over U.S. energy.

Still, the reality of today’s globalized supply chain and America’s financial incentives that continuously encourage further exploitations of humanity and the environment makes it almost a certainty the massive green energy transition being pushed by the Biden administration will be built with minerals and parts produced using Chinese and/or African slave labor.

With insufficient intelligence on the ground in China or Africa to track forced-labor manufacturing, and less still the raw materials, wealthy countries will continue to exploit the folks with yellow, brown, and black skin in developing countries.

In economic terms, the wealthier countries climate hysteria is imposing severe negative externalities on developing countries. Ethically, the West’s climate obsession is immorally condemning present generations of impoverished peoples and nations to continued perjury and early deaths in the years ahead. Make no mistake, this ruse exists to further enrich people in developed countries while they simultaneously exploit those in developing countries.

Author

• Ronald Stein

  Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”

 

You'll Need To Re-Use That Cotton Shopping Bag 7,100 Times For It To Make Environmental Sense

By Hank Campbell — August 6, 2018

Companies left and right are banning plastic straws because ocean critters are important - with no evidence getting rid of plastic straws is really helping marine critters at all. While I shake my head at that, I am not surprised. The free market has spoken, companies respond to what consumers think they want. When activists and endocrine disruption magicians claimed BPA might be doing... something... the science community knew that if a chemical binds to estrogen 1/20,000th as well as actual estrogen, it is not doing anything, it is just a harmless trace chemical, but I was not surprised ConAgra took it out of their cans. The public were told they wanted that. The market responded and the cost was passed along to consumers.

I was also not surprised that environmentalists did not suddenly rush to buy Manwich without BPA lining in the cans, and the company laid off 1,500 people due to its higher costs and flat revenue.

Do you want a paper straw that won't work or a permanent one that will never be cleaned? The movement may be temporary. We may see a migration back to straws after the hype dies down, just like we saw a migration back to butter after food lawyers like Center for Science in the Public Interest could no longer hide that trans fats were not healthier because they came from plants. Even the U.S. Congress has undone flawed policies, like their boondoggle with corn-based utensils instead of plastic from 2007-2011. (1)

Before straws this year, there was a war on plastic bags, brought about by, you guessed it, environmental press releases and carefully staged photos of garbage. Now poor people have to pay for bags, a regressive tax, unless they can foot the upfront cost for buying bags. But how often do people really wash their bags? Ever? Well, rarely, a study found. Even the most casual cleaner knows you don't want meat drippings on your counter promoting illness the next time you make food, but most won't think about it in bags. And if you keep them in your trunk the bacteria could increase 10X.

But it's for Gaia.

Except it isn't. A recent study found that a cotton bag will need to be reused 7,100 times (2) for it to make sense from a Life Cycle Assessment environmental impact perspective. 7,100 times means that if you go grocery shopping once per week (and you shouldn't go more often because that's bad for the environment too) you will have to use that bag for 136 years.

As Dr. Trevor Thornton, Lecturer in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Deakin University phrased it, "Our assumptions about what is environmentally friendly don’t always stand up to scrutiny."

Which means we should scrutinize first, and waste money on alternatives later.
NOTES:

(1) In Science Left Behind (with Dr. Alex Berezow, before either of us were at the American Council on Science and Health) I wrote about the Congressional cafeteria replacing plastic utensils with compostable, corn-based environmentally terrific alternatives after Democrats gained control of the House in January, 2007. Environmentalists cheered. The Congressional buildings were miserable. The utensils broke and melted easily. Congressional accountants were baffled. The cost was incredibly high, and the utensils had to be shipped on giant, emissions-belching trucks to Virginia to be composted. When the House switched hands again in 2011, the outgoing head of the committee recommended to his replacement that they switch back and Rep. Lundgren of California did. Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi then claimed Republicans were giving people cancer with styrofoam and killing the environment with plastic.

(2) "Organic" cotton is even worse for the environment due to older production requirements in order to use the label.

Ecology: Man’s Last Fad

By Michael D. Shaw May 14, 2018 @ Health News Digest

 

The title of this piece refers to a bumper sticker that began to appear just before the first Earth Day in 1970. According to the Earth Day Network, Senator Gaylord Nelson was inspired to do something about the environment, in the wake of the big Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969.

As to the “fad” aspect, the slogan reflected a worry—common at the time—that society would soon lose interest in improving the environment, and thus our species would pollute itself (along with many others) into extinction. But, one other way that the fad can manifest is by uncritical acceptance of the worst possible gloom and doom scenarios. That, in turn, leads to arrogant virtue signaling by those who wish to show how much more Green they are than you.

In certain cases, you can virtue signal to yourself—by doing Green acts to bump up your own self-image. Indeed, that was one of the points of John Tierney’s famous article from 1996 entitled “Recycling Is Garbage.”

“Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental experience, an act of moral redemption. We’re not just reusing our garbage; we’re performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess. Recycling teaches the themes that previous generations of schoolchildren learned from that Puritan classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Tierney also exposed other myths. We are not running out of landfill space, and plastics are not evil, compared to more natural materials:

“[L]ightweight plastic packaging requires much less energy to manufacture and transport than traditional alternatives like cardboard or paper. Food companies have switched to plastic packaging because they make money by using resources efficiently. A typical McDonald’s discards less than two ounces of garbage for each customer served—less than what’s generated by a typical meal at home.”

Tierney referenced archaeologist William Rathje, who excavated landfills and discovered that paper, cardboard, and other organic materials—while technically biodegradable—tend to remain intact in the airless confines of a landfill, and occupy much more landfill space than plastic. Twelve plastic grocery bags fit in the space occupied by one paper bag. And these days, virtually every grocery store has containers to collect plastic bags for recycling.

The bottom line is that recycling is good if it makes economic sense.

In 2015, Tierney did a follow-up, entitled “The Reign of Recycling.” His overall tone is still pessimistic. Not only is recycling more expensive than simply burying trash, the proposed goal of zero waste would be absurd. He quotes former EPA official J. Winston Porter:

“It makes sense to recycle commercial cardboard and some paper, as well as selected metals and plastics. But other materials rarely make sense, including food waste and other compostables. The zero waste goal makes no sense at all—it’s very expensive with almost no real environmental benefit.”

One way to get beyond fads and purely emotional appeal is to examine specific instances, whereby a particular discarded object is recycled, and turned into another product…

1. How about using discarded fishing nets (said to comprise 10 percent of marine litter) to make office chairs? Meet The Smart Ocean chair, made with nearly two pounds of recycled fishing nets. Humanscale has teamed up with Bureo, a company that collects discarded fishing nets in Chile, and recycles them into plastic pellets that can be formed into a variety of products. Besides the chairs, Bureo produces skateboards, and a version of the popular game Jenga®.
2. Moving onto land, many homeowners are familiar with high-density polyethylene (HDPE) lumber, as a wood substitute. This material has found great success in such applications as outdoor furniture and replacing old wood trim in residential exteriors. HDPE is infinitely recyclable, and the raw materials are mostly derived from post-consumer bottle waste, such as milk and detergent bottles, or other post-industrial material.

This material is cleaned by a decontamination process to a high purity level, which removes contaminants such as food residue, paper, and adhesives. It is then compounded into a rigid board stock material.

Finally, fads rarely stand up to logic and right reason. For example, the inherent appeal of wind energy must be examined in light of all the facts—and the debate is intense. Recent experience with large subsidies for alternative energy projects have not been a smashing success. Likewise, political pressure to expand recycling programs to include questionable materials has done little but increase costs.

Wow. There’s a thought: We need less politics and a lot more logic and right reason in our approach to ecology