Five major oil and chemical companies that are part of the alliance – Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, ChevronPhillips and Dow – produce more plastic in two days than the initiative has managed to clean up in the last five years.
In 2019, a group of around 30 oil and chemical companies from around the world formed the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) with the aim of reducing the amount of plastic they divert into the environment by around 15 million metric tons by the end of 2023, pledging to invest 1.5 billion dollars in clean-up initiatives.
But according to a new report by Uneartheda Greenpeace investigative journalism team, the initiative’s members have produced a thousand times more new plastic in five years than they have cleaned up. At the beginning of last year, the alliance’s goal was quietly abandoned as “too ambitious”.
The team found that five AEPW companies, including Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, ChevronPhillips and Dow, were producing more plastic every two days than the total amount of plastic the alliance has cleaned up in five years.
The members of the alliance have launched major plastics expansion projects since the initiative was founded. Exxon, Shell and Total alone have jointly added 5.6 million tons of plastic production capacity since 2019 – representing a 20% increase for the five companies analyzed.
These multinationals produced 132 million metric tons of polyethylene (polymer used in plastic bottles and bags) and polypropylene (polymer used in food packaging and plastic cups) in the 2019-2023 period alone, not including other types of plastic or the plastic produced by other alliance member companies, and only removed 119,000 tons of plastic waste, equivalent to 0.1% of the plastic produced. It is likely that the amount of plastic produced is underestimated, as the analysis only covers two of the most widely used polymers.
Plastic waste was mostly diverted through mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfills or the use of waste as fuel, according to AEPW documents.
“This investigation has unmasked the thin veneer of greenwashing that hides the growing mountain of plastic waste that Big Oil is producing. The recycling schemes they are promoting can barely make a dent in all the plastic these companies are producing,” said Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, speaking to Mother Jones magazine. “They’re letting the open tap flood the house while they try to scoop up the water with a teaspoon. The only solution is to reduce the amount of plastic produced in the first place.”
“It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry – which is practically the same thing as the plastics industry – has been at it for decades,” says environmental activist Bill McKibben, speaking to Unearthed.
Unearthed’s report found that the alliance was created by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade association representing the world’s largest oil and chemical companies, and Weber Shandwick, a public relations firm. According to Unearthed, AEPW was conceived as a campaign to “change the conversation away from simplistic, short-term plastic bans to real, long-term solutions for plastic waste management”, due to the “intense negativity and demonization of plastic”.
The AEPW was born at the same time as calls began to emerge at the United Nations (UN) talks for the creation of a global mechanism to tackle the growing problem of plastic waste. Since then, the alliance has been a prominent presence at the UN treaty talks, with a delegation participating in every round of negotiations, pressuring governments to abandon plans to reduce plastic production.
Greenpeace’s investigation comes ahead of what was supposed to be the final round of negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty – which has been compared to the Paris Agreement – in Busan, South Korea, which began on November 25 and ended up being postponed until 2025.
The members of the alliance, together with the ACC, were present at the negotiations where they systematically argued that reductions in plastic production should not be included in the treaty, arguing that the problem was plastic waste and not plastic production.
“Weber Shandwick’s plan [para a aliança] is a classic example of fossil fuel PR,” Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, a group of PR professionals campaigning on climate change, told Unearthed. “For generations, fossil fuel companies have come up with ways to pretend that they are part of the solution, when in fact they are the source of the problem,” he adds.
“Plastics are seen by the oil industry as a major growth market, with recent studies projecting that production will triple by 2060,” reads the research.
In response to the allegations, an AEPW spokesperson stated that it “respectfully disagrees with the allegations and inferences, including that the organization’s goal is to ‘greenwash’ the reputation of its members… The alliance aims to accelerate innovation and channel capital into developing effective, scalable solutions to help end plastic waste and pollution.”
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