Waste piled up at a recycling facility in Bali, which is part of a waste management project funded and co-designed by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. Photo: Made Nagi/Greenpeace
Companies behind campaign to ‘end plastic waste’ produced 1,000 times more plastic than it cleaned up
It has taken the Alliance to End Plastic Waste five years to clear up the amount of plastic its leading oil and petrochemical members produce in under two days, analysis reveals
Companies behind campaign to ‘end plastic waste’ produced 1,000 times more plastic than it cleaned up
It has taken the Alliance to End Plastic Waste five years to clear up the amount of plastic its leading oil and petrochemical members produce in under two days, analysis reveals
Waste piled up at a recycling facility in Bali, which is part of a waste management project funded and co-designed by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. Photo: Made Nagi/Greenpeace
Leading members of a high-profile industry initiative aiming to “end plastic waste” have produced over 1,000 times more plastic than the scheme has cleaned up, according to an Unearthed investigation.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste was launched in 2019 by a major oil and chemical trade group, pledging to invest $1.5 billion in clean-up initiatives that would remove millions of tonnes of plastic from the environment.
Its members come from across the plastics supply chain, including oil giants ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, who manufacture the base chemicals used in packaging and other products.
The Alliance was launched by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a major plastics trade association, and conceived by a PR agency as a campaign to “change the conversation – away from short-term simplistic bans of plastic”, Unearthed’s investigation found.
The group has been a significant presence at UN negotiations for a global plastics treaty, which are due to conclude in Busan, South Korea next week. Alliance members and the ACC have each been pushing governments to abandon plans to curb plastic production, documents obtained by Unearthed show.
It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world – Bill McKibben
Plastics are seen by the oil industry as a major growth market, with recent research projecting production to triple by 2060.
At one of the Alliance’s major clean-up projects, a waste collection and recycling programme in Indonesia that has since been handed over to the local government and community, waste collection targets have been missed as a new recycling facility sinks into a mountain of waste next door, Unearthed has established.
Meanwhile figures shared by consultancy Wood Mackenzie with Unearthed show that five major oil and chemical companies in the Alliance’s executive committee – Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, ChevronPhillips and Dow – produce more plastic in two days than the Alliance’s projects have cleaned up over the past five years.
“It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world,” the environmental campaigner Bill McKibben told Unearthed. “The oil and gas industry – which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry – has been at this for decades.”
A spokesperson for the Alliance to End Plastic Waste rejected the suggestion that the group’s purpose is to greenwash the reputation of its members. It said it works with organisations from across the supply chain to identify, develop and fund solutions to the plastic waste crisis that can be scaled up.
Stemming the tide
In January 2019, public concern over the environmental impact of plastic waste was surging. David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II in 2017 had broadcast “heartbreaking” images of albatross feeding their young with plastic waste and sea turtles entangled in plastic bags to an audience of millions, and in 2018 an NGO report estimated that floating “garbage patches” now covered 1.6 million square kilometres of the Pacific. Governments were responding with bans and taxes on single-use plastics such as straws and bags.
We wanted to shift the global marine litter debate – Weber Shandwick
In this context, the Alliance To End Plastic Waste was launched. Nearly 30 multinational companies spanning the plastics supply chain – from producers such as ExxonMobil, to product manufacturers such as Procter & Gamble and waste companies such as Veolia – congregated in London to announce what they called “the most comprehensive effort to date to end plastic waste in the environment”.
Promotional materials stated that the Alliance would focus on cleaning up “the ten rivers responsible for the vast majority of ocean plastic waste”, highlighting waterways in African and Asian countries with poor waste infrastructure.
The idea for the Alliance was developed by the PR agency Weber Shandwick in response to a commission from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a powerful lobby group representing the world’s biggest oil and chemical companies, documents obtained by Unearthed show.
“Given the intense negativity and demonization of plastic itself, the American Chemistry Council… turned to Weber Shandwick for assistance on this challenge,” the agency wrote in a submission to PR industry awards.
The brief was to “create a campaign to change the conversation – away from short-term simplistic bans of plastic to real, long-term solutions for managing plastic waste.” Weber Shandwick made an even bigger pitch.
“We wanted to shift the global marine litter debate to one focused on real, long-term solutions to marine litter, rather than on short-sighted bans on plastic that would not address the issue,” the agency wrote. Only actually cleaning up waste “would solve the reputational challenge”.
The ACC paid Weber Shandwick $3 million, while the Alliance itself paid them a further $7 million, tax filings show. In total the Alliance has spent over $10 million on communications consultants.
“Weber Shandwick’s plan for [the Alliance] is a classic example of fossil fuel PR,” said Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, a group of PR professionals campaigning on climate change. “For generations fossil fuel companies have been making up ways to pretend to be part of the solution, when in fact they are the source of the problem.”
“Plastic pollution is not simply a waste issue,” Ellen Palm, a researcher at Roskilde University in Denmark, said. “To address it effectively, policy interventions across the full life cycle of plastics are essential… That means a rapid and substantial reduction in the production and use of plastics.”
A spokesperson for Weber Shandwick told Unearthed: “We worked on this campaign five years ago with the intention of making a difference on a massive and complex issue. We believe organisations like ours have an important role to play in accelerating progress on sustainability.“
The ACC said in a statement: “In January of 2019, ACC and its members launched the AEPW to help end plastic pollution. For years, AEPW has operated as an independent and separately incorporated organisation. ACC has no role in AEPW’s governance or decision-making.”
A spokesperson for the Alliance said there is “no factual basis” to the suggestion that the group engages in greenwashing, adding that the Alliance’s “mandate is to identify solutions that support the collection, sorting and recycling of plastic waste and promote a circular economy for plastics”.
132 million tonnes of plastic
The Alliance initially aimed to remove 15 million tonnes of waste from the environment over five years. It later dropped this target, with an Alliance spokesperson describing it as “too ambitious”. It also pledged to invest up to $1.5 billion. To date, Alliance members have provided $375 million in funding.
In its latest progress report, marking the group’s activities up to 2023, the Alliance disclosed that it has cleaned up 119,000 tonnes of plastic waste over its first five years.
That figure, however, is minuscule when compared to the plastic production of its leading members.
Production estimates from consultancy Wood Mackenzie reveal that between 2019 and 2023, just five companies belonging to the Alliance’s executive committee produced 132 million tonnes of plastic — an amount more than 1,000 times greater than the Alliance has removed from the environment.
The analysis looked at the plastics output of the chemical company Dow, which holds the Alliance’s chairmanship, as well as the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, which is a joint venture of the US oil giant Chevron.
These five companies produce more plastic every two days than the Alliance has cleaned up over its five years.
The data concerns the world’s two most widely produced plastics – polyethylene and polypropylene – but does not include other plastics such as PET and polystyrene. Polyethylene variants are used to make plastic bags and bottles and much more, while polypropylene is the basis of food packaging and plastic cups, among other everyday items.
“To fix this planetary health crisis, we need to address the underlying problems of hazardous chemical inputs in plastic manufacturing and the unbridled production of disposable plastics,” Aileen Lucero, a campaigner with EcoWaste Coalition in the Philippines, where the Alliance is funding projects, told Unearthed.
The future of oil
Worldwide plastics usage is predicted to treble by 2060 if current trends continue, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook. The petrochemicals used to make plastics, fertilisers and other substances are expected to play an increasingly important role in driving demand for oil, the International Energy Agency predicts.
“The industry is starting to accept the fact that oil demand for road transport fuels will inevitably decline,” according to Saidrasul Ashrafkhanov, an analyst at the think tank Carbon Tracker, “so it’s pivoting to petrochemicals and plastics to try to offset that.”
But extracting, refining and cracking fossil fuels to create plastics is an energy-intensive process, and managing plastic waste generates further emissions: in 2019, plastics accounted for 1.8 gigatonnes of greenhouse gasses, the OECD found – almost five times the UK’s emissions that year, according to the European Commission’s database of global emissions. If plastic usage continues unabated, the OECD predicts that this could more than double to 4.3 gigatonnes by 2060.
Alliance members have launched major plastics expansion projects since the initiative’s founding. Exxon, Shell and Total have together added 5.6 million tonnes of plastic-producing capacity since 2019, according to Wood Mackenzie — representing an increase of 20% for the five companies analysed.
Shell has almost doubled its plastic-making potential since it joined the Alliance, after it opened a $14 billion polyethylene facility in Pennsylvania two years ago. That project alone cost nearly 10 times the amount the Alliance pledged to spend on its clean-up drive and adds 1.6 million tonnes a year to the British company’s capacity.
This expansion is set to continue. Exxon’s new petrochemical complex in China is expected to open in 2025 and will bring at least 2.5 million tonnes of polyethylene and polypropylene capacity online. Meanwhile Total is joining forces with Aramco, the Saudi energy company, to build an $11 billion petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia, and Dow is building a $6.5 billion project in Canada.
A spokesperson for ExxonMobil told Unearthed: “Plastics aren’t the problem – plastic waste is. We support a broad set of solutions to address plastic waste and are doing our part to contribute, including through advanced recycling, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, and by supporting the global treaty’s goal of eliminating plastic pollution by 2040.”
Unearthed contacted the other oil and chemicals companies included in the analysis, but they did not comment.
A mountain of waste
One of the Alliance’s earliest projects set out to develop a “life-changing” waste system for 160,000 people in Jembrana, northwest Bali, which would be handed to the local government and community to run.
But the project has collected a fraction of the plastic waste it aimed to handle. Just a year after it was handed over, the recycling facility is being swamped with rubbish from an adjacent landfill and is struggling with broken machinery and poor finances.
Jembrana’s waste system was set up by the Alliance in partnership with Project STOP, which supports waste management projects in southeast Asia.
The Jembrana scheme includes a household waste collection service, and a new recycling facility, which was built next to an existing landfill. Project STOP also worked with the government to set up a community organisation, the Jagra Palemahan group, which would run key aspects of the project.
What shocked people ten years ago no longer shocks people, but the situation on the ground has only gotten worse.
When the Alliance handed Project STOP Jembrana over to the local government last year, it said that it had “reached financial sustainability” – although it reported collecting just over a quarter of the 2,200 tonnes of plastic it originally intended to collect every year.
But the community organisation has fallen into debt, and the mountain of waste at the neighbouring landfill is bigger than when Project STOP began.
Unearthed visited the site in November and was told by workers that only 35 of the original 53 waste collection vehicles were still working, causing collections to falter.
“There has been no fleet to pick up trash from my house for a long time. So I… burn the trash behind my house,” local resident Ni Luh Sumitri told Unearthed.
Crucial waste sorting and recycling equipment is broken, contributing to the waste towering over the site. Fires in the piled-up rubbish are reportedly frequent, while neighbours complain about the smell.
“More and more residents are collecting and sorting waste… but the problems at the [facility] are now an obstacle,” I Ketut Suardika, head of the Jagra Palemahan community organisation, told Unearthed.
The head of Jembrana’s Environmental Agency, Dewa Gede Ary Candra Wisnawa, told Unearthed that his party is still trying to improve management, but added: “We in the regions [are facing] budget constraints… there are many things that need to be fixed or adjusted.”
Unearthed contacted Project STOP and Systemiq, the sustainability consultancy that co-founded it but they declined to comment on the story.
“Recycling projects backed by groups like the Alliance to End Plastic Waste aren’t leading to meaningful prevention of plastic,” said Tiza Mafira, co-founder of the Indonesian campaign group Plastic Diet Movement and a director at the Climate Policy Initiative.
“In the global south we are inundated with plastics in our environment, they’re absolutely everywhere. If you go to any beach in Indonesia, you’ll find lots of plastic. What shocked people ten years ago no longer shocks people, but the situation on the ground has only gotten worse.”
She added: “These companies are not investing in actually reducing plastic, in redesigning their supply chains, in real upstream solutions – and these are companies with enough capital and tax incentives to seriously innovate.”
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste told Unearthed that it develops and tests waste solutions around the world that are “typically at the edge of what is currently possible”. They added: “As with any portfolio, we recognise projects may not work perfectly or achieve the same level of success. If these projects were easy, we wouldn’t be fulfilling our purpose of developing new solutions.
“Accordingly, we not only measure our progress by volume, but also through the funding of projects and the advancement of what we hope are scalable solutions.”
The Paris Agreement for plastics
Next week, the world’s governments will meet in Busan, South Korea, to agree a final deal on the UN’s Global Plastics Treaty, which has been compared to the landmark Paris climate agreement.
Since talks began two years ago, opinion has been split over whether the treaty should curb the rapid growth in global plastic production and regulate potentially hazardous chemicals, or whether it should instead focus on cleaning up plastic waste, particularly in the global south.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste was formed around the same time that calls began emerging at UN environment talks for a global mechanism to tackle the growing problem of plastic waste.
It has been a prominent presence at UN treaty talks, with a delegation attending every round of negotiations. At the most recent negotiations in Ottawa, Canada, in April, the Alliance registered five people as observers, and ran industry events and a large exhibition in a hotel adjoining the UN venue. The Alliance also sent four representatives to last year’s climate summit in Dubai.
In 2022, then-president of the UN’s Environment Assembly, Norwegian minister Espen Barth Eide, commended the “strong efforts” of the Alliance at negotiations and described its members as “concerned businesses who want to bring us forward”.
“An important counter narrative”
In Ottawa, six members of the Alliance’s executive committee, including Dow, ChevronPhillips and ExxonMobil, met with the EU’s leading official for the European Green Deal, Maros Sefcovic, alongside trade association Plastics Europe and others. The meeting was not described as being linked to the Alliance. Notes released through freedom of information rules show that the companies did “not share” the EU’s prioritisation of curbing plastic production and addressing toxic chemicals.
Further emails obtained by Unearthed show the Alliance contacted EU officials working on the treaty and sent them a report reviewing plastics and waste policies around the world. This criticised policies that appear unfavourable to the production of plastic, such as plastic taxes and reusability targets, while promoting voluntary industry agreements and chemical recycling, and emphasising the importance of waste management. The Alliance also published a version of this report on its website.
A spokesperson for the European Commission told Unearthed: “Given the link between increased production levels and escalating plastic pollution, the EU has been emphasising the necessity to set global targets for the reduction of the production of primary plastic polymers.”
The last Trump administration was supportive of the Alliance, with a trade official hailing the project as “an important counter-narrative” in emails with the American Chemistry Council (ACC) shortly after it had launched the Alliance.
The Alliance denied having privileged access to politicians, telling Unearthed the group “has the same level of access as any other organisation to policy makers”.
Two months after the ACC launched the Alliance, as campaigners were attempting to get the concept of a new global plastics treaty off the ground at the UN Environment Assembly, the ACC wrote to the US secretary of state to “commend the US [government] delegation for its remarkable achievements” there on two plastic waste resolutions.
The US delegation, the ACC wrote, had ensured “the focus of the debate was on actions to address marine litter rather than the creation of new global governance structures” – a reference to a legally binding treaty. This “set the process for a plastic treaty back by three years,” Tim Grabiel, a senior lawyer at the Environmental Investigation Agency, who was present at the talks, told Unearthed.
The ACC has sought to dissuade the Biden government from backing European calls for plastic production caps. Its CEO requested a meeting with President Biden before the Ottawa talks, over concerns that the treaty was becoming “an activist wish list to end plastic”. When it was reported the White House would support production caps, the ACC accused Biden and Harris of caving “to the wishes of extreme NGO groups”.
In an interview with the Financial Times during the Ottawa talks, the head of plastics at ExxonMobil spoke in no uncertain terms: “The issue is pollution. The issue is not plastic. A limit on plastic production will not serve us in terms of pollution and the environment.”
David Azoulay, director of environmental health at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a nonprofit, disagrees.
He told Unearthed: “[The Alliance’s] tactics would divert attention from real solutions to the plastics crisis, such as reducing production, and instead continue the industry’s expansion.”
He added: “If someone were to design a Bond-villain-style poster child for greenwashing and political manipulation, they would be hard-pressed to conjure a better one than the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.”
Additional reporting by Tonggo Simangunsong