As an investment firm with industry ties explained, any positive impacts associated with AR would require "shifting away from oil exploration and new extraction infrastructure," since it would only lead to benefits "when it displaces the use of virgin plastics."

In fact, the whole idea of AR as a way to recycle plastics hasn't been the norm. The plastics industry has primarily promoted chemical recycling processes as ways to turn plastics into fuel, which isn't recycling at all. The American Chemistry Council used to just call pyrolysis "plastics-to-fuel."

The third key claim about AR is that it can address the problem of post-consumer mixed plastic waste, often referred to as "hard-to-recycle" plastics by the industry, that mechanical recycling can't. Dow, for example, says that AR allows for “recycling the unrecyclable.”

All of the major plastics producers have made AR commitments, but none of them have a practical pathway to meeting them. Exxon says that it will process 1 billion pounds annually by the end of 2026, but has processed a tiny fraction of that so far.

But the plastics industry has been trying to scale up chemical recycling to address plastic waste for 50+ years to no avail. Mobil patented virtually the same process Exxon is using today back in 1978, and efforts in the decades since have faced predictable problems.

First, the plastics industry presents AR as new and groundbreaking–like when Exxon CEO Darren Woods called it a "brand new technology" in 2022.

@climateintegrity.org's new report, "The Fraud of Advanced Recycling," highlights the huge divide between the plastics industry's public claims about the potential of advanced recycling to address the plastic waste crisis and the technical realities of chemical recycling processes.

This isn’t the first time that journalistic norms have been inept in the face of people seeking to do great harm, but somehow that never makes it less shocking.

“Unlocking the investment opportunities of waste” sounds familiar