California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of environmental nonprofits sued ExxonMobil on Monday, accusing the gas giant of enacting a decadeslong “campaign of deception” that fueled a global plastic pollution crisis.

The novel lawsuits filed in San Francisco Superior Court will seek civil remedies from ExxonMobil for environmental destruction, public health harms, and an end to “deceptive practices” that they contend have led to its plastics being found from the depths of the Mariana Trench to the peak of Mt. Everest.

“In the past decade, as we’ve been drowning in plastic waste, ExxonMobil has increased its production capacity by roughly 80%. They are bullish on the plastics market. Our coastline, oceans, rivers and bays are swimming with plastic pollution that costs California municipalities, California taxpayers, over a billion dollars each year,” Bonta said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit. “What solution does ExxonMobil give us? Plastic recycling—a farce, a lie, a deceit.”

The converging lawsuits against ExxonMobil will attempt to prove the corporation systematically led the public to believe that plastic waste is safely disposable through recycling, and failed to share information about toxic “forever” chemicals and plastics’ lasting environmental harms. The United Nations estimates plastic production will continue to increase from 440 million tons a year to more than 1,100 million tons a year by 2050, noting that 36% of all plastics produced are used in packaging for single-use plastic products. If successful, the lawsuits could secure hundreds of millions of dollars to support climate change solutions.

ExxonMobil is one of the oldest and largest gas and plastics companies in the world with a market cap of $512 billion. The company has been the focus on numerous lawsuits for environmental harms in recent decades. Past lawsuits include the Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska, climate change denial, and lying about the carcinogenic properties of benzene.

ExxonMobil defended its “advanced recycling” practices in a statement on Monday, and blamed California officials for not cooperating with efforsts to tackle plastic pollution.

“For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective. They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others,” an ExxonMobil statement said. “Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills. The first step would be to acknowledge what their counterparts across the U.S. know: advanced recycling works “We’re bringing real solutions, recycling plastic waste that couldn’t be recycled by traditional methods.”

At Monday’s news conference, Bonta detailed what he described as the extent of the harm perpetuated by ExxonMobil’s plastic production and its ongoing effort to misinform the public about plastic recycling. Bonta emphasized the importance of seeking remedies and abating further harm in the lawsuits rather than punitive damages.

“We are not seeking damages in the form of traditional damages,” Bonta said, “We are demanding ExxonMobil fund, in all likelihood to the tune of billions of dollars, to abate the harm of their deceit, their lying, their perpetuation of the myth of recycling.”

Niall McCarthy, who is representing nonprofits in the lawsuit they filed concurrently with Bonta’s, described the case as a “first of its kind” between a state attorney general and nonprofits in the fight against climate change. McCarthy said the trove of evidence, both subpoenaed through traditional legal requests and published in news outlets’ investigations, will shed light on the decadeslong campaign to promote plastic to the detriment of consumers and the environment.

“We’ve uncovered a wealth of information about Exxon through the work of these nonprofits and the lawyers exposing what they did going back to the 70s, so we feel like we’re in a pretty strong position,” said McCarthy, a partner with Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy. “But whenever you file a one-of-a-kind lawsuit, there are certainly challenges.”

Sierra Club President Allison Chin characterized plastic pollution as the “defining environmental issue of our time,” comparing it to the lawsuits against Big Tobacco that became the model for suing large corporations. Chin said the lawsuit marks a turning point in the environmental movement by taking a more aggressive approach toward polluters.

“Like the tobacco industry before them, Exxon has run a decades-long campaign to hide the true risk of plastic from the public. Exxon profited by claiming plastics are safe, disposable and recyclable. That wasn’t true,” Chin said. “No company has the right to pollute with impunity.”

Sejal Choksi-Chugh, executive director of the Bay Area nonprofit SF Baykeepers, described plastic’s impact on the Bay Area, telling a story about an otter poking its head up through a sea of plastic during a rainstorm. She said it was time for the largest producer of single-use plastics to “clean up its own mess.”

Bonta underscored that the goal of the lawsuits is to prevent plastic pollution at its source beginning with ExxonMobil. He outlined a case against the oil giant that, beginning in the 1980s, made continual efforts to protect its profits while plastics infected the globe’s rivers, coasts, oceans, and children. The people of California, he said, deserve the truth.

“ExxonMobil used, funded, created and hid behind industry trade and front group to pedal this deception. Groups with friendly-sounding names like the Council for Solid Waste Solutions or Partnership for Plastics Progress, all formed by ExxonMobil and a small number of petrochemical companies to push deceptive messages about the viability of recycling in the 1980s and 1990s,” Bonta said. “It’s time that ExxonMobil pays the price for its deceit.”

©#YR@ MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit at mercurynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.