AILSA CHANG, HOST:

So many of us have grown up learning not to throw away plastics - right? -like, that they belong in the recycling bin, not the trash. Well now, California is suing ExxonMobil and saying that that is a lie and that the company has deceived the American public. So what are you supposed to do with all that plastic? Should you still be dragging your blue bin to the curb full of plastic bottles? Well, NPR's Laura Sullivan has been investigating recycling for years and joins us now. Hey, Laura.

LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.

CHANG: OK, so it has been drilled into us for years and years to keep recycling plastic. How did we get to a point where this long-held truth might not actually be true?

SULLIVAN: So for decades, the oil and gas industry has spent millions on advertising, saying that recycling can save the world's plastic problem. But what we found here at NPR and what the state of California is now alleging is that the oil industry knew all along that that wasn't going to happen, that it was nearly impossible to recycle the world's plastic. Sure, the technology exists, but economically, it's never really made sense. It's expensive. It's messy. It's just - it's not viable.

CHANG: Right.

SULLIVAN: Many people remember learning to recycle plastic in school - the trash cans with the pictures and all that plastic trash.

CHANG: Yeah.

SULLIVAN: There were ads on television. Here's a popular one from 1990. It's got this plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash. It's full of potential. We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles.

CHANG: It's full of potential. Well, OK, if plastic recycling is a total myth, what's happening to all those piles of plastic?

SULLIVAN: So the latest numbers show that less than 5% of all the plastic that is produced is ever turned into something else. I mean, the vast majority of it is getting burned or landfilled here. That's best case. And some of it is being dumped in landfills abroad or winding up in oceans.

Now, ExxonMobil said yesterday that this is just a problem of imagination. They say recycling works, it just needs to be funded properly. Critics, however, say that if that were true, we would have solved the plastic crisis 50 years ago when we first started trying.

CHANG: Good point. OK, so then what are people to do? Like, should they just throw all their plastic in the trash?

SULLIVAN: Some people say yes, that trying to recycle is just an expensive way for plastic to get to the landfill. But environmentalists say there's a little bit of hope with a couple kinds of plastic. This would be your soda bottles, water bottles and milk jugs, basically. These are, like, the original plastics, the workhorses. If you flip them over, you can often see a number one or two on the bottom.

There are some buyers for this material. So, you know, put them in your bin and hope for the best. I will tell you that the numbers aren't great here either, even for water bottles that are relatively clean and easy to grab off a sorting line. We found less than 50% make it onto another life.

CHANG: Man. OK, just to be clear, you're talking about just plastic - right? - not paper or metals.

SULLIVAN: That's right.

CHANG: Like, you can keep recycling those.

SULLIVAN: That's right.

CHANG: OK. What about bags and yogurt containers? Because a lot of recycling programs accept those, right?

SULLIVAN: Yeah. So we haven't found many markets for these, if any. Industry officials told us that a lot of it is just ending up in the trash, despite what the programs say. And some of it ends up overseas, in countries that don't have recycling programs or even any way to handle trash, which is why it ends up in the ocean. When we were in Indonesia, we found large dumping grounds.

So what environmentalists in the state of California are hoping is that people will see plastic for what it is - that it's trash. And if they see it differently, maybe they will choose to use something else instead.

CHANG: That is NPR's Laura Sullivan. Thank you so much, Laura.

SULLIVAN: Thanks so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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