Legislative sleight of hand and a handful of friendly congressmen.

A secret deal with the world’s largest pesticide makers.

A bespoke trade group fronted by global soda and snack giants.

A new Fieldnotes investigation reveals that each features in a sophisticated campaign of misdirection being waged by ExxonMobil, among the world’s largest producers of the petrochemical feedstock for single-use plastic. Its goal: to vastly expand the federal definition of recycling to include what the oil major has branded “advanced recycling,” a suite of energy-intensive and environmentally hazardous technologies that use extreme heat and chemical reactions to break down plastic waste into its molecular building blocks.

In theory, those molecules can then be used to make new plastic; in reality, that has never happened at any meaningful scale despite industry’s best efforts—and millions in public funding. Nonetheless, Exxon and other corporate interests have long hailed the technologies, also called chemical recycling, as a solution to the global plastic waste crisis, using the promise of “circularity” tomorrow to forestall limits or outright bans on plastic production today.

Exxon’s legislative vehicle of choice for expanding the definition is the Recycled Materials Attribution Act, or RMAA, a bipartisan bill introduced this past February by Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY) and signed off on by a House subcommittee last week. 

But while Langworthy’s name is the one on the legislation, confidential industry documents obtained by Fieldnotes show that Exxon originally “[d]eveloped” the bill—and is likewise the driving force behind the ongoing corporate push for its passage.

Exxon’s covert efforts are detailed in a trove of internal presentation slides and meeting minutes from the Ag Container Recycling Council, a pesticide trade group that Exxon recruited as part of its campaign. The docs reveal:

  • Exxon began laying the foundation to push RMAA at least as far back as fall 2024, more than a year before Langworthy would introduce the bill that the oil giant had “[d]eveloped and championed” behind closed doors.
  • Exxon engaged in an apparent quid pro quo on at least one occasion, agreeing to conduct an NDA-shielded pilot project to process hard-to-dispose-of hazardous pesticide containers, while Bayer, Syngenta, and other pesticide makers agreed to advocate for Exxon’s position on recycling.
  • Exxon worked with a DC lobbying firm that specializes in manufacturing corporate lobbying alliances to create the Recycling Leadership Council, an industry group led by major soda and snack makers that has become the face of RMAA on Capitol Hill—obscuring the true scope of Exxon’s involvement in the process.

Details of Exxon’s efforts were first reported by Politico, which was given an exclusive preview of our work. As the outlet put it: “ExxonMobil wants Congress to write the rules for what counts as ‘recycled’ plastic. But it’s not putting its name on the effort.”

Langworthy did not respond to detailed questions sent to his office regarding RMAA and how it was developed.

ACRC, meanwhile, did not dispute the findings of this investigation but declined to answer additional questions about its work with Exxon. “That information is confidential and so I’m not at liberty to comment on it,” Ag Container Recycling Council executive director Mark Hudson told Fieldnotes. "The only thing that I can say is that what is public information is that we are a member of RLC.” Exxon did not respond to a request for comment nor did the Consumer Brands Association, the soda and snack trade group that nominally leads the Recycling Leadership Council.

Legislative Sleight of Hand

You can find all the nitty gritty details of Exxon’s influence campaign in our full investigation, which is based on the ACRC internal documents, IRS tax filings, federal lobbying disclosures, EPA visitor logs, and emails between lobbyists and state regulators obtained via public records, among other material.

But the Exxon-developed legislation itself is worth a closer look.

RMAA’s stated objective is to prevent companies from making a "misleading recycled content claim," but in practice would greatly expand what they could label as recycling by including “non-mechanical” technologies such as pyrolysis and other forms of plastic waste management. The bill likewise allows for a controversial accounting scheme known as “mass balance,” which essentially lets companies use a system of credits to claim specific products are made from recycled plastic even if they’re not.

Put more plainly, the Exxon-developed bill would not limit what a company can call recycling, so much as it would instead limit what the government can call misleading.

The legislation is part of a larger war of semantics the petrochemical industry and its allies are waging on the regulation of plastic waste processing. Two related bills are also now in Congress, both of which were introduced by RMAA co-sponsors:

  • Rep. Randy Weber’s (R-TX) Packaging Claims and Knowledge Act would broadly define terms like “recyclable” at the federal level, which would then supersede stricter state definitions.
  • Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s (R-TX) Recycling Technology Innovation Act would redefine chemical recycling as manufacturing instead of solid waste management, thereby weakening the federal Clean Air Act regulations to which it’s subject.

Exxon’s allies have publicly hailed the former as a "complementary” to RMAA and privately described the latter as RMAA “companion legislation.”

Both Texas Republicans have accepted campaign cash from Exxon, via either its corporate PAC or the company’s employees and their spouses. Weber has received more than $30,000 since his 2012 campaign, and Crenshaw has taken more than $17,000 since he first ran for his seat in 2018, according to the OpenSecrets database.

Crenshaw’s bill also mirrors a change proposed by the U.S. EPA earlier this year that would reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing—which the agency buried in a rulemaking on an entirely different category of waste incineration. Lobbyists for Exxon and other petrochemical companies met with EPA officials in the weeks before it released its proposal, visitor logs show. Similarly, communications we obtained via public records request show that Exxon previously helped state regulators write a similar rule in Louisiana.

Neither Weber nor Crenshaw responded to detailed questions sent to their offices concerning their support of RMAA and whether Exxon was involved in crafting the related legislation.

The GOP’s broader support for Exxon is no secret. EPA chief Lee Zeldin starred in a promotional video Exxon made last year touting its advanced recycling operations, and then name-dropped the company in a glowing op-ed he wrote earlier this year further hyping the technology.

But support for RMAA is not limited to only one side of the aisle.

A small group of Democrats have also thrown their support behind RMAA. Unlike Weber’s bill, which has a sole Democratic co-sponsor, and Crenshaw’s, which has zero, RMAA boasts five Democratic co-sponsors, all of whom signed on at the bill’s introduction: Reps. Marc Veasey, Henry Cuellar, and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Rep. Donald Davis of North Carolina, and Rep. Jonathan Jackson of Illinois.

Notably, the three Texas Democrats have all received significant campaign donations from Exxon via its corporate PAC and/or its employees and their spouses. According to OpenSecrets, Exxon has given Veasey more than $87,000 since his first campaign in 2012, Gonzalez more than $23,000 since 2022, and Cuellar at least $15,000 in 2022.

The five Democratic lawmakers did not respond to questions sent to their offices about whether they knew of Exxon’s involvement in the creation of the bill they are currently co-sponsoring—or whether they will continue to support it now that that information is public.

Read the full investigation here.

About the Author
Joshvoorheesheadshot
Josh Voorhees
josh@fieldnotes.co
Josh is a Research & Communications Specialist at Fieldnotes, where he investigates the political and corporate actors driving the climate crisis and harming public health. Previously, he covered...