Oil and chemical companies that promised to invest $1.5 billion in clean-up initiatives to divert plastic waste from the environment instead have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to The Guardian.

“It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world,” the environmental campaigner Bill McKibben told Greenpeace’s online magazine, Unearthed. “The oil and gas industry — which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry — has been at this for decades.”

The allegations come as delegates prepared to meet  at the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment, scheduled to take place from November 25 to December 1 in Busan, South of Korea.

The companies, including the biggest oil and chemical producers, created a high-profile alliance in 2019, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), with the stated aim of ending plastic pollution. Together, they aimed to divert 15 million tonnes of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy. Instead, five companies alone have flooded the world with 132 million tonnes of plastic since then.

Documents from a PR company that were obtained by non-profit Greenpeace and shared with The Guardian suggest that a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” which were being proposed across the world in 2019 in response to an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health.

Early in 2023, the alliance target of clearing 15 million tonnes of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as “just too ambitious.” Worldwide plastics usage is predicted to treble by 2060 if current trends continue, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook.

An article in Unearthed said November 20 that figures shared by consultancy Wood Mackenzie 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.

The Unearthed article said 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 organizations from across the supply chain to identify, develop and fund solutions to the plastic waste crisis that can be scaled up.