“Peak Greenwashing”: Two Bills in Congress Endorse Misleading Recycling Claims

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Read the story here.

By Lisa Song

The plastics industry spent decades convincing consumers that throwing used products stamped with the “chasing arrows” symbol into a curbside bin meant they would be recycled.

Now, amid growing awareness that many of those items never get reprocessed, the industry is championing a pair of proposals in Congress that would give misleading recycling claims the support of federal law.

On the surface, the two bipartisan House bills promise transparency for consumers by establishing national standards for recycling and recycled content labels. 

But the legislation — promoted by oil, chemical and packaging companies that spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress each year — would forbid states from setting stricter requirements. That would neutralize efforts like California’s “truth in labeling” law, which bans the chasing arrow symbol on plastic products that contain toxic chemicals or that can’t realistically be recycled.

One of the measures would endorse a controversial form of “mass balance” accounting that allows companies to claim a product contains recycled content when virtually none of it came from reprocessed plastic. Two years ago, a ProPublica investigation exposed the misleading, mathematical sleight of hand used in that type of mass balance, which the Biden administration subsequently prohibited for specific products.

See Also: Trash and Dignity: The rise of inclusive recycling projects in Latin America

Both bills, which have gained momentum and could face a full House vote after the midterm elections, “are peak greenwashing,” Rachel Fullmer, a staff attorney on toxics and environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an email. They “champion deceptive, anti-consumer policies which would result in an increase in plastic production and plastic waste incineration, all while hiding behind the false brand of ‘recycling.’”

Experts say the best solution to the plastics crisis wreaking havoc on human health and the environment is to make and use less of the material; recycling remains a marginal solution at best.

The bills tackle a growing threat to the industry, as several states have proposed or passed laws that require manufacturers to more honestly acknowledge the challenges of recycling plastic. Those measures could force companies to spend money changing their packaging or labels.

The Consumer Brands Association, which represents the packaged goods industry including Amazon, PepsiCo and Land O’Lakes, praised the House bills. 

These proposals “work in tandem to reduce consumer confusion and plastic waste while providing much-needed clarity to support new domestic innovations and investments,” the organization wrote to the leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in July. They “demonstrate that consumer protection and recycling-focused efforts go hand-in-hand with promoting affordability and manufacturing investments, and we strongly encourage your support for both bills.”  

The association spent $2.4 million in the first half of 2026 lobbying on these bills and other issues, according to data from OpenSecrets. In September, the two recycling bills cleared the House committee.

Five Democratic House members, including three from Texas, are among the 13 co-sponsors of the bill that endorses mass balance accounting. The other has 19 co-sponsors, including one Democrat. 

A few weeks ago, Sen. John Curtis, a Utah Republican, introduced the mass balance bill in the Senate; it currently has no other co-sponsors. 

Sheen of Recyclability

Consumers have long been confused by the chasing arrows symbol on many plastic containers. The label was created in 1970 to encourage paper recycling. The plastics industry began placing it on its products in the 1980s to quell public outrage over plastic pollution. 

The symbol gave plastic the sheen of recyclability, even though most items cannot be reprocessed due to economic or technical barriers. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 8.7% of U.S. plastic waste was recycled in 2018; the rest ended up in landfills or was incinerated. In 2019, the Department of Energy estimated the national plastic recycling rate at 5%. 

In recent years, the plastics industry has touted the promise of chemical recycling, a set of costly, often polluting technologies that break plastic into its molecular building blocks. Theoretically, these processes could take the most stubborn, unrecyclable plastics, like grocery store bags or string cheese wrappers, and rebuild them into new products.

That rarely happens. 

Take ExxonMobil’s chemical recycling plant in Baytown, Texas. It uses oil refinery equipment to heat up the plastic and transform it into different chemical compounds. 

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, visited the Baytown plant last year. He later appeared in a promotional video, calling the facility a “proof of concept” for chemical recycling that could inspire “this entire country.”

But only 8% of the plastic waste processed by ExxonMobil gets transformed into new plastic, according to the California attorney general’s office, which sued the company in 2024 over “deceptively” promoting chemical recycling as an environmental solution. The other 92% mostly becomes fuel, which is burned rather than made into plastic products. 

Citing internal company records, the lawsuit states that the recycled plastic is so heavily diluted with new plastic, the resulting products contain less than 0.1% recycled content. 

In response, the company said in a court filing that while the state of California may not believe ExxonMobil’s recycling technologies are sufficient to solve the plastic waste crisis, “ExxonMobil did not assume liability for global pollution by innovating solutions to the problem.”

The company has marketed its chemically recycled products as containing “30% ISCC PLUS certified-circular” content, a technical term that could easily be misinterpreted as meaning 30% recycled material. That label is possible through a specific type of mass balance, which allows companies to claim credit in a new plastic product for the recycled molecules going into other things made in the chemical recycling process. Manufacturers can inflate the reported recycledness, or “circularity,” of the more lucrative products like plastic, while reducing the advertised recycled content of less valuable products. 

The Recycled Materials Attribution Act, introduced by Rep. Nick Langworthy, a New York Republican, would require the Federal Trade Commission to edit the Green Guides — advertising guidelines designed to prevent greenwashing — so mass balance is recognized as “an acceptable method for substantiating recycled content claims.” 

It would bypass the FTC’s own process for revising the Green Guides, which began several years ago. The agency had collected more than 1,000 public comments, including ones on whether limits should be placed on mass balance. 

The bill also prevents states from adopting stricter laws on mass balance. 

The Recycling Leadership Council is an industry consortium supporting Langworthy’s bill. The consortium quoted Langworthy in its February press release, touting the legislation as modernizing recycling guidelines “with a uniform national standard that protects consumers from misleading claims while giving American manufacturers the certainty they need to invest, innovate, and compete.”

In the first half of this year, the council spent $120,000 lobbying for Langworthy’s bill and related issues, including “advanced recycling” — the industry’s preferred term for chemical recycling.

“Advanced recycling technologies offer an important opportunity to keep more plastic waste out of landfills,” John Hewitt, spokesperson for the Recycling Leadership Council, said in an email. 

Hewitt, who also represents the Consumer Brands Association, cited a report from a center-left think tank, which concluded that investing in chemical recycling could more than double the U.S. plastic recycling rate.

Hewitt also defended the bill’s endorsement of mass balance, which “is an established method for tracking recycled materials through complex manufacturing processes, allowing companies to incorporate more recycled content into products.”

See also: Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026 to come into effect from April 1: Kirti Vardhan Singh

Chemical recycling has struggled to operate at scale. If the mass balance bill passes, it could help ExxonMobil and other companies grow their business, as consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainable products.

ExxonMobil spent more than $5 million in the first half of 2026 lobbying on the mass balance bill and many other energy or environmental issues. The company didn’t return requests for comment.

Langworthy’s campaign committee received $157,000 from the energy sector in the 2026 election cycle, including oil and gas producers and chemical companies. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Bound for a Landfill

The other bill, the Packaging and Claims Knowledge (PACK) Act, would regulate which items can be marketed as recyclable, compostable or reusable. Consumer product packaging could only be stamped with the chasing arrows recycling symbol if at least 60% of consumers have access to recycling programs that accept the product. The item must also be technically recyclable, meaning it “can be” reprocessed into a new product — but there’s no requirement to show it’s economically feasible to do so. 

Recycling programs sometimes accept plastic products even when there’s no affordable way to ship them to a factory that will make them into something new; as a result, plastic that’s been collected for recycling ends up in a landfill or incinerator.

Products not meeting the 60% criteria must include qualifying language, such as “check locally” to see if it’s accepted for recycling.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Randy Weber, a Texas Republican, targets states like California that have stronger requirements for the chasing arrows symbol. A recent California law requires 60% of Californians to have access to facilities that routinely collect, sort and sell the products for reprocessing. In addition, products will be disqualified if they have inks or labels that prevent recycling, or if they contain certain levels of heavy metals and the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, some of which are carcinogenic. 

When Weber introduced the bill last December, his press release called out California’s law: “Packaging and labeling standards in the United States are increasingly influenced by state-level regulations, particularly those adopted in California.” 

“The PACK Act cuts through that confusion,” he said in the press release. “It’s pro-environment, pro-business, and rooted in common sense.”

Weber did not return calls for comment. His campaign committee has received $206,000 from the energy sector and chemical companies during the 2026 election cycle. 

The bill provides little detail about who will make the crucial decisions on which products qualify or what data will be used. 

But at least some power will be given to unspecified “accredited third-party certification” groups, which will certify every product’s recyclability claim. These nominally independent organizations provide sustainability labels for various companies. 

One example of such a group is How2Recycle, which provides recycling labels — for a fee — to companies. The labels are meant to erase consumer confusion, by instructing them to “empty and replace cap” before recycling a particular kind of bottle, for instance. 

These third-party groups are supposed to be independent, but they’re easily captured by industry interests, said Kate O’Neill, an environmental science professor at the University of California-Berkeley who specializes in the politics of recycling.

How2Recycle’s parent organization, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, has a membership dominated by retailers, brands and packaging companies. Members include Google, Chobani, 3M, Clorox and Lego. (The EPA and United States Postal Service are also members.) Several years ago, How2Recycle made the questionable claim that No. 5 plastics, used in yogurt tubs, were widely accepted for recycling. 

How2Recycle and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition didn’t return requests for comment before publication.

California’s law is under a preliminary injunction due to a lawsuit from food producers and packaging companies. However, consumers can still bring private lawsuits if they suspect companies of falsely using the recycling symbol on their products, Lynn Dyer, president of the packaging trade group Ameripen, said in an email.

“AMERIPEN recognized early that differing state rules could make it harder for businesses to explain how consumers should handle packaging after use,” Dyer said. So Ameripen brought together a coalition and “helped make the case to Congress,” resulting in Weber’s bill. The group has “been engaged in discussions with congressional staff from the outset, have closely followed the bill’s development, and draw on the experience of organizations across the packaging value chain.”

In July, Ameripen urged manufacturers, retailers and brands to tell their members of Congress to back the bill. Ameripen spent $160,000 lobbying for the legislation and other environmental issues from January to June 2026. 

ProPublica reached out to every co-sponsor of the House bills. Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, a Republican from Georgia who supports the PACK Act, was the only lawmaker who responded. 

“American consumers deserve clear, consistent, and reliable information about the products they purchase, and our manufacturers deserve a predictable set of rules to follow,” Carter said in a statement. “The PACK Act is about establishing a uniform national standard that eliminates confusion, supports American manufacturing, and provides greater certainty for businesses and consumers alike. We can promote responsible recycling practices without forcing American businesses to navigate a patchwork of conflicting state regulations.”

The co-sponsors of the Packaging and Claims Knowledge (PACK) Act are:

Rep. Troy Balderson, Republican of Ohio
Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, Republican of Georgia
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas
Rep. Neal Dunn, Republican of Florida
Rep. Randy Feenstra, Republican of Iowa
Rep. Russ Fulcher, Republican of Idaho
Rep. Adam Gray, Democrat of California
Rep. Glenn Grothman, Republican of Wisconsin
Rep. David Joyce, Republican of Ohio
Rep. John Joyce, Republican of Pennsylvania
Rep. Nick Langworthy, Republican of New York
Rep. Laurel M. Lee, Republican of Florida
Rep. Addison McDowell, Republican of North Carolina
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican of Iowa
Rep. Barry Moore, Republican of Alabama
Rep. Michael Rulli, Republican of Ohio
Rep. Bryan Steil, Republican of Wisconsin
Rep. Glenn Thompson, Republican of Pennsylvania
Rep. Tony Wied, Republican of Wisconsin

The co-sponsors of the Recycled Materials Attribution Act are:

Rep. Troy Balderson, Republican of Ohio
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas
Rep. Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas
Rep. Donald Davis, Democrat of North Carolina
Rep. Gabe Evans, Republican of Colorado
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas
Rep. Jeff Hurd, Republican of Colorado
Rep. Jonathan Jackson, Democrat of Illinois
Rep. Michael Lawler, Republican of New York
Rep. Addison McDowell, Republican of North Carolina
Rep. August Pfluger, Republican of Texas
Rep. Marc Veasey, Democrat of Texas
Rep. Randy Weber, Republican of Texas

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