A small Kansas county in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit is challenging the nation’s biggest oil and chemical companies alleging deceptive plastics recycling advertising.
Ford County’s class-action lawsuit, filed late last week in the U.S. district court for Kansas, alleges lies about the feasibility of plastics recycling has “led to higher plastic prices” and “massive sanitation problems” for local landfills.
Deceptive advertising has proliferated plastic pollution, threatening the public’s health in violation of public nuisance common law, the complaint says.
Ford County, a Republican-leaning area with a population just over 30,000 people, is the first to ask a jury in the federal court system to hold nearly a dozen major fossil fuel and petrochemical groups responsible for plastics recyclability claims.
