by Lisa Song, Illustrations by Max Gunther, special to ProPublica

Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup.

It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s being touted as a cure for a crisis.

Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies.

Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.

But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management — one that can be solved with recycling.

Industry leaders knew then what we know now: Traditional recycling would barely put a dent in the trash heap. It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.

Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced”type of recycling known as pyrolysis — “pyro” means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.

While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution: Not only would it save hard-to-recycle plastics like frozen food wrappers from the dumpster, but it would turn them into new products that can replace the old ones and be chemically recycled again and again.

So when three companies used ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology to successfully conjure up that fruit cup, they announced it to the world.

“This is a significant milestone,” said Printpack, which turned the plastic into cups. The fruit supplier Pacific Coast Producers called it “the most important initiative a consumer-packaged goods company can pursue.”

“ExxonMobil is supporting the circularity of plastics,” the August 2023 news release said, citing a buzzword that implies an infinite loop of using, recycling and reusing.

They were so proud, I hoped they would tell me all about how they made the cup, how many of them existed and where I could buy one.

So began my long — and, well, circular — pursuit of the truth at a time when it really matters.

This year, nearly all of the world’s countries are hammering out a United Nations treaty to deal with the plastic crisis. As they consider limiting production, the industry is making a hard push to shift the conversation to the wonders of chemical recycling. It’s also buying ads during cable news shows as U.S. states consider laws to limit plastic packaging and lobbying federal agencies to loosen the very definition of what it means to recycle.

It’s been selling governments on chemical recycling, with quite a bit of success. American and European regulators have spent tens of millions subsidizing pyrolysis facilities. Half of all U.S. states have eased air pollution rules for the process, which has been found to release carcinogens like benzene and dioxins and give off more greenhouse gases than making plastic from crude oil.

Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the science of recycled molecules.

Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis.

Not now. Maybe not ever.

Let’s take a closer look at that Printpack press release, which uses convoluted terms to describe the recycled plastic in that fruit cup:

“30% ISCC PLUS certified-circular”

“mass balance free attribution”

It’s easy to conclude the cup was made with 30% recycled plastic — until you break down the numerical sleight of hand that props up that number.

It took interviews with a dozen academics, consultants, environmentalists and engineers to help me do just that.

Stick with me as I unravel it all.

In traditional recycling, plastic is turned into tiny pellets or flakes, which you can melt again and mold back into recycled plastic products.

Even........

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