Max this week I had a very specific memory from elementary school returned to my brain in mint condition.

Aaron again with the mighty morphe power rangers?

I remember in one of our weekly reader newspapers that there was a little tutorial on recycling

specifically what the numbers on the bottom of plastic containers meant.

Oh funny I remember that too they were guides for how to recycle the different

types of plastic number Number one or two

would go on one bin, numbers three and four would go in another, and I forget what

we were supposed to do with number five. It's actually fine that you mostly forgot

what they meant because it turns out they were probably

all going to the same place anyway the dump.

Oh all those well-honed sorting skills wasted.

I'm Aaron Ryan and I'm Max Fisher and this is how we got here a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question.

This week how did plastics recycling go from an exciting promise to, well, a scam

perpetuated by big oil meant to mislead the public into continuing to buy and use

single-use plastics?

That sounds both incredibly paranoid errand, but also sadly feasible. That is the

the accusation made by a lawsuit filed this week by the state of California

against ExxonMobil.

Ooh, courtroom drama.

We've probably all suspected that plastic recycling might be fake, but the story of where

that lie came from and how it got sold is a wild one. It's got everything. Corporate malfeasance,

a campaign of deception, billions of dollars on the line. China! A claim that plastic of is that all these years of dutifully rinsing out take-out containers were a waste?

...