13 | Sustainability Report Highlights Lorem ipsum dolar sit etium apparatus dolar sit etium montrimonii, catherdas sinosous. Advanced recycling involves breaking down plastic waste into its molecular building blocks. This approach effectively transforms plastic waste into the raw materials that are used in the process of making virgin-quality plastic and other valuable products. ExxonMobil believes advanced recycling is a necessary complement to traditional recycling for several reasons: • Advanced recycling enables society to capture more value from a broader range of products and provides more flexibility in sorting and separation processes. • There are no evident technical limitations regarding how many times a plastic product can be put through these processes. • Advanced recycling helps remove contaminants from used plastic. • Advanced recycling provides opportunities for lower overall greenhouse gas emissions over the full life cycle of the plastic. ExxonMobil is working on technology to help enable and accelerate large-scale advanced recycling solutions that could address certain limitations of traditional recycling and do so in an economically feasible way. Leveraging our expertise in research and development and molecule management, we are developing options for integrating advanced recycling solutions at our petrochemical facilities. We expect this will lead to more mixed and soiled plastic waste being recovered and used to make high- value raw materials safely, reliably and economically, at scale. We are doing this without diminishing our commitment to developing products that are easier to recycle via traditional recycling methods. Supporting improvements in plastic waste recovery As economies grow, society’s commitment to waste management systems must expand to enable the appropriate collection, sorting and processing of waste to minimize environmental impact. These infrastructure enhancements are needed for all types of municipal solid waste, not just plastic. However, increasing plastic recycling rates and converting plastic waste into a broad range of valuable products could unlock value and help offset some of the costs of improvements to waste collection and sorting infrastructure. Environmental benefits of plastics relative to alternative materials While ExxonMobil agrees there is no place for plastic waste in the environment, the environmental benefits of plastic are clear. Calls to replace plastic packaging with alternative materials can often have unintended negative environmental impacts. For example: According to a 2011 U.K. Environment Agency study , a cotton tote bag would need to be used 131 times to have a lower full life cycle emissions impact than using a typical plastic grocery bag once. A 2016 TruCost study found that substituting plastic in consumer products packaging with alternatives that perform the same function would have nearly four times the negative impact on the environment on a full life cycle basis. A 2018 study by the Denmark Ministry of Environment and Food concluded a paper bag would need to be reused 43 times to have a lower impact on ozone depletion and air and water pollution than the average plastic bag. A 2018 Franklin Associates study in the United States found the manufacturing process for plastics packaging used almost 50 percent less energy and 80 percent less water compared to the manufacturing process for alternate materials.