12 | Sustainability Report Highlights Increasing plastic recyclability ExxonMobil is creating innovative products that help society reduce plastic waste by meeting consumers’ performance needs with less material, developing new materials for packaging that is more easily recycled, and enabling customers to increase their recycled content. For example, our Vistamaxx TM performance polymers increase our customers’ ability to use recycled materials, while also improving toughness and tear resistance. Our products can be used to make full polyethylene laminated pouches that are more easily recyclable and can replace difficult-to-recycle conventional multilayer packaging in non-food applications such as detergents and dishwasher pods, while retaining packaging performance benefits. And our performance polyethylene resins enable our customers to meet their performance needs with thinner, lighter-weight products, which require less resource. Assessing advanced recycling technology Plastics have value throughout their life cycle, including at the end of their life. Both traditional and advanced recycling processes are needed to help society maximize the value captured from plastic waste, but there are some limitations with traditional recycling as currently configured. Traditional mechanical recycling – grinding discarded plastic and melting it together with new plastic – is an efficient approach where waste is well sorted and for waste products that are made predominantly from one type of plastic. However, each time plastic is recycled via traditional processes, it loses some of its performance benefits. In addition, it is difficult to remove contaminants from traditional recycling processes, an important consideration for food and health care applications. Our employees monitor the production, loading and storage of plastic pellets at all our resin-handling facilities to minimize plastic pellet loss.