Los Angeles County has filed a lawsuit against the world’s largest beverage companies — Coca-Cola and PepsiCo — claiming that the soda and drink makers lied to the public about the effectiveness of plastic recycling and, as a result, left county residents and ecosystems choking in discarded plastic.

The suit is the latest in a series of high-profile legal actions California officials have taken against petrochemical corporations and plastic manufacturers. In September, state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and a group of environmental organizations sued Exxon Mobil, accusing the company of falsely promoting plastics as universally recyclable when, in reality, the vast majority of these products cannot be reused.

The L.A. County suit alleges — in a vein similar to that of Bonta’s suit against Exxon Mobil — that the global beverage companies misrepresented the environmental impact of their plastic bottles, “despite knowing that plastics cannot be readily disposed of without associated environmental impacts.”

“Coke and Pepsi need to stop the deception and take responsibility for the plastic pollution problems” their products are causing, said L.A. County Board of Supervisors Chair Lindsey Horvath.

Neither company has responded to requests for comment from The Times.

Currently, just 9% of the world’s plastics are recycled. The rest ends up being incinerated, sent to landfills, or discarded on the landscape, where they are often flushed into rivers or out to sea.

At the same time, there is growing concern about the health and environmental consequences of microplastics — the bits of degraded plastic that slough off as the product ages, or is used, or washed. The tiny particles have been detected in every ecosystem on the planet that has been surveyed, as well as nearly every living organism examined — including the brain, heart, lungs, blood and semen of humans.

In a statement, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors said that current methods of recycling are “incapable of eliminating environmental impacts…”