Chemical recycling plants would generate hazardous waste

Chemical recycling plants — which plastics industry advocates say are a possible solution to the growing plastic waste crisis — mostly burn plastic waste and spew toxic fumes, according to a Defense Council report. of Natural Resources (NRDC, for its acronym in English) of the United States.

“The industry proposes it as an important solution”, said Veena Singla, NRDC senior scientist and author of the report“but it is a false solution”, he added.

Each year, the United States generates more than 35 million tons of plastic waste, most of which ends up in landfills. About 8.5% of it is recycled, meaning it’s usually crushed and compressed into plastic, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A big part of the problem is that plastics are difficult to break down into raw materials, and doing so is expensive.

Chemical recycling is an emerging field in the United States. It includes both the burning of plastic to convert it into fuel and the use of chemicals to convert existing plastics into feedstock for ultimately more plastics.

The process is being promoted as a “advanced recycling” by industry advocates like the American Chemistry Council (ACC). The idea is to create a circular economy, where more plastics are reused and less virgin plastic needs to be produced.

The EPA does not count chemical recycling or incineration in its 8.5% recycling rate. The industry is pushing to change that. The idea that chemical recycling could be a solution for plastic waste has gained traction in recent years.

NRDC researchers searched for facilities that do, have done, or will do chemical recycling and have any record of their work with the EPA and identified only 8 that met their criteria.

They found that of this group, the majority focused on incineration rather than producing new plastic products. In addition, the facilities generatelarge quantities” of hazardous waste and tend to be “located in disproportionately low-income communities, people of color, or both.”

Joshua Baca, ACC vice president of plastics, dismissed the report as an attack on his industry. “This is yet another misguided attempt to discredit the acceleration of the circular economy for plastics.” wrote in an email. “Advanced recycling helps process more than 90% of the plastics that are not recycled today, because we agree that low recycling rates are not acceptable.”

The report focused on Agilyx, a plant in Tigard, Oregon, that it says takes waste polystyrene, a common type of plastic, and uses chemical recycling to turn it back into styrene, which is then used to make new polystyrene. But instead, according to the report, the facility sent most of the plastics it received to be burned and, in addition, “generated nearly 500,000 pounds of hazardous waste in 2019 alone″.

In a written statement, Tim Stedman, CEO of Agilyx, said the Oregon facility creates an oil with styrene monomers, which can be used to create new polystyrene products, adding that “chemical recycling processors are not producers of any significant amount of hazardous waste.”

Singla said chemical recycling is just another way for the industry to put off dealing with the real impacts of its products. “We have to attack the root of the problem“, he pointed. “We need less plastic, period”.