Experts Decry ‘Funny Math’ of Plastics Industry’s ‘Advanced Recycling’ Claims

Elizabeth Claire Alberts | September 28, 2022 | Mongabay

• Environmental experts say there’s a strong possibility that a federal bill will be introduced in the U.S. that seeks to strengthen an industry known as “advanced recycling,” or “chemical recycling.”

• While proponents of advanced recycling tout it as a solution to the ever-growing plastic pollution issue, critics say that it’s not recycling at all, but a highly polluting incineration process that converts plastic into fuel.

• Experts say that current advanced recycling plants are able to operate with ease due to state laws that subject them to fewer regulations.

• Critics say the passing of a federal bill into law would substantially increase the number of advanced recycling plants across the U.S., allowing them to evade many environmental regulations while disproportionately polluting the air in low-income communities and communities of color.

In April 2022, a Texas company unveiled a plan to transform a tiny Pennsylvania town into an industrial hub: it would invest $1.1 billion into building a manufacturing plant that will annually convert around 450,000 tons of plastic waste — an amount 40 times as heavy as the Eiffel Tower — into feedstock for new products, a process dubbed by the plastics industry as “advanced recycling,” though also known as “chemical recycling.”

In a press release, the company, Encina, says the facility will help the world transition toward a circular economy and achieve carbon neutrality. But critics say the company is simply burning plastic to make fuel and that these actions will endanger the environment and human health.

Encina has yet to open its new plant in Point Township, Pennsylvania, but there could be about eight other facilities currently operating across the U.S. that use so-called advanced recycling processes, according to a brief by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Environmental experts say the facilities operate under the guise of being recycling plants, when they’re really producing hazardous toxic waste, some of which is converted into fuel. Moreover, they say these facilities are able to evade a number of environmental regulations due to 20 state laws that define advanced recycling as a manufacturing process, rather than as a more strictly regulated waste disposal process.

Now, environmental experts say they anticipate an even greater problem: the possibility of a federal bill being introduced that, if passed into law, would strengthen the chemical recycling industry across the U.S.

Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the NRDC, said the plastics and chemical industries would see the approval of a federal bill as the “holy grail.”

“Essentially, federal legislation similar to what has been passed in many of the states would apply nationwide, and would remove federal health protections,” Rosenberg told Mongabay in an email.

While no bill has yet been introduced at a federal level, Rosenberg said that the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry association based in Washington, D.C., that represents plastic manufacturers, has been saying “that they are going to introduce a bill,” and representatives from ACC have been “talking to Congressional offices about it.”

In response to these reports, a coalition of more than 200 organizations, including the NRDC, recently submitted a letter to the U.S. Congress, urging officials to reject any bill that would enable the plastics and chemical industries to forge ahead with advanced recycling.

“The last thing Congress should be doing is weakening regulations for toxic technologies,” Sarah Doll, national director of Safer States, an NGO that’s part of the coalition, said in a statement. “As a nation, we should be focusing on real solutions to the plastic crisis, like bending the curve down on the use of plastic and solutions like nontoxic reuse and refill systems.”

Activists say the very best way to curb the massive plastics pollution now escalating around the globe is to reduce plastics production, not to incinerate the waste, which can potentially cause air, ground and water pollution.

What exactly is ‘advanced recycling’?

The world has a plastic problem. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that global society produces about 400 million metric tons of single-use plastic products and other plastic waste each year, and that less than 10% is recycled. In the U.S., the recycling rate is even worse — one study suggests that only 5% is truly recycled.

Plastic pollution has gotten so bad that scientists have suggested that we have crossed a planetary boundary for plastics and other chemicals entering the environment — meaning that we have transgressed a limit beyond which our Earth may not be able to cope with the environmental stress that humans inflict. This boundary crossing could destabilize Earth’s natural operating systems, especially when the unrestrained release of chemicals interacts with other Earth systems and processes. Ultimately, human survival could be at risk.

So what do we do with all of this plastic waste, much of which is polluting our oceans, waterways, land, and even the atmosphere? The chemical and plastics industry says a solution lies in “advanced recycling.”

America’s Plastic Makers, an association of plastic producers and fossil fuel companies that claims to seek the end of plastic pollution, says that “advanced recycling” is a sustainable process that “creates new top-quality plastics out of used plastics,” including 90% of “hard-to-recycle plastics.” Chemical recyling is described as a process of breaking down solid plastic into liquid or gas form through gasification (the heating of waste in a low-oxygen environment) or pyrolysis (the heating of waste without oxygen) to “remake plastics or products for other industries.”

America’s Plastic Makers argues that advanced recycling facilities do not emit more air pollution than facilities that produce cars or food, and that the process is “key to meeting circularity goals while keeping plastics out of landfills and our environment.”

Environmental experts view things very differently. First of all, they dispute the idea that advanced recycling is recycling at all, at least not in the traditional sense of turning an old plastic product into a new one. Instead, they say it’s a highly polluting, energy-intensive process that incinerates plastic waste, and in most cases, turns it into fuel, such as diesel and aviation fuel.

According to a Greenpeace report published in 2020, less than half of 50 surveyed recycling projects that were approved by the ACC — some of which are currently operational and some of which are yet to open — would be considered “credible plastic recycling projects,” while most of the rest turned plastic waste into fuel.

“Very little, if any, plastic is being recycled at the ‘chemical recycling’ facilities in the U.S.,” Rosenberg said. “These are plastic-to-fuel operations, which is not recycling. The industry is selling a fantasy of recycling plastic, but they are primarily making dirty aviation fuel.”

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