A Gary, Indiana Plant Would Make Jet Fuel From Trash and Plastic. Residents Are Pushing Back
James Bruggers | December 12, 2022 | Inside Climate News
For Lori Latham and four other self-described “badass women,” the future of their hometown rests on a battle over 75 acres that lie between a giant steel mill and a failed casino once owned by Donald Trump.
The site sits behind parked railroad cars painted in graffiti, where abandoned concrete silos rise from the sandy southern shore of Lake Michigan, a remnant of a former cement plant that helped build the country’s interstate highway system. Here, a California company called Fulcrum BioEnergy wants to construct a gasification plant and refinery to turn the Chicago area’s trash—as much as 30 percent of it waste plastic—into jet fuel.
It’s a bid, according to Fulcrum, to make a dent in the airline industry’s contribution to climate change while reducing waste at landfills. The city’s mayor, Jerome Prince, touts what he sees as a green energy future in this once-booming vestige of the Rust Belt.
But Latham and the group she co-founded, Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, along with some national environmental experts, smell a ruse.
They question the company’s claims of sustainability in what amounts to a complicated, high-energy production process, and the company’s ability to deploy a new combination of technology intended to turn the trash and plastic waste into a gas used to make aircraft fuel. They also say it’s unfair to locate the plant in an environmental justice community already burdened disproportionately by a century of pollution from heavy industry.
“We use the term greenwashing, where they make things seem like they’re green technologies when they’re really not,” said Latham, a Gary native who works in business development for an engineering firm and also is chairwoman of the environmental justice and climate committee of Gary’s branch of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. “I feel like Gary is being used based on its location, and also based on its demographics just to be a solution for where to put Chicago’s trash.”
The company’s plans, while embraced by the federal government and the airline industry, do not pass a common sense test, said Jane Williams, executive director of the environmental nonprofit California Communities Against Toxics, who has advised the Gary advocates.
“They are taking trash and applying massive amounts of heat to make a fuel, and then burning it,” Williams said. The proposed gasification process uses intense heat to turn the trash and plastic into a synthetic gas, before another process turns the gas into synthetic crude oil, which in turn is used to make jet fuel in an on-site refinery.
