Plastic Burning ‘Has No Place In Climate-Forward NY’
By Judith Enck And Tok M. Oyewole | March 14, 2022 | Syracuse.com
Judith Enck is president of Beyond Plastics, based at Bennington College in Vermont, and a former EPA regional administrator in the Obama administration. Tok M. Oyewole Ph.D., is U.S. and Canada policy and research coordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).
State Sen. John Mannion (D-Syracuse) has introduced Senate Bill 7891, which would promote plastic burning in our state. At least 15 states have so far passed similar legislation, including Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, none of which are environmental leaders. But this destructive approach, which the plastic industry calls “advanced recycling” or “chemical recycling,” has no place in climate-forward New York.
The plastic industry has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, and plastic burning represents their latest attempt to sidestep worldwide pressure to keep fracked gas in the ground. Senate Bill 7891 is part of a nationwide push to gut regulations on plastic burning facilities, allowing for the build-out of infrastructure before legislators and the public understand these plants’ destructive impacts. The timing is perfect for the plastic industry, which hopes to quadruple production by 2050. The ramp-up will help plastic surpass coal as a contributor to climate change by the projected date of 2030.
Investing in plastic burning allows the plastic industry to profit from the management of the same waste crisis it is creating. It is no wonder, then, that the CEO of Brightmark, a plastic disposal company poised to cash in on plastic burning, recently published an opinion piece in the Post-Standard urging New York to buy into this waste management myth (”Next step for NY’s green economy: improving how we recycle,” Feb. 28, 2022).
This is a technology that is commercially unproven, energy- and pollution-intensive, and currently incapable of scaling up to process the millions of tons of plastic waste the U.S. produces each year. Industry researchers have worked on technology to convert used plastic into new plastic since the 1970s, but 40 years later, they still have not found a viable formula. A 2020 report from the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) found that of the 37 plastic burning facilities proposed in the U.S. since the early 2000s, just three are operational.
None were able to turn used plastic into new plastic — just into fuel that’s later burned, releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air, harming plant workers, and poisoning the communities that live nearby, most of whom are low-income and people of color.
The same report took a close look at Agilyx, one of the industry’s most celebrated plastic burning plants, using 2019 data, the most recently available. While Agilyx did produce styrene oil, a potential building block of plastic, the plant shipped it off-site instead of using it to produce new plastic. Agilyx also sent nearly 500,000 pounds of its incoming plastic to be burned at a cement kiln, instead of processing it at their facility. According to performance and emissions data, every ton of plastic processed that year produced over three times its weight in greenhouse gasses.
Overall, half of the plastic that enters a plastic burning plant leaves as greenhouse gases. That’s on top of the emissions from burning the resulting fuel.