The Risks of 'Chemical Recycling'
July 14, 2023 | Living On Earth
So-called ‘chemical recycling’ of plastics is a highly inefficient process that releases large amounts of carbon emissions and hazardous pollutants. James Bruggers reports for Inside Climate News and joined Host Steve Curwood to discuss the health and safety problems he’s been covering at the Brightmark chemical recycling plant in Indiana.
Transcript
O’NEILL: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Aynsley O’Neill
DOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering.
When plastics are recycled, they have to be sorted according to those numbers 1 through 7. And even when everything does make it into the right bin and facility, you’d be mistaken to think that the plastic enters an endless cycle of rebirth. In reality, numbers 3 through 7 are almost impossible to recycle. And even the more easily recycled number 1 and 2 plastics can’t be infinitely renewed because the polymers they are made of degrade each time the plastic is melted down. Now industry groups like the American Chemistry Council are promoting so-called chemical recycling or “advanced recycling” as a solution. This technique uses high heat, chemical reactions, or both to break down the plastic back into its raw materials so that it can be used to rebuild polymers from scratch. But many scientists and environmentalists say it’s disingenuous to call this process “recycling” since it’s highly inefficient and releases large amounts of carbon emissions and hazardous pollutants. And at the Brightmark chemical recycling plant in Indiana, health and safety concerns have kept the plant from operating at full capacity. James Bruggers has been covering this for our media partner Inside Climate News and joined Host Steve Curwood to explain.
CURWOOD: So, what exactly is chemical recycling and how much recycling is this chemistry?
BRUGGERS: Well, first of all, you know, we need to remember that there just isn't much recycling going on at all. You know, there's globally less than 10% of the plastic waste that's generated gets recycled. And most of that is a mechanical process, where you have this plastic waste that's sorted, it's cleaned, it's shredded, and then it's molded into new plastic products. With chemical recycling, which sort of falls under this industry umbrella of what they call advanced recycling., they break the plastic waste chemically down into its chemical constituents or feedstocks that would be used by the chemical industry to produce new plastic. So, what are some of those feedstocks? Well, naphtha is one, toluene, xylene, benzene and stuff like that. So that's what is going on at a chemical recycling plant. You know, there's just an awful lot of the plastic waste that gets lost in the process because in the case of pyrolysis, it makes a lot of gas, which is then used to create heat for this very heat intensive process. And that gas never gets used to make new plastics, it's kind of lost in the process.
CURWOOD: James tell me about some of the environmental health and safety challenges that Brightmark, this company that does this so-called chemical recycling in northern Indiana, what are some of the environmental health and safety challenges that the company has faced, since it began with this plant, what in 2020 I believe it is?
BRUGGERS: Yeah., so my first trip up there last summer, I had written a story about this technology and the troubles that it was having getting started, you know, getting beyond the startup mode. And the follow up story, which I recently did, I became in touch with four former Brightmark employees, one of whom was a pretty senior person who kind of ran the refinery aspect of the chemical side of the operation and I learned about oil spills, one of them in particular that was reasonably sized inside the facility. And then there was another problem, that part of the plant where the bales of plastic are chopped up and turned into pellets well, there's a worker there who worked in that part, who claims that there was so much dust in the air that it gave him lung problems and he's actually sued the company over those issues.
CURWOOD: At one point there was a fairly big fire, I believe, at the Brightmark plant made it into the news. What was that all about?
BRUGGERS: Yeah, they had two fires that were substantial in terms of needing a response from local fire departments and sent a lot of smoke into the air. And these were both a result of, you know, just trying to get their operation going according to the people that I talked to who used to work at this plant. So they were trying to kind of, you know, get this pyrolysis process started and to see if they could continue to make it run for a long enough time to start making the product that they needed and in both those cases, they ended up with a fire that was fueled by very hot gases under pressure, and also this pyrolysis oil and nobody got burned but there were very close calls from what I understand. So, it's like, all of a sudden, you've got this jet fire coming out of a valve or something and people if they had been there, just like five seconds earlier, they would have suffered some pretty serious consequences.
Listen to the interview and read the full transcript here. >>
