Dumped, Not Recycled? Electronic Tracking Raises Questions About Houston’s Drive to Repurpose a Full Range of Plastics
James Bruggers | November 1, 2023 | Inside Climate News
The message on the signs at the recycling drop-off site here was clear, and warmly welcomed by area residents who visited on a recent autumn Saturday to stuff bags of plastic waste into large green metal containers.
“All plastic, all numbers, all symbols,” proclaims one sign at the recycling site in Houston’s suburban Kingwood community, referring to the seven standard types of plastics, commonly identified on a plastic product by a number inside a “chasing arrows” icon. “Bag it and bring it,” reads another.
Normally, recycling programs limit what kinds of plastic they accept, ruling out types that are difficult if not impossible to recycle. So Ken White, a resident of Kingwood, a leafy master-planned community known as “the livable forest,” was taking full advantage of the opportunity on that sunny morning.
Bag by bag, he was tossing “everything that is plastic” into bins bearing the names of the Houston Recycling Collaboration, ExxonMobil and three other companies. “Styrofoam. Plastic bottles. Plastic wrap. Bubble wrap,” White said with a grin of appreciation. “It’s great. I hate just throwing it away if it can be reused.”
The Kingwood site is one of two all-plastics depositories rolled out in the past year as part of a nearly two-year old collaboration between the city of Houston and Big Oil. The goal is to boost the dismal plastic recycling rates in Houston, which are thought to be even lower than the national average of 6 percent, and—however paradoxically—turn this petrochemical and plastics manufacturing hub into a model of responsibility for other cities struggling with that problem.
But the effort is opaque, and dogged by contradictions. The city and its partners have shrouded their collaboration in secrecy. Electronic tracking by an environmental group indicates that the plastic waste isn’t getting repurposed, although families hoped it was going to a new chemical recycling operation opened late last year by ExxonMobil at its nearby Baytown Complex. And a planned $100 million plastic sorting center needed to fulfill the coalition’s vision of Houston as a hub for chemical, or “advanced,” recycling remains unfunded and behind schedule.
While none of the partners in the recycling collaboration would speak for the program as a whole, the city underlines that the effort is new and argues that progress will come. Still, environmentalists fret that scaling up chemical recycling could add to the pollution burden of Houston’s low-income and minority communities and prove a successful ploy to entrench the nation’s fossil fuel economy.
There are multiple warning signs. On Tuesday, the environmental groups Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network issued a report documenting decades-old challenges to the chemical recycling of plastics. Titled “Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception,” the 159-page paper identifies 11 chemical recycling plants in the United States that were at least partly operating as of September, often with government support.
The challenges at those plants include a low output of recycled plastics; the production of hazardous waste like toxic chemicals and heavy metals; fires and oil spills at production units; and questions of commercial viability, the report said. The technology “has failed for decades, continues to fail, and there is no evidence that it will contribute to resolving the plastics pollution crisis,” the two advocacy groups conclude.
