Beyond Plastics’ Response to the American Chemistry Council’s Poll of NYS Voters’ Views on So-Called “Advanced Recycling”

The statement below is by Judith Enck, President of Beyond Plastics and Former EPA Regional Administrator in response to the American Chemistry Council’s Poll of New York State Residents.

For Immediate Release: April 27, 2022

Contact: Judith Enck, President, Beyond Plastics, judithenck@bennington.edu, Cell: 518-605-1770

For decades, the plastics industry has spent millions of dollars trying to fool the public into thinking that plastics can be recycled but the truth is that the vast majority of plastics end up burned in incinerators, buried in landfills, or littering our landscape, waterways and ocean. In the US, less than ten percent of plastics are recycled.

Now the plastics industry is attempting to mislead the public again with claims about the promise of “chemical recycling” or “advanced recycling” as a viable way to deal with plastics.    

The American Chemistry Council’s poll is useless – they may as well have asked if New Yorkers like adorable puppies and fresh-baked apple pie. 

Americans support true recycling - something that can effectively be done with materials such as aluminum and paper that can be turned back into similar products and used again many times. True recycling is, unfortunately, not possible with plastics which can only be downcycled one to two times, at most before ending up in a landfill or incinerator. But only a fraction of plastics are even downcycled before they end up buried, burned or littered.

Americans do not support “chemical” or “advanced” recycling - a largely unproven process in which massive amounts of energy are used to heat discarded plastics at high temperatures to turn them into a heavily degraded version of the fossil fuels they were made from. Regardless of whether the American Chemistry Council calls this “chemical recycling” or “advanced recycling”, this energy-intensive process creates toxic air pollution and speeds climate change. And it’s most certainly not recycling.

In order to be useful, the American Chemistry Council’s poll question should have read, “Do you support plastics being sent to waste-to-fuel, pyrolysis, or gasification facilities?” 

And an even more useful follow up question to include would have been, “Do you want to live near one of these facilities?”   

These facilities do not get built without massive taxpayer subsidies. Brightmark recently pulled out of Macon, Georgia when the local government refused to provide $500 million in government bonds for its proposed $680 million facility. Another useful poll question would have been, “Do you support investing millions of taxpayer dollars in this false solution?”

Had the American Chemistry Council worded their question accurately, we believe they would have gotten very different results.

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