Author Archives: David Evans

ExxonMobil just launched one of the largest chemical recycling plants in North America – but environmental advocates say the technology is a dangerous distraction from the need to reduce plastic production.On the surface, the latest addition to ExxonMobil’s giant petrochemical refinery complex in Baytown, Texas, sounds like it could be a good thing: An “advanced recycling” facility capable of breaking down 36,000 metric tons of hard-to-recycle plastic each year. But plastic waste advocates warn that plants like it do little actual recycling, and instead generate hazardous pollutants while providing cover for oil giants to keep producing millions of tons of new plastic products each year.The facility, which began large-scale operations in December of last year, is one of the largest chemical recycling plants in North America. Chemical recycling works by breaking down plastic polymers into small molecules in order to make new plastics, synthetic fuels and other products. Companies like ExxonMobil have rebranded the technology as “advanced recycling” and are now touting it as the latest hi-tech fix to address the plastic crisis, as traditional, mechanical recycling has failed to slow the tide of plastic piling up in landfills and the ocean.ExxonMobil also says it’s planning to build chemical recycling plants at “many of its other manufacturing sites around the world”. Though it hasn’t committed specific dollar amounts to building new plants, the company is currently assessing locations in Louisiana, Illinois, Belgium, Singapore and elsewhere.By the end of 2026, the oil giant hopes to have enough chemical recycling capacity to process roughly 450,000 metric tons of plastic each year.But that’s a drop in the bucket compared with how much plastic ExxonMobil creates.In 2021 alone, ExxonMobil churned out 6m tons of new single-use plastic, more than any other petrochemical company, according to a recent report by the philanthropic Minderoo Foundation. What’s more, recent research has shown that chemical recycling is worse for the environment than mechanical recycling in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and water use, and in some cases, worse than virgin plastic production. The process ExxonMobil’s Baytown plant uses, called pyrolysis, is often so inefficient that many environmental advocates say it should not be called recycling at all.Conventional mechanical recycling involves sorting different types of plastic into individual streams that are washed, shredded and melted down to make new products. During this process, the chemical makeup of the plastic remains unchanged, although contaminants can find their way in during the melting and cutting process and the end products have a weaker physical structure.Chemical recycling relies on high heat, pressure or chemical catalysts like enzymes to break down plastic into its molecular building blocks. Those building blocks can then be used to make new products – including new plastics with the same physical structure as the original material.The most commercially widespread chemical recycling technology today is pyrolysis, according to Taylor Uekert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who studies plastic recycling.Pyrolysis has significant environmental impacts. Plants that use it require large amounts of energy to operate: Uekert found that recycling a kilogram of high-density polyethylene plastic using pyrolysis requires nearly seven times the amount of energy needed to make a kilogram of virgin plastic. Typically, that energy comes from burning fossil fuels, which creates air pollution and planet-heating carbon emissions.Pyrolysis operations can also consume large volumes of water, and they often generate hazardous waste. Overall, Uekert’s research found that the environmental impact of making recycled plastics with pyrolysis is 10 to 100 times greater than virgin plastic production.In a pyrolysis plant, plastic is put in a reactor and subjected to high temperatures (ranging from 300 to 900C) and pressures in the absence of oxygen. This treatment transforms plastic into a synthetic form of crude oil which can be used as a replacement for fossil fuels or to create new plastics.While pyrolysis is able to handle more types of plastic waste than some other chemical recycling technologies, Uekert said it is not typically considered “closed loop” recycling because the fuel it generates is often burned for energy – meaning it can’t be recycled again and again. Although pyrolysis is not the same as incineration, in which waste is burned in the presence of oxygen, environmental advocates often liken pyrolysis to incineration since the end products tend to go up in smoke one way or the other.Chemical recycling “is a way for the industry to continue to expand its plastic production and assuage people’s concerns about plastic waste”, said Veena Singla, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has analyzed chemical recycling facilities around the US. “They’re trying to put a pretty bow on it.”ExxonMobil’s Baytown recycling plant uses the firm’s proprietary “Exxtend” technology, a pyrolysis-based approach, according to company statements. Reached for comment, an ExxonMobil spokesperson, Julie King, told the Guardian that this process “complements traditional mechanical recycling” by turning hard-to-recycle plastics into raw materials which can be used to make new plastics for food packaging, medical equipment and personal hygiene products.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKing declined to respond to criticisms about the negative environmental impacts of pyrolysis or answer questions about how much pollution the Baytown recycling plant generates. She also did not confirm the exact name or location of the plant: when asked for any identifying information that could be used to look up its state and federal permits, King simply said that ExxonMobil reports emissions to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state of Texas in a “consistent and timely manner in accordance with all laws, regulations and permits”. King also offered that a third-party analysis by the environmental consulting firm Sphera found that every ton of plastic waste fed through ExxonMobil’s chemical recycling process generates 19 to 49% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than processing the same amount of crude-based feedstocks. (ExxonMobil did not share a copy of a report, and Sphera didn’t answer emails.)She also declined to say how much of the plastic waste fed into the plant would be used to make recycled plastic versus synthetic fuel. An internal analysis shared with the Guardian by the Minderoo Foundation found that if ExxonMobil’s Baytown plant had yields typical of pyrolysis plants, only 23% of the fuel it generates would be used to produce new plastics. The rest would go to other non-plastic applications, like fuel for transportation.Chemical recycling is “deflecting attention away from what we need, which is reducing single-use plastics and a global treaty on plastic waste”, said Phaedra Pezzullo, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder who has a book forthcoming on plastics and environmental justice.In an undercover investigation in 2021, Unearthed caught the ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy on video explaining how the firm uses recycling – including the Baytown plant – to shift the conversation around how to deal with plastic away from reducing consumption. (ExxonMobil’s CEO, Darren Woods, later said that McCoy’s comments “in no way represent the company’s position on a variety of issues”, and the oil company has since parted ways with McCoy.)As the petrochemical industry forges ahead with chemical recycling, the same low-income communities and communities of color that bear the burden of plastic manufacturing are seeing these plants pop up in their backyards.Of the eight chemical recycling facilities operating in the US in 2021, six are located in disproportionately Black and brown communities, according to a report by Singla. Five are in areas with a large number of households living on less than $25,000 a year.The Baytown plant wasn’t included in Singla’s analysis, which only included facilities for which data had been reported to the EPA or state permits were available as of August 2021. But the city, already a hub of petrochemical production, fits the pattern she identified: nearly 20% of its predominantly white, working-class residents live in poverty, with a per-capita income of just $25,000.ExxonMobil’s Baytown complex – which includes the third largest oil refinery in the US and a plant that manufactures 2.3m metric tons of plastic a year – is a major contributor to regional air and water pollution. It also has a long history of emitting chemicals above its permit limits, including the carcinogenic compound benzene. In recent years, ExxonMobil’s Baytown complex has been the site of fires and explosions that have injured workers and triggered shelter-in-place orders for nearby residents.“Exxon has a terrible track record of polluting the Baytown community,” Luke Metzger, the executive director of Environment Texas, told the Guardian. “This false ‘chemical recycling’ will only produce more toxic misery for Baytown.”

East Palestine isn’t alone: Communities around the country grapple with toxic chemical exposure | The Hill Skip to content A view of the scene on Feb. 24, 2023, as the cleanup continues at the site of of a Norfolk Southern freight train derailment that happened on Feb. 3 in East Palestine, Ohio. (AP Photo/Matt Freed) …

Continue reading “East Palestine isn’t alone: Communities around the country grapple with toxic chemical exposure”

Air Date: Week of April 7, 2023

ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge Refinery along Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” (Photo: Jim Bowen, Flickr CC BY 2.0)
The Black residents of the heavily industrialized corridor along the Mississippi known as “Cancer Alley” have filed a civil rights and religious liberty lawsuit against the parish council that has given a green light to these polluting facilities for decades. Monique Harden of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice joins Host Steve Curwood to explain the history of environmental racism and resistance in “Cancer Alley.”

For decades, a sprawling plastics facility on the James River has been the crown jewel of Hopewell’s industrial hub.Under different names, including Honeywell and Allied Chemicals, the plant is part of the reason Hopewell earned its moniker as “the chemical capital of the South.”It’s currently owned by Parsippany, New Jersey-based AdvanSix and is a descendent of the company responsible for the 1975 Kepone disaster, which shut down fishing in the James for years.Regulatory filings reviewed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch indicate that the plant has been flagged 66 times in the past eight years for violations of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, releasing toxic chemicals into Hopewell’s air, as well as into the James River.

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Hundreds of documents from Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality and the federal EPA offer a window into how one of area’s largest factories breaks environmental law, according to the agencies. 

The AdvanSix plant is seen on Thursday, March 16, 2023,in Hopewell, Virginia.

SHABAN ATHUMAN/TIMES-DISPATCH

Since 1990, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality have had the company on their radar. According to the EPA, AdvanSix violated the federal Clean Air Act, the country’s primary air quality law, every month over the past two years.The Hopewell factory is one of the world’s largest production sites for caprolactam, a chemical used to make a strain of nylon known as Nylon 6. The product shows up in seatbelts, tires, clothing and rugs.The plant sits at the southern end of the small city, within a mile of more than 900 residences, including public housing projects and a more affluent stretch of the neighborhood known as City Point. It commands about a half-mile of real estate overlooking the James River.’Patterns of noncompliance’On March 29, 2022, the plant released a mist containing 7.23 tons of sulfuric acid, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers toxic even in small amounts. The leak came from equipment that inspectors had asked the company to repair years before, records show.On May 6, regulators wrote to the plant’s manager to discuss more than 390 tons of sulfur dioxide that the company had released over 10 years, records show. Each year, their machinery had blown past its sulfur dioxide limitation, releasing more than 113 times the limit allowed by the state, they said.Sulfur dioxide is a harmful gas tracked by the EPA. The gas can damage the human respiratory system, particularly for children or people with asthma. The EPA says it’s also harmful to trees, contributing to acid rain. AdvanSix said this release was still within the limit of their overall permit.

The AdvanSix plant in Hopewell is shown in March 2018. The manufacturing center has been repeatedly cited by regulators, state and federal documents show. 

DANIEL SANGJIB MIN/TIMES-DISPATCH

Between 2015 and 2016, AdvanSix released at least 5 excess tons of a gas called phenol. The company told regulators about the release on Jan. 26, 2018, nearly two years later, filings show. Phenol can cause gastrointestinal damage, cardiovascular disease after long-exposures, and respiratory and skin damage at high levels of exposure, according to the CDC.The factory has also been polluting directly into the river, the reports show. EPA said the agency had documented “numerous and significant exceedances of stormwater benchmarks.” The state also flagged the release of millions of gallons of cooling water into the James.Chemical runoff, particularly nitrogen runoff, creates dead-zones in the watershed around Hopewell. Dead-zones indirectly kill life in the river. Scientists who study the bay say dead-zones are a known problem in the Hopewell area, where the river widens to the size of a lake.The Times-Dispatch has published a full link to the violations at richmond.com. 

Luca Powell

Advansix says most violations were promptly corrected, and said that a majority of regulators findings were actually self-reported by the company.“At AdvanSix, we are committed to being good partners and neighbors in the communities in which we operate,” said Janeen Lawlor, a spokesperson for the company. “This commitment includes a strong focus on ensuring responsible environmental stewardship and strict compliance with all regulatory requirements.”Lawlor said the company has spent millions of dollars upgrading the Hopewell plant. AdvanSix said it is committed to transparency and engaging with regulators, and that all of the water compliance issues had been addressed. State regulators offered a different perspective. Virginia Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson Aaron Proctor described the plant as having “patterns of noncompliance” dating back as far as 1990, when the facility was owned by Honeywell.In 2013, the VDEQ and the EPA brought Honeywell to the table to pay $3 million in damages for releases of benzene, a toxic gas, as well as “failing to control nitrous oxide and particulate matter emissions.”Two years later, Honeywell was hit with another consent order and made to pay $300,000 in civil charges. This time, the company had spilled a cocktail of lethal chemicals into the James River, killing more than 2,000 fish.And in each subsequent year since then — except 2020 — the plant’s managers have received notices from regulators about gas leaks, spills, monitoring failures, and reporting issues – first when it was owned by Honeywell, and then continuing into its current ownership by AdvanSix.The agency is slowly building a case to make the plastic producer comply with environmental rules. The state has the authority to file an injunction or fine the company. To do either, all that state lawyers need to prove is the potential for harm, according to a VDEQ manager familiar with AdvanSix’s case.Eric Schaeffer, who served as head of enforcement at the federal EPA under President Bill Clinton, reviewed the factory’s regulatory records. Schaeffer now heads the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington, D.C-based nonprofit group that investigates pollution at U.S. plants.Schaeffer said that he was surprised regulators hadn’t done more to penalize AdvanSix. The company was fined $50,000 in 2022 for its most recent offense. That same year, the AdvanSix announced $171 million in income, a slice of which the company used to perform stock buybacks.

Luca Powell

“That’s not gonna do it. It’s just not going to do it,” said Schaeffer. “Especially when you have a repeat situation like this one. When the penalties are too small, I almost think of them as fees. It’s not enough to even qualify as a penalty.”Schaeffer described the releases as “significant violations.”“Benzene is a class A carcinogen, and at pretty low levels of exposure. Phenol’s bad news. And sulfur dioxide reacts with ammonia to make fine particles, which are nasty and have a very high public health price,” Schaeffer said.’Cleaner air to breathe, pure water to drink’The Hopewell plant is one of five mega-facilities in the Prince George County community, where manufacturing has been an economic staple of generations. Pollutants released from the plant create potential health hazards in a community with one of the highest rates of poverty in Virginia. Hopewell’s life expectancy is five years lower than the state average. Its cancer mortality rate is nearly double the state average, and its rates of hospitalization for asthma stand at three times the Virginia norm, according to state data.The city’s public health district said the Hopewell health trends are “concerning,” but hesitated to draw any clear links.“Life expectancy rates can’t be attributable to any single determinant,” said Julie Thacker, population health manager for the Crater Health District. Thacker said air quality was among a number of other factors, including access to healthcare and rates of poverty.Schaeffer says those warning signs aren’t an excuse, although they are a common refrain he heard in his time at the EPA.AdvanSix statement”As an American Chemistry Council Responsible Care company with all sites RC14001 certified, we have a sharp focus on the safety and sustainability of our operations. We actively engage with local officials, regulatory agencies and our communities to help safeguard the environment and innovate to make products and processes safer. We are dedicated to proactively identifying – and self-reporting – opportunities for improvement. Our local community can be assured that the safety, health and well-being of our local community is our top priority.” Janeen Lawlor, AdvanSix spokesperson“If there are a lot of other (health) factors, the last thing you want is a bunch of chemicals in the air,” Schaeffer said.Some of the houses nearest to AdvanSix include Hopewell’s City Point, a higher-end suburban neighborhood near Waterfront park, where Gen. Ulysses Grant’s Civil War headquarters still stand.Even closer to the plants are the Davisville and Bland houses — a predominantly Black federal housing project less than a mile from AdvanSix’s smokestacks.Mike Harris, a Hopewell City Council member, lives in the Davisville neighborhood. His house faces directly onto the plant.

Mike Harris, Hopewell city councilman for Ward 2.

“At night is when the light show begins,” said Harris, referencing the spouts of smoke and flame that make a dramatic painting against the night sky. He can watch the performance from his window.Harris is a new face in Hopewell City government, but grew up in the neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s. He ran to represent the Davisville ward — Ward 2 — by advocating for the basics. “Cleaner air to breathe, pure water to drink,” reads one of his campaign posters.Five years ago, Harris said, the city and federal HUD partners had planned to tear down the Davisville project, citing hazardous health conditions from nearby industry. The plan fell apart as resistance to being relocated and zoning ordinances created hurdles.Harris, 73, said the City Council had never been told about any leaks from the plant. After his election in November, Harris was invited to lunch by an AdvanSix lobbyist, he said. About the AdvanSix plantTHE FACTORY  AdvanSix is a plastics producer in Hopewell, Virginia. It manufactures nylon, which is used in rugs, tires, and seatbelts.  The massive complex of buildings covers about 200 acres.  THE COMPANY  AdvanSix, based in Parsippany, New Jersey, is a publicly traded company with reported a net income of $172 million in fiscal year 2022.  The company has plants in Frankford, Pennsylvania; Bucks, Alabama; and Portsmouth, Chesterfield and Hopewell. HOPEWELL PLANT  The company is under scrutiny by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. The violations include: Illegal release of over 390 tons of sulfur dioxide, a hazardous air pollutant.Illegal release of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and benzene into Hopewell’s ambient air.Misreporting nitrogen levels of runoff into the James River.Harris said the company lobbyist never mentioned the violations, but did bring up an $8 million special tax that the company pays to the city.“They never said anything to us about these violations,” said Harris. “And when I told my peers on the City Council, they said, ‘Michael, what are we going to do about it?’”AdvanSix declined to make local plant managers available for an interview.The town’s mayor, John Partin, is a former AdvanSix employee. Partin says they’ve pushed the company to do more by raising taxes on the plant to help fund projects for the city.”I think it’s concerning,” said Partin, who explained that he hadn’t been notified of the pollution violations either. “That’s why I’m reaching out to see what can be done to make sure we’re holding the company accountable.”Legally, the company has a permit that allows them to dump over 1 million pounds of nitrogen into the river each year, more than any other company in Virginia. That is as much nitrogen as is produced by Henrico County, which has a population of over 300,000, according to state permit records.

The AdvanSix plant is seen on Thursday, March 16, 2023,in Hopewell, Virginia.

SHABAN ATHUMAN/TIMES-DISPATCH

AdvanSix secured the nitrogen allowance in the wake of its numerous consent orders and controversial history. In 1975, a company called Allied Chemical was dumping a toxic pesticide called Kepone in the Chesapeake Bay between 1966 and 1975. Allied then bought Honeywell in 1999, later spinning off Advansix in 2016.Across the street from AdvanSix is a massive Dominion Energy power plant, as well as industrial plants that produce paper, chemicals, and food additives.AdvanSix is among the largest, commanding premium space along the James River waterfront, as well as a railway that allows the plant to bring in chemicals from across the country by train. The Hopewell plant is one of four owned by company, which also operates a Nylon 6 plant on Bermuda Hundred Road in Chesterfield.In 2021, company CEO Erin Kane issued a sustainability report, lauding the company’s platinum rating for corporate social responsibility, which was issued by an independent group called EcoVadis.

The AdvanSix plant is seen on Thursday, March 16, 2023,in Hopewell, Virginia.

SHABAN ATHUMAN/TIMES-DISPATCH

The report “reflects our commitment to continuously improving our health, safety and environmental performance to best serve our customers, our key stakeholders and the communities where we live and work,” Kane said.That same year, however, AdvanSix was cited again by state regulators — this time for giving the state misleading readings of how much nitrogen one of their drains was releasing into the James River, according to a DEQ violation report.A drain that should have been releasing 56 milligrams per liter of nitrogen was actually releasing 1270 milligrams per liter, more than 20 times what their discharge records said.

📷 The Times-Dispatch’s ‘Photo of the Day’

Jan. 1, 2023

Cleveland Browns running back Nick Chubb (24) carries the ball as Washington Commanders cornerback Danny Johnson (36) tries to stop him during the first half of a NFL football game between the Cleveland Browns and the Washington Commanders on Sunday, January 1, 2023 in Landover, MD.

Shaban Athuman/ RICHMOND TIMES-D

Jan. 2, 2023

Sharon MacKenzie of Mechanicsville walked with her friend Cindy Nunnally and her golden retriever, Sunny, during a GardenFest for Fidos at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden on Jan. 2.

Eva Russo, Times-Dispatch

Jan. 3, 2023

People remember eight-year-old P’Aris Moore during a vigil in Hopewell Tues., Jan. 3, 2023. Moore was shot and killed while playing in her neighborhood.

ALEXA WELCH EDLUND/TIMES-DISPATCH

Jan. 4, 2023

UR’s Jason Nelson presses down court as George Washington’s Brendan Adams, left, and Hunter Dean defend in the Robins Center Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2023.

ALEXA WELCH EDLUND/TIMES-DISPATCH

Jan. 5, 2023

Manchester’s Olivia Wright reaches in on James River’s Alisha Whirley at James River Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023.

ALEXA WELCH EDLUND/TIMES-DISPATCH

Jan. 6, 2023

Daron Pearson plays basketball at Smith Peters Park in the Carver neighborhood on Friday, January 6, 2023 in Richmond, Va.

Shaban Athuman/ RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

Jan. 7, 2023

UR’s Tyler Burton takes a shot as Duquesne’s Joe Reece defends Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023.

ALEXA WELCH EDLUND/TIMES-DISPATCH

Jan. 8, 2023

Park ranger Bert Dunkerly leads a walking tour of Revolutionary Richmond on the grounds of the Chimborazo Medical Museum in Richmond on Jan. 8. The tour was part of a multiday annual event interpreting Richmond’s Revolutionary history, including the capture of the city by British General Benedict Arnold on Jan. 5, 1781. 

EVA RUSSO, TIMES-DISPATCH

Jan. 10, 2023

Bon Secours Richmond Community Hospital COO Joey Trapani and Richmond City Councilwoman Cynthia Newbille react after cutting the ribbon to commemorate the opening of the East End Medical Office Building on Tuesday. Bon Secours Richmond Market President Mike Lutes (left) and Del. Delores McQuinn, D-Richmond, were also part of the festivities.

EVA RUSSO/TIMES-DISPATCH

THE TRAIN THAT DERAILED NEAR THE Ohio-Pennsylvania border in February 2023 was hauling mixed frozen vegetables. It was hauling malt liquor and semolina flour as well as chemicals used to make plastics. Chemicals like vinyl chloride monomer. Think of vinyl chloride like metaphorical railcars. When coupled end-on-end-on-end, they make up the long-haul train that is polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic, which the manifest suggests other cars on the actual ill-fated train were also carrying.
PVC is garden hoses. Is water pipes. Is shower curtains. Is siding and decking and flooring and toys. It is medical tubing and IV bags. And for the audiophiles among you, it is records, also called vinyl, even when sometimes pressed from polystyrene.
Vinyl chloride is a carcinogen. Burning vinyl chloride, like burning PVC plastic, creates the conditions to form even more potent chemicals called dioxins.
Multiple companies make PVC plastics. The PVC on the derailed train was carried in cars tagged ROIX, which in railroad speak means the cars were owned by a company called Shintech. Shintech—“the world’s largest producer of PVC”—is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese firm, Shin-Etsu. In the U.S., it operates PVC plants in Freeport, Texas, and in Addis and Plaquemine, Louisiana.
Multiple companies make vinyl chloride. Norfolk Southern was carrying vinyl chloride in at least two cars traceable (the car ID, OCPX) to OxyVinyls, a division of OxyChem, which is a division of Occidental Petroleum. OxyVinyl’s vinyl chloride plant is in Deer Park, Texas, near the Houston Ship Channel, where a tornado ripped through earlier this year, knocking the plant temporarily offline.
Sometimes vinyl chloride and PVC factories cluster together, says Jim Vallette of Material Research, who has mapped the industry. For example, the companies Olin and Dow each supply vinyl chloride to Shintech’s neighboring Louisiana and Texas PVC plants, Vallette told me.
Other times, the railroad is how vinyl chloride is ferried to distant PVC plants, and then how finished PVC gets to its molders and fabricators.

IT IS UNCLEAR WHAT EXACT ROUTE the East Palestine train was traveling.
Chemical engineers, like train engineers, also speak of routes—the different pathways by which hydrocarbons can be coaxed toward the same destination.
There are multiple routes to making vinyl chloride.
All routes require chlorine.
Chlorine is bleach. Is white linens and white paper. Is disinfectant. Is the WWI-era war gas racing across the fields at Ypres before sinking down into the trenches and the lungs of unsuspecting soldiers.
No other industry uses more chlorine than PVC.
Chlorine is made from brine, which is to say salt, from which the chlorine must be split.

PVC is garden hoses. Is water pipes. Is shower curtains. Is siding and decking and flooring and toys. It is medical tubing and IV bags.

Historically, mercury figured prominently in this process.
Then asbestos.
Now the chlorine industry is pivoting toward using membranes manufactured from a chemical in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) family. PFAS is a group of at least 12,000 substances; the better studied of the group have been associated with a number of health effects, including cancers.
Asbestos is a carcinogen with its own signature cancer: mesothelioma.
Mercury is a heavy metal and, in the form of methylmercury, it is teratogenic (meaning it causes birth defects, notably on the developing brain and nervous system, my colleague at the Science and Environmental Health Network, Dr. Ted Schettler, reminded me). It is also a neurotoxicant and a global pollutant, so much so that its industrial use falls under a United Nations treaty: the Minamata Convention on Mercury.
The convention is named for a town and a bay on an island in the south of Japan.
It, too, has a signature disease—Minamata disease—though some who live with it have stated they would rather it be called what it is, which is severe industrial methylmercury poisoning.
The community of Minamata is more readily associated with mercury than with what the mercury was used to make, which are (among other endpoints) the chemicals used to make vinyl chloride and vinyl.
One hundred and forty nations convened in Japan in 2013 to adopt the Minamata Convention. Fifty nations had to sign for it to go into effect.
Japan didn’t ratify the convention until February 2016.
The East Palestine train derailment followed seven years later. Almost to the day.
I haven’t yet explained the different routes to vinyl chloride.
Early process patents were filed in 1912, writes the late historian Morris Kaufman, who began studying the history of PVC production at Imperial College London in the 1960s. German attempts to scale production didn’t yield a commercially viable product, so thirteen years later, the patents were allowed to lapse. A handful of companies picked up the research and development, making PVC’s origins international, diffuse, and difficult to neatly trace, said Kaufman.
In the U.S., Union Carbide, since bought by Dow (which merged with DuPont, reshuffled itself, and reemerged as “the new” Dow), began producing vinyl chloride in 1929 at a petrochemical complex—at the time something entirely new under the sun—along the Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio, which is a tributary of the Mississippi, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
PVC production commenced the following year in 1930, though it took a while for the plastic to catch on. Union Carbide set up along the Kanawha to take advantage of Appalachian natural gas, which the company had been a front-runner in exploiting. There was already a WWI-era chlorine plant next door.
Scientific research on vinyl chloride toxicity followed immediately thereafter, with papers appearing in the literature in the 1930s, too.
Another route begins from petroleum, which historically is how vinyl chloride has been made along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
A third route to vinyl chloride instead starts from coal.

The East Palestine disaster makes plain just how many communities are enveloped by plastics and have experienced both routine releases and environmental disasters linked to its production. 

BEGINNING IN 1932, THIS IS HOW THE COMPANY that is now Japan’s Chisso Corporation opted to make vinyl chloride at Minamata. The company made carbide from the limestone found just north of town and the coalfields of northern Kyushu. From carbide to acetylene, and acetylene via a mercury catalyst to acetaldehyde, and onward to vinyl chloride and also, in a separate process, to a plasticizer called dioctyl phthalate (DOP for short), which also is used to soften PVC as well as other plastics.
The company also began routing its mercury-laden wastes into Minamata Bay that same year.
The mercury poisoned the water, which poisoned the fish, which poisoned the fisherfolk and their families who ate it. The last in line to be poisoned were the babies born from wombs poisoned with mercury.
“I had a vision of myself trying to swallow Japanese capitalism,” writes Michiko Ishimure, a writer from Minamata often compared to Rachel Carson.
Since the 1960s, she published—to much acclaim—genre-spanning “nonfictional novels” about the disaster. The first volume she titled Kugai jōdo (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow). For decades, she advocated for the people of Minamata, though “year after year withered and fell off neatly,” she wrote, “like dead leaves or the brain cells of the victims of mercury poisoning.”
The witnessing, the writing, wore on her: all “these highly significant historical moments stuck in my throat.” It is suspected Ishimure suffered nerve damage from mercury as well.
Though officials recognized the first cases of Minamata disease in 1956, it wasn’t until 1968 that the Japanese government went on the record, admitting “that the cause for the disease was the methylmercury from the Chisso factory,” said Timothy George, professor emeritus of history at the University of Rhode Island and author of the book, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan.
Chisso already had ceased using mercury in their acetaldehyde process earlier that year.
“The company itself never officially acknowledged responsibility until it lost, in 1973, a lawsuit brought by the patients that ordered it to pay the largest settlement in Japanese legal history up to that time,” he added.
Other court cases followed.
As did, eventually, the Minamata Convention, which includes provisions to phase out the global use of mercury in chlorine, vinyl chloride, and acetaldehyde production.

Read more from Rebecca about our plastic legacy here.

“Incredibly,” says Vallette, “the mercury-acetylene route is still used (and expanding) in the Uyghur region” of northwestern China, where PVC plastics are made using the forced labor of the Uyghur people, many of whom are Muslim.
The U.S. passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and now U.S. Customs and Border Protection is banning the import of vinyl flooring from plastics made at these factories.
Still, they “are probably the most polluting plastics plants in the world,” he says. “The PVC plants [there] release more than 50 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, and are continuing to use and release massive amounts of mercury.”
Despite the Minamata Convention.
Says Vallette: these PVC plants “deserve a lot more attention.”

IN 2022, THE UNITED NATIONS GATHERED the global community, this time in Nairobi, Kenya, where overwhelming international support began negotiations toward a legally binding treaty on plastic pollution. The Minamata Convention was held up as a model.
Negotiations opened last fall in Uruguay. They will convene again in Paris this May.
At issue is whether nations will adopt measures to address plastics’ upstream toxic use (in addition to the accumulation of downstream waste).
Plastics experts—myself among them—have called for the treaty to cap production of nonessential plastics; to uphold human rights, including the right to a safe work and home environment; and to push the industry toward safer, more transparent, and less chemically complicated production. Meaning: what to do about mercury, asbestos, PFAS, and the thousands of other already known toxics used in plastics production, and also what to do about monomers like vinyl chloride and plastics like PVC and incidental byproducts like dioxins ought to be on the table.
But the dialogue more often focuses on plastics as a waste problem. If the treaty adopts this narrowed understanding about why so many plastics are problematic, then what has happened in Minamata or East Palestine, then what is happening in China and plastics corridors the world over, won’t seem relevant to a broad instrument that also could be designed to prevent future disasters, future long emergencies in communities living along plastics’ production, transport, and handling routes.
Plastics is a system held up by toxics. By chemicals exemplified by vinyl chloride monomer. As well as by processes that make the intermediates that make the monomers that make the plastics. That system is laid bare when trains linking nodes in plastics’ vast petrochemical network ignite or are, as also happened in Ohio, intentionally burned.
The East Palestine disaster makes plain just how many communities are enveloped by plastics and have experienced both routine releases and environmental disasters linked to its production. When it comes to environmental history, says George, “there is no such thing as the history of just one little place. Every place is connected to every other.”
Regardless of what route the train arrived in East Palestine, in a way it had passed through all the places where vinyl chloride ever has shaped lives and livelihoods. Places I haven’t yet mentioned like, Illiopolis, Illinois, where a PVC plant exploded. Or plants across Italy or in Louisville, Kentucky, where vinyl workers died from angiosarcoma. And in Belgium or Romania, where those who’d climbed down into the vats to clean them were forced into early retirement with fingers too disfigured to function by the rare bone-reabsorbing disease acroosteolysis. Places like Morrisonville and Reveilletown and Mossville, Louisiana, predominantly Black communities, polluted, but ultimately displaced by vinyl production despite communities organizing to protect them.
Places like Minamata.
Read Sandra Steingraber’s account of another PVC disaster here.

“CAN MINAMATA EVER TRULY BE OVER?” writes George. “So many ‘final and complete’ solutions have all turned out to be so incomplete.”
The documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara says that for the people of Minamata, “the story is far from over.” His documentary, Minamata Mandala, released in 2020, took well over a decade to film. It centers on the story of the people of Minamata, some of whom continue to travel around the globe as kataribe, storytellers. The film is six hours long.
Also in 2020, a major motion picture, called Minamata and based more or less on historical events, premiered in Berlin. It stars Johnny Depp as U.S. photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, who in the 1970s, at the behest of the Minamata community, and alongside Aileen Smith (portrayed by Minami), made pictures for Life magazine to help them make their case. The film’s 2022 U.S. release, however, was overshadowed by Depp’s involvement in a high-profile case of his own. To the detriment of the people living out the long legacy of mercury—and vinyls—in Minamata and beyond.
While searching for the details about Chisso’s production methods, I stumbled on news of the film, and also of its soundtrack, written by the celebrated Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who has won two Golden Globes, an Oscar, and a Grammy, and passed away from cancer while I was working on this essay.
I’ve been listening to the Minamata soundtrack on repeat as I write; the writing taking on (uncharacteristically for me) a steadiness, like wheels on rails, paragraph after paragraph. It is somber, profound, transporting, a reflection of the scale of the industrial disaster and decades of care work and community activism that also is Minamata.
Recently, the soundtrack was released, I’m not kidding, on vinyl.

The author wishes to thank Timothy George, Bethanie Carney Almroth, Patricia Villarrubia-Gomez, Jim Vallette, and Ted Schettler for their expert research and advice in preparing/reviewing this essay. Additional bibliographic resources have been posted to the author’s website: www.rebecca-altman.com.

Just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl in February, the City of Phoenix, Arizona, published a peculiar press release touting its strategy for waste diversion. Thanks to its relationship with Direct Pack Incorporated, a multinational company that makes and recycles plastic, the city said it would be able to send much of its plastic waste to Mexico for recycling.

“[T]he City of Phoenix stands ready to achieve its goal of hosting the greenest Super Bowl events yet,” the announcement from Phoenix’s public works department said.

The city was referring to a forthcoming Direct Pack facility for recycling plastic items called PET thermoforms — clamshells, berry containers, salad boxes, egg cartons, and similarly shaped containers made from polyethylene terephthalate, one of the seven main kinds of plastic. Direct Pack already has a recycling facility in Guadalajara that it says can recycle tens of thousands of tons of PET thermoforms each year, and it’s been constructing a new one in Mexicali, Mexico, just across the border from California. 

The facility is great news for plastic companies based in the U.S., where industry publications say PET thermoform recycling has remained “a struggle.” These companies face growing scrutiny over skyrocketing plastic pollution, and they have spent decades trying to convince the public that recycling is the answer. Direct Pack says on its website that it can give PET thermoforms new life again and again, turning plastic containers like those thrown away at the Phoenix Super Bowl into a “valuable infinite resource.” 

But environmental advocates in Mexico are less excited about the idea of processing more of what they see as garbage from abroad. “The U.S. shouldn’t send this waste to Mexico,” said Marisa Jacott, director of the Mexican nonprofit Fronteras Comunes. “We have less money, less infrastructure.” Rather than engaging in what she called “waste colonialism,” she urged U.S. companies to stop producing so much plastic in the first place and to stop promoting recycling as a cure-all to the plastic waste crisis. 

Direct Pack’s Mexicali facility is part of a larger plan from the U.S. plastics industry to improve recycling infrastructure for the 1.6 billion pounds of PET thermoforms that the U.S. and Canada produce every year. Unlike the PET bottles used for bottled water, soda, and fruit juice, which are among the easiest plastic products to recycle, PET thermoforms are accepted by just 11 percent of the U.S.’s material recovery facilities, or MRFs — the plants where mixed materials from recycling bins like paper, aluminum, and plastic are sorted into bales for further processing. And even that doesn’t mean that those thermoforms will ultimately be turned into new products; most recyclers are unwilling to buy and reprocess PET thermoforms because it costs more to sort, wash, and recycle them than to make new plastics.

The main North American trade group for PET container recyclers lists only one facility in the U.S. that will accept PET-only bales of plastic for reprocessing. The president of another industry group, the Association of Plastic Recyclers, said last year that PET thermoforms were a low-volume commodity that weren’t worth the costs of sorting and storage.

Given such a bleak landscape, Ornela Garelli, an oceans and plastic campaigner for the nonprofit Greenpeace Mexico, said the promise of thermoform recycling is a “greenwashing strategy” from the plastics industry — a way to justify the continued production of plastics. She said it’s time to stop making so many thermoforms in the first place, not hold out hope that more recycling infrastructure will ever be able to keep up with a growing glut of plastic waste.

Still, U.S. plastic makers are doubling down. A U.S.-based nonprofit called The Recycling Partnership — funded and overseen by plastic and packaging companies, including Coca-Cola and Exxon Mobil — said it plans to fund a number of PET recycling efforts this year, beginning with a first round of grants announced in early January for three companies focused on PET reclamation. 

One of these companies is Direct Pack, whose headquarters are in Azusa, California, just outside Los Angeles. But rather than building out PET thermoform recycling infrastructure stateside, The Recycling Partnership’s grant is being used to help Direct Pack build a new PET recycling facility in Mexicali, set to begin operating this spring. According to The Recycling Partnership, the plant will source thermoforms from across the U.S., process them into a plastic feedstock called “flake,” and send them across the street to an existing Direct Pack thermoform production plant, where they will be converted into new packaging.

Strawberries packed in plastic clamshells.
Getty Images

Andrew Jolin, Direct Pack’s director of sustainability, told Grist that “the whole process is environmentally sound,” adding that the company has been “embraced by the local community with our competitive pay scale and benefits.” He said concerns about the recyclability of PET thermoforms are “disinformation” propagated by Greenpeace and that Direct Pack plans to open a similar recycling plant in North Carolina by the end of the year.

Critics, however, have raised legal and ethical objections. Jim Puckett, founder and executive director of the U.S.-based nonprofit Basel Action Network, told Grist it was “disgusting” that the City of Phoenix and the companies represented by The Recycling Partnership were touting the Mexicali facility. “Of course it’s wonderful for them, they get to sweep their garbage across the border,” he said.

Puckett said the Mexicali facility could run afoul of an international agreement called the Basel Convention, which regulates the international plastic waste trade. Although the U.S. hasn’t ratified the agreement, Mexico has — meaning it’s illegal for Mexico to import plastic waste from the U.S. unless it’s “almost free from contamination and other types of waste” and “destined for recycling in an environmentally sound manner,” rather than incinerated or dumped. Bales of PET that contain more than 2 percent other types of plastic, paper, metal, food, or other materials are generally regulated under the Basel Convention as “hazardous waste” and are banned from U.S.-Mexico trade.

“It’s really difficult to achieve that level of cleanliness,” Puckett said. In California, MRFs are unable to sort bales of PET beyond an average of about 10 percent contamination — and that’s when they include PET bottles. There’s virtually no data on contamination in thermoform-only bales — since most recyclers in the U.S. won’t buy PET thermoforms, they’re typically not sorted into bales on their own.

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Craig Snedden, Direct Pack’s president, said the company does not check PET bales before they’re exported from the U.S. to the company’s Guadalajara facility, but he’s confident that they contain less than 2 percent contamination, based on data on the weight of PET collected compared to the weight of all the nonrecyclable materials Direct Pack sends to a landfill. Adam Gendell, The Recycling Partnership’s director of materials advancement, said the most common types of contamination are from food, which “doesn’t sink anybody’s ship” or “cause deleterious effects to the natural environment.” 

In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for the City of Phoenix referred Grist to Direct Pack and highlighted its goal of achieving “zero waste” by 2050.

Environmental groups have also raised concerns that PET thermoform recycling could divert millions of gallons of water from residential use in Mexicali, which was declared to be in a state of emergency drought last summer. Multiple washes are required to remove sticky glues and labels from PET thermoforms, making them significantly more water-intensive to recycle than bottles.

Jolin said the Mexicali facility would “not use a lot of fresh water” — about 800 gallons per day. He said it’s more environmentally friendly to recycle PET thermoforms than to make packages out of other materials like paper, because doing so requires more trees to be harvested. (The U.S. recycling rate for cardboard is greater than 90 percent, compared to 5 percent for plastic.)

Garelli, with Greenpeace Mexico, said supporting a PET thermoform recycling plant in Mexico allows Direct Pack and its funders through The Recycling Partnership to skirt labor regulations that are tougher in the U.S. The minimum wage in Mexicali is about $17 per day — $2.12 an hour, based on an eight-hour workday — compared to $15.50 an hour in California.

“Instead of forcing their own companies to make the transition toward reusability, they are sending all their plastic waste to countries where there are more flexible laws,” she said. “They can pay low salaries to the workers.”

Federal data compiled by the Basel Action Network shows that U.S. plastic waste exports to Latin America have grown by some 90 million pounds per year since 2017, when China stopped accepting it with its “National Sword” policy. “It is not fair for countries — not only Mexico but other Latin American countries — to keep receiving this waste from the U.S.,” Garelli said. 

Editor’s note: Greenpeace is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

The Oregon Senate on Monday passed a bill that would ban prepared food venders from using foam containers, which take centuries to decompose. 
Senate Bill 543 banning polystyrene takeout containers, also called Styrofoam, a trademarked name, passed  20-9, with bipartisan support. It now goes to the House. 
“Polystyrene is a threat to the health of our communities and our land,” said Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, a chief sponsor of the bill. “This is a step towards a more sustainable and mindful approach to consumption and a commitment to preserving the health, beauty, and diversity of Oregon for generations to come.”
Polystyrene is a petroleum-based plastic and was commercially produced starting in the 1930s. The nonbiodegradable material has been in the crosshairs of environmentalists for decades. In 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the polystyrene manufacturing process the fifth largest source of hazardous waste. 
They are also a source of litter, and the foam can break down into tiny pieces, posing a hazard to wildlife and polluting waterways.
In areas where the containers are banned, vendors can use other options such as paper cups and cardboard food containers.
The measure, if passed, would go into effect in 2025 and apply to a variety of prepared food vendors, including restaurants, delis and food trucks and carts. Food vendors would face a fine of up to $100 a day for violations. 
The nine senators opposed to the measure included eight Republicans and Sen. Brian Boquist, I-Dallas. 
Sen. Art Robinson, R-Cave Junction, said the bill is another example of a restriction on businesses. 
“Here we go again,” Robinson said in a statement explaining his vote. “Another small requirement. We are now deciding what disposable containers restaurants may use.”
Local ordinances banning polystyrene foam foodware products have passed in Oregon cities, including Portland, Ashland, Eugene, Florence, Lincoln City, Medford, Milwaukie, Newport and Silverton.
Other states have passed laws limiting polystyrene, including Washington, Colorado,  Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Virginia.

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