Author Archives: David Evans

Pittsburgh recently joined a growing number of local governments, including Philadelphia, that have approved a ban on single-use plastic bags at the register at stores. 
“I’m thrilled. I am absolutely thrilled,” said Sandy Grote, who was shopping at the Giant Eagle store at the Waterworks shopping center in Pittsburgh with a cartful of groceries in reusable bags.
Grote worries about plastic pollution. “I really do think about it because plastics are going nowhere, and it’s forever. So I really try to avoid plastic when I can,” she said.
LISTEN to Julie Grant discuss her reporting with The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple

Vanessa Lynch grew up in the Pittsburgh suburbs in the 1980s and ’90s but moved away for college. She returned to the area a decade later with her husband and then-1-year-old child.
It was 2007, and the fracking industry was just beginning to take hold in southwest Pennsylvania. The then-fledgling industry was not really on Lynch’s radar; between raising a daughter and working full-time as a therapist, she had her hands full. Things got even busier when she had her son in April 2009 and he began suffering from frightening wheezing spells when he was 6 months old, requiring periodic medical attention.
“Honestly, I really had very little understanding of what was going on in the region,” she says.
Just before her daughter was set to start kindergarten, Lynch and her family moved half an hour away to Indiana Township to be close to a good school and have more space to play outside. The neighborhood had everything the growing family could hope for, with a park to play soccer and softball and a creek for summertime wading.
A couple of years later, however, she learned via a neighbor’s Facebook post that the fracking industry had quietly placed a gas drilling site in her community, just above the local park. Infuriated and inspired to act, in 2018, Lynch joined up with the local chapter of the national environmental advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force, where she now works as a part-time organizer.
Lynch and her fellow organizers were not able to shut down the well pad, but they did win more protective ordinances for the township, shielding approximately 85% of its land from future drilling.
Now, though, there’s another threat lurking at Lynch’s door: a plastics manufacturing plant that Shell Oil is constructing just an hour away, on the banks of the Ohio River.
Shell’s ethane-cracker plant, which it began building in 2017, is set to open later this year, but the company has not yet announced a firm date and did not respond to a request for comment. The first facility of its kind in Appalachia, it will use extreme heat to “crack” ethane, a byproduct of fracked gas, into ethylene, a building block for manufacturing plastic.
The facility will produce more than 1 million tons of plastic pellets per year, which will be used to make products ranging from phone cases to auto parts. As it does, the facility will spew hundreds of tons of dangerous compounds into the air while also emitting planet-heating pollution. And it will be fed by the fracked gas from thousands of wells peppered across Appalachian communities—communities like Lynch’s.
From Gas to Plastic
The fossil fuel industry is a powerful political and economic force in Pennsylvania, and Lynch’s organizing has been an uphill battle. In recent years, though, the market has been on her side.
In the roughly 15 years since fracking first came to Appalachia, gas has become a far riskier investment. Until Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, growth in global demand was on the decline, especially amid the spread of COVID-19. One 2021 study even found that Appalachian gas may never be profitable again.
In plastic, however, the fossil fuel industry sees a chance to turn itself around, solidifying demand for fracked gas in the region for decades to come. Local officials are on board with the scheme—they awarded Shell one of the largest public subsidy packages in national history.
Advocates are particularly concerned because the Shell cracker plant isn’t meant to be the sole plastic plant in the region. Rather, it is part of a plan to transform Appalachia’s Ohio River Valley into a plastic and petrochemical hub, with cracker plants, storage facilities, and gas pipelines erected across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
“These plants don’t stand alone, and they require a high volume of natural gas to do the work that they do,” Lynch says. “So when you think about the Ohio River Valley and the potential for these sorts of very large polluters to become more and more common, it really does become a more concerning story.”
Health Impacts
In Lynch’s township, gas companies are currently extracting gas from eight wells. But six more are permitted for future use if the industry decides to develop them, and as demand for ethane increases to supply the cracker plant (or plants), she is concerned that the number could rise.
Nearby areas, many of them more economically depressed, are far more open to drilling than hers. The most fracked county in the state is Washington County, where the poverty rate is 3% higher than it is in Lynch’s township. But as demand grows, Lynch says, fracking is expanding.
“[Washington County] is where fracking really started in southwest PA, so it’s the most concentrated,” she says. “What we’re finding is, as they’re looking for places to expand, we’re the next generation of areas that they’re coming to.”
Since emissions don’t respect borders, pollution from nearby municipalities could spread across the region. The air in the area is already polluted: A 2013 study found that Allegheny County, which comprises the greater Pittsburgh area, including Indiana Township, is in the top 2% of areas in the U.S. for cancer risks from air pollution.
Fracking—shorthand for “hydraulic fracturing”—involves pumping chemicals, such as benzene, antifreeze, and diesel, deep underground to fracture shale deposits and release the gas stored within them. The process releases airborne benzene, formaldehyde, particulate matter, and ammonia, which have been linked to respiratory ailments and other illnesses.
There is no way to determine whether fracking contributed to Lynch’s son’s lung issues due to his proximity to fracking operations, but the practice has been linked to shortness of breath, worsened asthma, and other respiratory ailments.
There are other health impacts to worry about too. Used fracking chemicals often get dumped into rivers—a concern that some state and federal authorities have ignored.
Drilling into shale for gas can also release radioactive materials, like uranium and thorium, that have been buried for millennia. In recent years, dozens of children have contracted rare cancers, including Ewing sarcoma, in southwest Pennsylvania. Researchers suspect exposure to radiation could be responsible.

“Fracking makes people sick. It makes people very sick,” says Ned Ketyer, a retired pediatrician and board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a physician-led organization focused on environmental health.
With the imminent opening of Shell’s cracker plant, Ketyer says there will be even more risks to health on the horizon from the plant’s emissions, including nitrogen oxide, ozone, and volatile organic compounds, as well as the increased demand for fracked gas.
Ketyer has spent years raising the alarm about the dangers of fossil fuels, but despite the evidence that gas is harming locals, he’s found that not everyone is interested in pushing back.
“This is an area where people have lived for generations, extracting fossil fuel and supporting the industries that extract fossil fuels,” he says.
Challenges
Growing up in the Pittsburgh suburbs, Lynch didn’t think much about pollution. Neither, she says, did her family members—even those who were exposed to it each day at work. Her grandfather, for instance, was an electrical engineer in the steel industry.
“He used to tell a story about how when he would get up in the morning, he would put on his white shirt to go to work, and when he would come home in the evening, the shirt would be gray,” she says.
Polluting, fossil fuel-based industries—coal, steel, and now gas—have long formed the backbone of the region’s economy. The resulting public desensitization to pollution has posed difficulties in local environmental organizing. So have Shell’s claims that the plastic industry will put people back to work. In southwest Pennsylvania, the unemployment rate is significantly above the national average.
“We are often prepared to trade our health for jobs,” says Lois Bower-Bjornson, field organizer for Clean Air Council, who lives in southwest Pennsylvania’s Washington County.
Amid dwindling employment opportunities, local unions have been overwhelmingly supportive of the cracker plant. But while Shell once claimed the facility would create thousands of jobs, that projection later dropped to the hundreds.
Matt Mehalik, executive director of the Breathe Project, a coalition of environmental and public health groups focused on the Pittsburgh region, says that even some residents who are skeptical of the fossil fuel industry’s expansion plans are nervous to publicly take a stand. They fear backlash not only from their neighbors, but also from the industry or its government allies.
“There’s a cultural history where people have learned through multiple generations that it’s better to just go along and get along and not raise up these issues—that if you want to be able to survive in this county, you keep your mouth shut,” he says. “That’s what we run up against. That is a legacy of [the region’s] industrial past.”
Resistance
Despite the challenges, a small yet vibrant movement in southwest Pennsylvania is fighting plans for gas and plastic expansion: holding protests, writing op-eds and letters to elected officials, and mobilizing dozens of people to testify at hearings.
They have achieved some wins, including the fact that the cracker plant will monitor its emissions on-site.
Activists have also taken emissions tracking into their own hands, using both naked-eye observations and low-cost monitors to track pollution to ensure Shell is complying with regulations.
Beyond fighting the Shell plant itself, Lynch has also been advocating for a fairer regulatory environment, pressuring the federal government to keep its promise to instate strict regulation on methane emissions and advocating for the state of Pennsylvania to join a regional climate initiative, two measures that could lessen local pollution.
Activists are also working to boost public awareness of the dangers of fracking and plastic. Bower-Bjornson of the Clean Air Council, for instance, organizes tours to introduce the public to the human impacts of fracking, showing attendees well pads and compressor sites and introducing them to people impacted by their pollution.
Like the planned petrochemical hub, the movement for a healthier and safer environment transcends state lines. This varied opposition is necessary, since there’s no single policy that can take down the fossil fuel industry, says Dustin White, a senior campaigner on plastics and petrochemicals with the Center for International Environmental Law.
“There’s no one thing that’s absolutely gonna stop it all,” he says, instead calling for a “death by 1,000 paper cuts” approach.
White, who lives in West Virginia, says this approach also includes thinking bigger by advocating for a total ban on a petrochemical build-out. Just as important is helping people envision more just and sustainable systems, where neither communities nor materials are treated as disposable: “A more regenerative economy,” he says.
It’s clear the current economic system isn’t working for most working-class people in Pennsylvania. It may not even be sustainable for the fossil fuel sector. Financial analysts and environmentalists alike have predicted that, due to a variety of market factors and increasing concern about the climate crisis, the petrochemical build-out is far from a safe financial bet.
Rather than pouring public money into projects that put Pennsylvanians’ health and the climate on the line—and that could be doomed to collapse anyway—activists say officials should invest in more sustainable industries. Research shows that investments in renewable energy, for example, could create almost a quarter-million jobs each year in the state.
Lynch fears that if her local economy doesn’t change quickly, the region—and the planet—she calls home could become unlivable by the time her kids are grown. But she gains motivation from knowing there’s another path.
“I think about the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania, but I also think about all the amazing opportunities we have to protect this region and to remind people that our health and our well-being [have] value,” she says. “It’s the project of a lifetime.”

Teaser photo credit: A Pittsburgh towboat pushes a barge down the icy Ohio River. Behind is the on going construction of the Shell Cracker Plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania in January 2019. By Drums600 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76249312

Most waste decisions are out of reach of consumers, who have the packaging chosen for them by manufacturers

When shoppers go to the store for shampoo or strawberries or cereal, they have the choice between brands and ingredients and even different prices, but there’s one major thing consumers can’t often choose: how those goods come packaged.

Long before an item lands on the supermarket shelf, its makers have chosen the cardboard box and the plastic or metal bag inside keeping food fresh. They’ve chosen which type of plastic clamshell will keep berries from getting smashed on the way to the fridge. They’ve selected which type of glass or plastic or compostable material will hold your hair care products on the shelf for weeks or months without falling apart.

This is the first story in a new series by InvestigateWest examining one of the most problematic pollutants of the 21st century: plastic. This series was funded in part by the Sustainable Path Foundation.

With arrows and numbers somewhere on the package, they’ve told consumers whether that material might be recyclable. But it’s up to individuals to make sure that little number on the bottom denotes something that is actually accepted for recycling in their area. Then, busy people are asked to make split-second decisions about which bin something belongs in, often with little idea whether that material will actually get used again, or simply end up as garbage.

“We as consumers are stuck with the packaging decision that somebody else has made,” says Washington state Sen. Mona Das, D-Kent, whom some have deemed the “single-use plastics warrior” for her work combating waste. “And then we as consumers have to figure out what to do with packaging, whether it’s plastic or glass or aluminum or … Styrofoam.”

Das is one of several Pacific Northwest lawmakers who’ve pressed for nation-leading legislation that would require companies to pay for the recycling programs needed to deal with the packaging choices they make. It’s a move that about a dozen other states have also considered as they tackle their recycling and waste streams.  

When consumers don’t know exactly what to do with all that packaging, they often do what’s called “wishful recycling,” tossing those containers into the recycling bin in hopes that they ultimately get recycled, Das says.

That creates serious problems. 

At local materials recovery facilities, people and optical robots work at a breakneck pace to separate garbage from recyclable materials. Despite their best efforts, they end up baling some of that contamination in with the plastics, metals and cardboard and then sell to places that can process those materials and turn them back into products or new packaging.

Until about five years ago, much of the world shipped those contaminated bales to China, where they could be recycled and made into new products. But then China shut the door to all but the most pristine bales in an effort to reduce air pollution from burning the leftover garbage, and to focus on better recycling the materials used and created within its own borders.

Suddenly, people around the world, including in the Pacific Northwest, had to figure out how to recycle all that packaging somewhere else. Some recycling programs at the city and county level stopped collecting entire categories of materials, and the companies and sorting centers in charge of waste streams went on the hunt for other markets.

Washington’s Department of Ecology found in 2018 that less than half of the 13.2 pounds of waste created per resident each day was recovered for recycling, for composting or to be burned for energy. That adds up quickly in a state with more than 7.4 million people, particularly as the amount of plastic and other waste created per person is increasing over time — in 2000, it was more like 9.7 pounds per resident each day. 

But there’s something many other countries have already figured out: You can make the companies that sell products in your area pay to ensure their packaging is either recycled, reused or composted, and in doing so, you can greatly increase that recovery rate and reduce how much goes to waste.

What’s the magic solution? Industry experts call it an “Extended Producer Responsibility” or EPR. 

In 2021, Maine and Oregon became the first states in the country to pass such legislation. They are already starting to figure out the rules of their own EPR programs, and while the Washington Legislature failed to vote on a similar bill before its session ended in March, negotiations with manufacturers in the Evergreen State may be helping other states push similar programs forward.

PASSING THE BUCK BACK

The basic way EPR programs function is by requiring producers to pay into a “producer responsibility organization” or a PRO that ensures their materials are recycled properly. The PRO negotiates collection costs, ensures that pickup is happening where it needs to, and ultimately sells the collected products to end markets for recycling or reuse.

By keeping the programs “material neutral,” states can ensure that different types of packaging all meet standards for recycling, reuse or composting. But if your material is harder to recycle, the PRO will charge you more for the extra labor.

PROs already exist in many states around the country, including Washington and Oregon, to handle the recycling and reusing of things such as electronics, paint, fluorescent lightbulbs and more, but packaging is a category that has yet to be widely addressed in the United States.

Key to the programs’ success is ensuring that people across the state have access to recycling. 

Das’ Senate Bill 5697 would have required manufacturers, brands and/or the businesses first distributing packaged products in the state to pay into packaging PROs in Washington. The bill also would have ensured that rural communities with garbage collection also have recycling collection.

That was one point of interest for the Association of Washington Cities, as many municipalities operate their own waste-collection systems. 

The cities, along with roughly 100 other stakeholders representing industries including plastics, metals, paper and waste collection met with Das and other proponents of the legislation over several months in 2021. 

In negotiations, the cities supported creating a basic recycling model to reach nearly every person in the state, explains Carl Schroeder, the deputy director of government relations for the Association of Washington Cities. But if that basic model was, say, the Honda Civic of municipal or county recycling, some places that have the Cadillacs and BMWs of recycling didn’t want to provide less. 

“One of the things we were kind of ‘giving up’ as we looked at this new approach was the locally developed systems that evolved over time,” Schroeder says. 

Still, the idea of passing the buck back to producers of plastics and other materials, rather than ratepayers, was appealing, Schroeder says.

“Producers of that packaging are the folks who make the decisions to utilize one packaging form or another. Our ratepayers ultimately bear all that cost and are not in a position to reduce that cost,” Schroeder says. “There are decisions that could be more environmentally beneficial and cost effective.”

THE PATH TO BECOMING LAW 

It often takes several years to create a complex program like an EPR through legislation, says Heather Trim, executive director of Zero Waste Washington, a nonprofit that works to pass policies aimed at ending waste entirely.

Around 2018, some of the first efforts to address plastic packaging in Washington were brought forward by a coalition of environmental groups and like-minded state lawmakers. In 2021, the groups successfully passed plastics legislation that will, among other things, soon require more post-consumer recycled content in plastic beverage bottles and bottles used for household cleaning and personal hygiene products. That laid the groundwork to focus on a packaging EPR, Trim says. 

To improve recycling systems overall, four things need to happen, Trim says. First up is truth in labeling, along with designing packaging to make sure it can truly be recycled. Second, consumers need education so they know how to return those products. Third, adequate infrastructure is required to collect and sort the material. And fourth, you need an end market for all that stuff. 

Only 49 percent of those materials are currently being recovered, when the goal is more like 75 percent, Trim says.

“We’ve got to create large amounts of clean material so that we can feed the demand being driven by the post-consumer content mandates,” Trim says.

A responsibility-based program would require producers to pay for many of the changes needed to get there. 

In British Columbia, packaging recycling is paid for by producers via an EPR that started in 2014. The program resulted in a nearly 86 percent recovery rate overall for paper, glass, metal and plastic packaging in 2020, and ensured more than 99 percent of households had access to recycling, according to an annual report by the producer responsibility program Recycle BC. 

However, the plastic recovery rate — the amount of plastic returned from the total sold in the province — still hovered around 52 percent, underscoring the need for smart packaging design and industry innovation, the report states. 

Of course, when industries are asked to pay for the problem, they also want a say in how the solution is run, particularly when there are valuable materials involved that they can use to meet other recycling mandates. For example, used soda bottles made from easily recycled types of plastic can help beverage companies meet recycled content mandates, making clean batches of those bottles from sorting centers desirable. Continued negotiations over who gets to control the collection and sale of bottles and other valuable materials may have been what ultimately prevented the Washington state bill from passing this year. 

But Das says producers know that the demand for sustainable packaging is growing, particularly among young consumers. With the opportunity to help write the solution, many, such as the beverage industry, have come to largely support the effort. 

“We applaud Washington state for exploring stronger collection and recycling systems that can speed progress toward a circular economy for all recyclable materials, and we appreciate the opportunity to work with the state on building a system that increases recycling rates,” the Washington Beverage Association said in an emailed statement to InvestigateWest. 

Other states have checked in with Das to see how the negotiations with various stakeholders were going, and some included tweaked language from Washington’s proposed legislation in their own bills. One similar piece in New York’s bill would require PROs to reimburse local recycling programs based on rates set by a government agency, while Washington’s bill would require the PROs to work with one another to set those reimbursement rates.

“If our bill can’t pass, I’m really proud that other states are using some of our language,” says Das, who has since announced she won’t seek re-election this year. “This is a solvable problem, and we are the ones to solve it. We need to work on it together.”

Das says she’s confident other environmental champions in the Legislature will take up the cause and keep pushing for the policy in Washington. Plus, as other states pass similar policies, it will only become easier to pass here, she says. 

Other states that have considered similar legislation include Maryland, California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and of course Maine and Oregon, the two states that last year passed the first U.S. packaging EPR laws. 

By this summer, Oregon lawmakers will learn more about labels’ misleading or false claims concerning recyclability, and then the state’s Department of Environmental Quality will spend the next few years developing the rules for PROs, which are expected to start operations by mid-2025. 

“This improved recycling system … will reduce confusion about what goes in the bin, keep litter out of our waterways and expand services across the state,” writes Jennifer Flynt, public affairs specialist for Oregon DEQ, in an email to InvestigateWest. “These changes will also provide peace of mind that what we put in our bin is actually recycled in a way that is good for the planet and does not cause harm domestically or overseas.”

With states individually tackling packaging, who ultimately controls each EPR program — a state agency versus the producers paying for recycling — is likely to vary from place to place, even when neighboring states may have similar goals. For example, Oregon’s EPR doesn’t cover beverage containers because the state has a long-standing deposit program designed to address that recycling, while Washington’s bill included beverage containers. 

Das recalls her father, who worked in the aluminum industry, holding up a soda can to her when she was young and explaining how it would be remade into a new soda can in just a couple months. The goal with EPR legislation is to get there with plastics. 

“We’re not going to get rid of plastic, it’s too versatile,” Das says. “My hope is we can turn plastic into a circular economy to be recycled over and over again. … We just need the political will to get it done.”

InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. This story was funded in part by the Sustainable Path Foundation.

FEATURED IMAGE: Truckloads of plastic bottles, cardboard, glass and newspaper run along an intricate set of conveyor belts and bins to be sorted at Waste Management’s Spokane Materials and Recycling Technology (SMaRT) Center. (Young Kwak/Inlander)

COMING SOON IN THE SERIES:

Researchers and environmentalists around the Pacific Northwest are expanding our understanding of the scope of plastic pollution in the environment, where that pollution comes from, and the impact that plastic pollution may have on animals and people. From marine wildlife research in Oregon and Puget Sound, to inland microplastics studies and macroplastic litter cleanups, people across the PNW are working to understand the root causes and potential solutions to pervasive plastics.

A group of Erie-area environmentalists would love to live in a world with a lot less plastic.Although their instincts tell them that recycling plastic is a good move — one that should reduce the amount of plastic going to landfills — they are raising concerns about a plan by International Recycling Group to build what’s billed as the nation’s largest plastics recycling plant in Erie.IRG, founded by former steel company executive Mitch Hecht, announced in April that it had purchased 25 acres of the former Hammermill Paper site to build a $185 million recycling plant that’s expected to employ 300 people.The company has received broad support locally from the business community, including a combined investment of $9 million from Erie Insurance and the Plastek Group.Members of three environmental groups with ties to Erie recently spoke with reporters from the Erie Times-News to discuss their concerns about both the safety of the process and the viability of the business plan.Representatives of those three groups — Juan Llarena of Our Water, Our Air, Our Rights; Jenny Tompkins from PennFuture; and Benedictine Sister Anne McCarthy — expressed one common sentiment:”We would love for this to work. We want this to work,” Llarena said.The bottom line, though, is that they’re not sure the plant would have the minimal effect on the environment that IRG claims.Plans announced$100 million recycling plant planned for ErieWhat’s more, they say they’re not certain if IRG’s business plan is sound. They say that raises concerns about what would happen if the plant was built but the business failed.Among other concerns, the environmental groups say they worry that massive stockpiles of plastic could also lead to dangerous fires. All it would take, the group of environmentalists said, is an overheated battery in a plastic toy.”The lithium-ion in a discarded e-cigarette pen is enough to start a fire,” McCarthy said. “How would a fire department even deal with a fire that hot?”Recycling newsErie recycling company spares 1.3 million bottles from the landfillTompkins said she’s not saying fire is inevitable.”It’s not to make the case that we assume a fire will happen. It’s how we deal with a fire if it does happen,” she said.The location of the proposed plant raises the stakes, Llarena said.”It’s in an environmental justice area,” he said, describing what Pennsylvania defines as a low-income area with a higher number of minority residents. “It’s a neighborhood with the Boys Club, schools, single-family homes, apartments. Burning plastic is toxic. Who would want to be around that?”Tompkins, who is Penn Future’s campaign manager for clean water advocacy, said she’s not prepared yet to say there is a safe location to build what IRG proposes.”I don’t think we can determine if this is feasible anywhere. I don’t think we can say yes to put it somewhere,” she said.Some of her questions revolve around the water that will be needed for the cleaning process.Questions asked and answeredHere’s a look at some of the top concerns raised by these environmental groups with Hecht, from IRG offering responses:With so much plastic and the potential for lithium batteries in the mix, isn’t there a great risk of fire? If not, why not, and can it be contained?Hecht: Every bale of plastic will be contained indoors and there will be “heat-seeking sensors” that are “continuously looking for heat generation within the bale.” If it does, the machinery would activate an irrigation system, Hecht said.”There’s a fire risk involved in any manufacturing process, and so there are sophisticated fire prevention systems that will be in the plant,” he said. “It’s not a fire risk related to some sort of chemical combustion. This is fire related to inert matter that is not combustible beyond any other type of stable matter. OK. There are no chemicals, there are no gases that add any additional risk then you would find otherwise in a stable, non-volatile manufacturing environment.”Viable business model?They raise issues about the viability of those plans. Perhaps most importantly, the small amount of unbaled plastic that can be carried in a pickup truck to take to a center is only 200 to 300 pounds. How can that work financially?Hecht: The plan has changed. No longer will individuals volunteer or work to retrieve plastics set out at the curbside and turn them into a collection site in exchange for a per-pound payment.”Initially we thought we would have a model where we were rewarding the collectors with digital currency and then we realized that really wasn’t workable,” he said. “For the time being our model is that we are paying employees of newBin to collect the plastic probably in the first year or so. We will likely be starting with neighborhood collection points around the city and slowly evolving into a door-to-door collection system.”Hecht said that part of the business model will likely entail a concept known as “extended producer responsibility.” In this case, companies that produce plastic products, like pop bottles, would make a financial investment in recovering the products that can otherwise end up in a landfill or pollute the environment. Such a company could donate to newBin, the company IRG is partnering with to develop a user application, in exchange for ad placement on the app.”The beauty of newBin is that we’re incorporating the future of what’s transforming recycling over the next five to 10 years, and that’s something called extended producer responsibility,” Hecht said. “For the first time, consumer product groups and retailers who use plastic are going to be asked to have monetary responsibility for supporting the collection and recycling infrastructure, which means that Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and retail chains like Giant Eagle are going to be asked to pay money to help support the recycling system.”Canada and many European companies already require such companies to make these investments and, Hecht believes, the U.S. is “trending” toward a similar obligation.”That’s why the economics are different today than just paying people to collect with the only revenues being the sale of recyclable materials,” he said. “We anticipate that in the future our business will be supported by those consumer products companies and retail outlets that are looking to play their part as a proxy for extended producer responsibility.”Concerns about pollutionCan you address concerns about plastic dust associated with the flaking process?Hecht: “There is normal ambient dust that is captured in a baghouse system at the top of the roof of the building, and everything will comply with a best-in-class filtration system so that no dust will be leaking out of the building,” he said.If IRG makes resin pellets, how much water is needed in the washing process and what becomes of that water? Is there a solid waste produced? What happens to it?Hecht: “There will be a closed-loop water filtration system, and part of that water uses the local wastewater treatment capacity that the city currently has,” he said. “But most of that water is designed in a closed-loop system. Once the water passes through the filtration system and cleans it, it goes back into the operations. There’s no chance that there’s any effluent or any leakage of that wastewater into aquifers or any other area. It’s as if it’s any other manufacturing facility that uses water treatment. It’s the same process.”Are IRG’s plans subject to public comment and review by the state Department of Environmental Protection?Hecht: “Absolutely. We are working with DEP for normal permitting for operating a plant like ours. You have air emissions permits and you have water permits. Those are the two primary permits that you need to operate. Both the air and the water will need to comport with the highest standards from the Department of Environmental Protection of Pennsylvania.”The staff are completely on top of everything that’s going to take place in our building. These are objective standards on air emissions, particulate matter and matter in any wastewater. We are not asking for any variance at all in relation to the highest standards that the DEP may require.”Is IRG required to post bond? What happens to the site if the business fails?”This is not municipal solid waste. The material coming into our plant is presorted, compacted 1,000-pound bales of post-use plastic. This is a feedstock for a material that gets turned back into a product that we manufacture. So there is no additional risk of contamination that is related to our operations. So there’s no more necessity for a bond for our facility than there is for a manufacturing plant that’s making widgets. I cannot imagine the city being on the hook for anything left in that building.”The materials that we purchase and that will enter our building are profitable commodities that are an inventory,” he added. “Right now we are purchasing that material. And if for some reason we can’t use that material, that inventory will be sold resold as a commodity to another recycler who would gladly want to purchase it.”More:Pennsylvania must act to stem pollution flowing to Chesapeake BayWill there be a long-term market for Clean Red, which will be sold to a steelmaker as a replacement for coke in the steelmaking process, especially if hydrogen is developed as a replacement for coke?Hecht: “Less than 10% of the material that comes through our plant will be turned into Clean Red. It is simply a way to handle residual waste plastic that has no other utility.”Plastic products like potato chip bags, Styrofoam cups and egg cartons cannot be recycled, Hecht said. IRG will turn those materials into Clean Red, which can then be used as a substitute for coke in the steelmaking process, instead of taking that waste to a landfill.IRG won’t make money on Clean Red, Hecht said, but it won’t cost the company money to landfill. Hecht believes a recycling application for those products will eventually be developed.”If there is anybody that has a recycling application for any material that comes through our plant it will be sold to them,” he said. “Clean Red is made as a very last resort before we send the material to a landfill. Will there be a future for Clean Red long-term? We hope not.”How much stuff will need to be taken to a landfill? Will that be cost-prohibitive?Hecht: “There’s going to be some landfilling because there will always be some modest amount of organic material and so forth,” he said. “There’s dirt, there’s sand and things like that.”Of all of the material entering the plant, about 5% is estimated to be waste that will end up in a landfill. Hecht said those costs are built into the company’s financial model and will not be cost-prohibitive.Questions about the locationDoes it make sense to locate this in an environmental justice area?Hecht: “Absolutely. We’re creating 300 high-paying jobs in a clean technology industry, in a clean manufacturing environment for which there is no threat of degradation to the area, the neighborhood, and it’s providing jobs, it’s economic development. There is no reason why there should not be this sort of development on the east side.”IRG signed a partnership agreement with the UECDC (Urban Erie Community Development Corporation) to work closely with the UECDC on a community benefits agreement, where we commit to high-paying jobs and we commit to unbiased hiring practices, hiring people from the city and from the 2nd District and the people that require employment the most.”More:Silent Walk for Peace set for playgroundAs environmentalists, Tompkins, McCarthy, and Llarena prefer the idea of recycling plastic instead of landfilling it. But plastics recycling — they note — is different than recycling aluminum or other metals.Plastic bottles, for instance, can’t be made into plastic bottles.”It’s really downcycling, ” Llarena said. “It breaks down to the point that you can never use it for the same thing.”McCarthy worries, though, that what looks like a solution might slow the process of weaning ourselves off plastic.”There is microplastic that is in the water, in the air, and in the land, and now in our food,” she said.It would be worrisome, she said, “if people think it’s OK to use plastic because we can recycle it. It’s not really accurate and it’s not really safe for the health of the community.”Hecht, on the other hand, questions why environmentalists have not taken their concerns to him directly.”It’s just odd that nobody has contacted the company and nobody seems to be too concerned to come to the company directly,” Hecht said. “We’ve always been open about everything we’re doing.”Contact Jim Martin at jmartin@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ETNMartin.Contact Matthew Rink at mrink@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ETNrink.

At the beginning of last year, 187 countries took steps to limit the export of plastic trash from wealthy to developing countries. It’s not working as well as they hoped.

According to an analysis of global trade data by the nonprofit Basel Action Network, or BAN, violations of a U.N. agreement regulating the international plastic waste trade have been “rampant” over the past year. Since January 1, 2021, when new new rules were supposed to begin clamping down on countries that ship their plastic refuse abroad, the U.S., Canada, and the European Union have offloaded hundreds of millions of tons of plastic to other countries, where much of it may be landfilled, burned, or littered into the environment.

“Toxic pollution and its burden on communities and ecosystems in importing countries continues as a direct result of these multiple violations,” BAN wrote in its analysis.

The regulations in question are part of the Basel Convention, a framework designed to control the international movement of waste that is designated “hazardous.” In the years after it was first adopted in 1989, the convention covered substances such as mercury and pesticides. But in 2019, signatories to the convention agreed to add new guidance for scrapped plastic, limiting its movement between nations except under specific circumstances, effective at the beginning of 2021. For example, the convention now bans the export of unmixed, contaminated plastic waste without importing countries’ notification and consent, as well as the assurance that it will be managed in an “environmentally sound” way.

These requirements — which were put in place to help protect communities and the environment from the planet’s growing glut of plastic waste — are stringent, and they have contributed to overall declines in the flow of plastic waste to the developing world since 2020. But the international plastic waste trade is far from being snuffed out, and BAN says that its ongoing scale indicates widespread Basel Convention violations.

For example, the U.S., which is one of only eight countries that has not yet ratified the Basel Convention, sent more than 800 million pounds of plastic waste to Mexico, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, and other Basel parties last year — activity that likely violates the convention’s plastic amendments, since they stipulate that party countries cannot trade regulated plastics with non-parties. According to BAN, the only way this would be legal is if all of the plastic shipped by the brokers who contract with U.S. waste collectors were “almost free from contamination” and sorted into single polymers, such as PET, the type of plastic water bottles are made from. 

This is a standard that the U.S. has been unable to meet even for its domestic recycling industry. “We’re not able to separate plastic economically to a level where it’s isolated polymers and not contaminated with at least 5 percent or more of other stuff,” said Jim Puckett, BAN’s founder and executive director. The economic and technological barriers are simply too great for American recyclers to adequately sort and handle the plastic they receive, forcing them to send most of it to landfills. 

Plastic trash accumulates along the Pasig River in the Philippines, a big plastic importer. Arur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images

If the U.S. can’t even sort its own plastic waste, Puckett asked rhetorically, then how can it be sorting hundreds of millions of pounds of it for export? “It just isn’t happening,” he said. 

BAN also suspects Europe of noncompliance with the Basel Convention, including violations of a ban on the export of unsorted, contaminated plastic waste from the E.U. to countries outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Throughout 2021, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other developing countries continued to receive much of Europe’s plastic trash — especially from the Netherlands, whose plastic exports to developing countries increased dramatically last year, from an average of 18.3 million pounds per month in 2020 to 41 million pounds in 2021. 

When plastic waste is shipped to countries with insufficient waste management infrastructure, it can cause long-lasting damage to people and the environment. Plastic that isn’t recycled may end up being incinerated, releasing hazardous chemicals that poison communities and the food chain. Otherwise, excess plastic may be dumped into uncontrolled waste sites or polluted directly into the environment, leading to contaminated water sources and impaired ecosystems.  In the Philippines, a big plastic importer, the influx of plastic waste is so overwhelming that it has sickened residents of Manila and clogged the island nation’s coastlines.

Because enforcement of the Basel Convention falls mostly on individual member countries, BAN said there isn’t much that the international community can do to crack down on plastic waste trade violations. Plastic importers may hesitate to strictly enforce the Basel Convention because they receive payments from exporting countries to do so, and because some plastic waste can be repurposed into new products for industry and manufacturing. In the immediate term, BAN has called on party members to implement tougher port inspections for illegal imports and exports of plastic waste, and for governments to place high penalties on companies that violate the convention.

A longer-term solution should look upstream, Puckett told Grist, and consider ways to limit the creation of plastic in the first place. He pointed to a recent pledge from the U.N. to negotiate a global, binding treaty covering plastic’s full life cycle by 2024. Although the final agreement will have to contend with the political power of the fossil fuel and plastics industries, a strong treaty could in theory do much more than the Basel Convention to curb the export of waste to the developing world.

“We don’t have illusions that it’s going to be easy,” Puckett said, “but we have to get a grip on the amount of plastic we’re producing if we want to impact plastic waste.”

In a small remote town in the outback, a multi-million-dollar mega facility shipped in from America will soon turn potentially toxic drinking water into some of the cleanest in Australia. Key points:US activist Erin Brockovich says PFAS contamination in her country is shaping up as a historic issueAfter major delays, Katherine’s $24-million facility will be switched on in the middle of the yearExperts say more treatment plants will be needed to clean up PFAS contaminated water across AustraliaIt is the largest to be built so far and one of the first, but experts and activists say many more will be needed as Australia begins to deal with PFAS contamination.A few years ago, residents of Katherine received the alarming news that the water they had been using was contaminated by a group of human-made chemicals known as PFAS, which some experts say are linked to cancers and other serious health concerns.Between 1988 and 2004, during firefighting training at the Tindal RAAF Base, PFAS leached into the Katherine River and spread kilometres through the highly connected aquifer below.The government advised against eating fish caught from the river, the local swimming pool was closed, bore-reliant properties surrounding the base were delivered bottled water by Defence and residents lined up for blood tests.A major study on the health effects of PFAS and a landmark class action were launched and an interim water treatment plant was brought in, but its size left many in fear the clean water would run out.