The dense black smoke from a fire at a plastics recycler in Richmond, Indiana, that began Tuesday afternoon and continued burning on Wednesday, forcing the evacuation of 2,000 nearby residents, was  dramatic, but far from an isolated incident in the world of facilities that store or recycle vast quantities of plastic waste.

There are hundreds of such fires in the United States and Canada every year and most of them never make the news, said Richard Meier, a private fire investigator in Florida who worked 24 years as a mechanical engineer in manufacturing, including in plastics companies.

“These plastics, most of them are derived from oil. They are petrochemicals and they have the same propensity for burning once ignited,” Meier said.

So far, in Richmond, in eastern Indiana between Indianapolis and Dayton, Ohio, local health officials say the biggest threat to the public is from breathing particulates in the smoke.

But as firefighters and residents there are now experiencing, the toxic chemicals plastic fires can release also pose significant threats.

“There can be a lot of nasty things that come along with burning plastics. Polyurethane can release hydrogen cyanide,” Meier said, referring to the chemical warfare agent. 

“Dioxins come from burning plastics,” he said, referring to a group of highly toxic chemicals that can cause cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, damage to the immune system and interfere with hormones. 

“That’s why firefighters wear full respiratory gear when fighting a plastic fire, with an air tank on their back,” Meier said.

On Wednesday, Richmond Mayor Dave Snow told reporters the fire occurred at a plastic waste collection business that city officials have been trying to clean up for several years. 

“We were aware what was operating (there) was a fire hazard,” Snow said. “The business owner is responsible for all this.”

The fire raised new and old concerns about the global plastics crisis that is overwhelming landfills and collection sites, choking the oceans and depositing microplastics inside the bodies and bloodstreams of wild animals and humans alike. Although plastics are ubiquitous in much of modern life, the United Nations and many of its member countries now view them as posing a health and climate threat thoughout their lifecycle, and are working on a plastics treaty in an effort to stop their proliferation and clean them up. 

In Richmond, City Councilman Ron Oler said as much as 70 million pounds of waste plastic was stored inside and outside several buildings on the burning property, which is near a residential area.

He said the plastics there were the hardest types to recycle and had been piling up ever since China stopped accepting most plastic waste —including from Richmond—under a policy called National Sword.

“This guy was buying up scrap plastic and selling it to China,” Oler said. When the China market dried up, so did his business prospects, he added.

But the plant’s owner kept receiving it and storing it, Oler said.

“Our biggest fear has been there would be a fire because there is so much plastic,” he said. Cleanup efforts, however, have been tied up in the courts, he said.

Oler said the fire itself has been terribly disruptive, requiring an evacuation zone of one-half mile, which affected at least 2,000 residents. It could burn for days, officials said.

“This is Richmond’s East Palestine moment,” he said, referring to the Feb. 3 train derailment in eastern Ohio and the controlled release and burning of five railcars of vinyl chloride, a cancer-causing chemical used to make PVC plastic.

At a Wednesday press conference, Christine Stinson, the executive director of the Wayne County Health Department, said air monitoring has revealed the biggest concern to be particulates in the smoke.

“Just standing here, you can see how close we are to the fire, my throat is starting to get a little sore,” she told reporters, several blocks from the charred and burning remains of the recycling business, with smoke still rising as a backdrop.

EPA officials said they will continue air monitoring for particulates and several types of chemicals, including volatile organic compounds, benzene, chlorine and hydrogen cyanide.

China’s National Sword policy rocked global recycling markets, including across the United States.

“I will bet there are almost a hundred of these facilities laying around the United States with giant stockpiles of plastics,” said Jane Williams, executive director of the environmental group California Communities Against Toxics. “There is no way to recycle it because it’s not recyclable.”

Since China adopted National Sword, a lot of plastic waste has been sent to landfills or burned in incinerators, said Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who has worked as a consultant to the oil and gas industry and now runs The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that fights plastics pollution and waste.

She’s been so concerned about fire threats from old and new stockpiles that she’s been tracking most of those plastic fires that actually do make the news. 

She has counted 70 and mapped their locations in several countries since 2019.

“This is a horrific problem because plastic waste is highly flammable and at these operations, not all of them have proper health and safety management,” she said. “They are sketchy operators.”

With the chemical and plastics industry promoting more recycling, and selling recycling to the public as “clean and green,” plastic fires at  recycling plants illustrate a contradictory and, she said, more realistic image of the industry.

She and other environmentalists say that fires at plastic recycling operations also highlight a threat from the American Chemistry Council’s national push to persuade state legislatures to regulate so-called “advanced recycling” operations as manufacturing and not solid waste management, limiting the need for waste management permits and regulations. 

The industry uses the term “advanced’’ to include recycling processes that convert plastic waste into chemical ingredients for new plastic products or fuel, using high heat and other chemicals. But these advanced recycling plants, which many environmentalists describe as essentially plastics incinerators, also typically stockpile waste plastics onsite. 

In fact, a Brightmark advanced, or chemical, recycling plant in northeast  Indiana experienced a fire in 2021 that also sent a large plume of black smoke into the air, according to a local television station report.

Kansas on Monday became the 23rd state to pass such legislation categorizing advanced recycling as a manufacturing process, subject to far less regulation than waste disposal or incineration, according to the American Chemistry Council. Indiana lawmakers passed their own version of such a law, Senate Bill 472, in March, and on Wednesday the Indiana chapter of the Sierra Club urged Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb to veto it.

The Richmond facility is not an advanced recycling plant. But Oler, the city councilman, said he believes its owner has been waiting on something like chemical or advanced recycling to buy its mountain of plastic waste. He said the stockpile included those plastics numbered 3-7, the hardest types of plastics to recycle through more conventional means.

The Richmond fire, and others at plastic recycling facilities, show that any increase in plastic recycling will need to be accompanied by an increase in fire prevention efforts, said Meier, the private fire inspector. Facilities that hold highly flammable materials like plastic will need, for example, more robust fire suppression systems, he said.

But Dell said she believes legislative efforts in mostly Republican states to classify advanced recycling facilities as manufacturing also have the potential to reduce safety requirements regarding fire prevention when officials should be taking steps to increase them.

“The fact that they are trying to (redefine) these as safe assembly plants is illegitimate,” Dell said. “It leaves communities holding the bag.”

Whether you’re cleaning your house, your car or your child, there are a variety of wet wipes manufactured for the job. Wet wipes are small, lightweight and extremely convenient. They have become a staple in most of our lives, particularly so during and since the COVID-19 pandemic.

But according to Water UK, an organisation representing the water industry, flushing wet wipes down the toilet is responsible for 93% of sewer blockages and costs around £100 million each year to sort out. And the majority of these wipes, about 90%, contain plastic.

Water UK also found that 22% of people admit to flushing wipes down the toilet, even though most of them knew they posed a hazard. And it’s estimated that 300,000 sewer blockages occur every year because of “fatbergs”, with wet wipes one of the main causes.

But it seems wet wipes could soon be banned in England – well, at least the ones that contain plastic – as the government has said it will launch a public consultation on wet wipes in response to mounting concerns about water pollution and blockages. This follows pledges made by major retailers, including Boots and Tesco, to discontinue the sale of such products.

Market projections show that 1.63 million tons of material will be produced in 2023 for wet wipes globally – an industry worth approximately $2.84 billion (£2.04 billion). Though these figures are likely to be on the conservative side as manufacturers increased the production of disinfecting wipes in 2020 during the pandemic – and have remained at the same level since.

Despite the popularity and wide use of wet wipes, not a lot is known about their environmental footprint. This is because manufacturers are not obliged to state what the wipes are made from on the packaging, only the intentionally added ingredients. This creates a challenge for both scientists and consumers alike.

What we know

Wet wipes are made from non-woven fibres that are fused together either mechanically or with the aid of chemicals or heat. The individual fibres can be made from either natural (regenerated cellulose or wood pulp) or petroleum-based (plastic) materials, including polyester and polypropylene.

Most wet wipes are a mixture of natural and synthetic fibres – and the majority contain plastic. As well as the fibres, wet wipes also contain chemicals, including cleaning or disinfecting agents which are impregnated into the material.

Some wipes are designed to be “flushable” and contain chemical binding agents that are designed to release the fibres of the wipe when they are exposed to water. This means that if wipes are not disposed of correctly, they can create both a plastic and a chemical hazard to the environment.

It’s well known that plastic breaks down extremely slowly and persists for centuries in landfill. And if plastic-containing wipes are released into the environment – either through littering or via the sewerage system – they can pose a number of hazards.

The plastic problem

When wet wipes reach the environment – including soil, rivers and the ocean – they generate microplastic pollution in the form of microfibers. Microfibers are one of the most prevalent types of plastic pollution in the aquatic environment and affect ecosystems as well as potentially human health through their introduction into the food chain.

The problem has been exacerbated by these “flushable” wipes. One study identified seven different types of plastics as potential components of flushable wipes – meaning that they still risk being a source of microplastic pollution. Recent work has confirmed that wet wipes (along with sanitary products) are an underestimated source of white microfibers found in the marine environment.

Data on the environmental impact of the associated chemicals is lacking, but this is something my research group is currently working on. What is known though is that plastics have the ability to absorb other contaminants such as metals and pesticides as well as pathogens. And this provides a way for pollution to be transported large distances through the environment.

Driven by environmental concerns as well as impending legislation, many plastic-free wipe products are now available or being developed. But even products made from natural fibres can still pose a problem to sewerage systems and so safe disposal – in a bin – is key.

The scientific evidence surrounding the environmental effects of bio-based plastics (plastics made from non-petroleum sources such as corn or potato starch) is also lacking, so caution is needed when thinking about simply switching from petroleum-based to bio-based plastics.

With this in mind, reusable washable products are a great alternative to disposables and have a much smaller environmental footprint. They are particularly handy around the home when washing is convenient.

That said, there will remain a market for disposables, but manufacturers should have to clearly label what the wipes are made from so that consumers can make a more informed choice.

This article is part of Outside Run’s complete 2023 Boston Marathon race coverage.

The Boston Marathon is making major strides when it comes to sustainability. As one of the world’s premier marathons, it’s working hard to implement systems and educate participants about event sustainability. And while running might not immediately seem like it has an enormous carbon footprint, the impact adds up.

Just getting to the start line produces emissions. More than three-quarters of race participants travel from outside of New England, producing .24 pounds of CO2 per mile of air travel. The marathon’s official flight partner, JetBlue, offers an option for travelers to offset its carbon emissions. Then, the buses that transport athletes 26 miles from Boston Common to the startline in Hopkinton contribute another 11.2 tons of greenhouse gas emissions (though mass transit, like buses, has less impact than personal vehicles). A major challenge presented in shrinking the marathon’s footprint is the sheer size of the event, with more than 30,000 runners and half a million spectators along a course.

“The biggest issue is definitely the scale of the marathon, and the fact that it happens so quickly over just one day. We have a limited window to get things set up and make sure everything’s going according to plan,” says Will Pollard, operations manager at the Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.), which owns and operates the race. “The fact that our footprint spans over 26 miles creates a lot of logistical elements that require a lot of planning to figure out.”

The B.A.A. is also working on educational initiatives for participants, including athlete newsletters and a booth at the expo that will spotlight the B.A.A.’s successes and challenges in making the marathon more environmentally friendly.

“There is always room for improvement! We evaluate each operational area post-event to see what worked well and what could use tweaking,” says Pollard. “I’m excited to see what we learn after this year about where we want to take the program next.”

Waste Diversion

Physical waste presents a major challenge for event organizers. In 2017, the marathon produced 62,000 disposable water bottles, 1.4 million water cups, and 171,380 paper brochures. While race foods, like bananas and orange slices, are compostable, athletes often toss food and trash on the ground, which results in more manpower needed to sweep the course, potentially tainted waste streams, and biodegradable waste ending up in landfills.

In recent years, 80 percent of waste from the Boston course has been diverted into sustainable streams such as recycling or compost. The B.A.A. has achieved this by placing volunteer-run waste stations in high-traffic areas of the course so that athletes and spectators can sustainably dispose of things, rather than throwing everything in the trash.

“Someone will bring an item that they need to throw away, then the volunteer will sort it into the correct stream: recycling, compost, or landfill,” says Pollard. “This gets everything organized before being hauled away by our trash and recycling partner.”

Sorting things effectively is critical for making sure materials can be composted or recycled, since “tainted” streams (like recycling bins that contain trash products) can’t be recycled or composted.

In 2022, the B.A.A. introduced compostable cups along the course.

RELATED: 8 Running Brands That Actually Give a Damn About The Planet

“We have 24 hydration stations set up to service all 30,000 athletes; that’s a lot of material that has previously been collected and sent to the landfill,” says Pollard. Now, all Gatorade and Poland Spring cups are made of compostable materials. The cups are collected in compostable bags and transported to a large, industrial compost facility. Last year, over 6.5 tons of cups were composted (roughly the equivalent of an adult African Elephant).

Runners typically bring extra layers to Hopkinton on race morning so they can stay warm before the start. Volunteers will collect discarded hats, gloves, jackets, and shirts from the Athletes’ Village area all the way to the Ashland town line. Last year, 21 tons of clothing were collected at the start line and donated to Big Brothers Big Sisters.

Sustainable Jacket

Event organizers aren’t just working to redirect used clothing back into circulation; they’re also ensuring that new garments are more sustainable and use more recycled materials. This year’s Boston Marathon Celebration Jacket contains 70 percent recycled content. This is a substantial move, as adidas provides volunteer jackets to more than 10,000 volunteers and official participant shirts to 18,000 men and 14,950 women.

“We’re creating products with recycled materials, making products to be remade, and developing products made with nature,” says Jennifer Thomas, Vice President of Global Sports Marketing at adidas. “Overall, the Boston Marathon articles reflect our overall ambition to use sustainable materials in 9 out of 10 products with every article in this collection using either recycled polyester or cotton that is sourced through our partnership with Better Cotton.”

This year’s Boston finisher’s jacket contains yarn that’s 50 percent Parley Ocean Plastic, which is plastic from islands, beaches, coastal communities, and shorelines that is upcycled into polyester fibers. According to Chris Lotsbom, Director of Communications at the B.A.A., the jacket colors reference the intersection of athletics and the environment, “by pairing natural tones inspired by sand and stones as a twist on the traditional blue and yellow colors of the Boston Marathon.”

Adidas is also partnering with the B.A.A. to collect and recycle water bottles from race weekend and turn them into park benches, in addition to providing a race bag for all participants that is sustainable and has a tag that reads: “This bag is made of 100 percent recycled polyethylene, sparing unnecessary natural resources + energy consumption. 91 percent of plastic products end up in a landfill despite being sturdy enough to give a second life,” to help educate participants about textile production and recycling. Adidas will also have a booth at the expo that will prominently feature the brand’s sustainability efforts and highlight a timeline of what adidas has done in sustainability, and what additional actions they hope to take to meet ambitious sustainability goals.

The B.A.A. is learning as it goes, but optimistic that it can keep finessing systems and incorporating learnings from previous years to limit the event’s environmental impact.

According to the Council for Responsible Sport, environmentally responsible races can recycle everything from cardboard to aluminum and glass. The Council certifies and lists events that meet certain criteria established by the Council, but the Boston Marathon has yet to achieve this standard, though they have been working with Athletes for a Fit Planet to establish best practices.

“We produce year-over-year sustainability reports which summarize our program post-race. These reports include weight data from the haulers and calculate our diversion rates. It’s important that we’re seeing year-over-year improvements,” says Pollard. “We also will use these reports to target new areas to target the following year.”

Read Outside‘s complete coverage of the 2023 Boston Marathon.

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.

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King 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.”