Category Archives: Plastic Pollution Articles & News

One of the most heralded advanced plastic recycling companies in the United States, PureCycle Technologies, has signaled that it could be in some serious financial trouble.

Late last week, PureCycle told regulators at the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that it would miss its deadline for filing a 2022 annual report. In two SEC filings, the eight-year-old company revealed a potential default on $250 million in revenue bonds issued by a local development agency to finance construction of the company’s first flagship recycling plant, in Ohio.

PureCycle’s loan agreement with investors promised a Dec. 1 completion date for the plant, which the company says is almost finished, along the Ohio River in Ironton, 130 miles southeast of Cincinnati. The company reported that it was negotiating with bondholders on whether the delay means that a default will be declared on the bonds, and if so, whether the parties can reach an agreement on a revised timetable and other matters.

Since it rolled out its technology, developed by the Cincinnati-based consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, in 2017, PureCycle has cast itself as a pathbreaker in recycling polypropylene, a highly versatile and durable plastic found in everything from drink cups and yogurt tubs to car dashboards, coffee pods and clothing fibers. In addition to the Ironton plant, the company is constructing another recycling facility in Georgia and has announced one for South Korea. 

PureCycle’s efforts are part of a push by industries that make and use plastics to develop new ways to address a global scourge of plastic waste that threatens public health and the environment, especially the world’s oceans. 

But like other kinds of advanced recycling efforts that have struggled to get out of the gate, like the Brightmark plant in Indiana, or faced serious questions about their commercial viability, like the Encina plant planned for Pennsylvania, PureCycle has its own set of problems. 

It fought allegations of fraudulent financial claims until it was cleared by an SEC investigation; encountered serious opposition to a feedstock preparation plant in Florida; lost a key source of feedstock and customers for its basic end product, worrying investors; and has been limited by the Food and Drug Administration in what kinds of plastic waste it can recycle into products that meet food safety standards. Then there are the construction delays at the Ohio plant, which PureCycle has blamed in part on the global coronavirus pandemic.

As of Monday, the Orlando, Florida-based company’s stock had fallen 40 percent since Jan. 23, from $9.36 per share to $5.56.

“They have a serious whack-a-mole problem here,” said Tom Sanzillo, director of finance for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, and a former New York state deputy comptroller. “Every time they fix something, something else goes wrong.” 

“They are up to their neck in debt,” which is common for companies that are trying to expand, he said. “They are juggling a lot of balls and you don’t know how it’s going to land, but you see all these dynamics. They have a cumulative set of risks that are threatening the viability of the company.”

Christian Bruey, a spokesman for PureCycle, said the company would not comment.

A Triple Threat to the Planet 

The world is making twice as much plastic waste as it did two decades ago, with most of the discarded materials buried in landfills, burned by incinerators or dumped into the environment, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Production is expected to triple by 2060. 

Globally, only 9 percent of plastic waste is successfully recycled, according to the OECD. The United Nations describes plastic as posing a triple planetary threat of climate change, nature loss and pollution, with the emissions associated with its production and disposal warming the atmosphere and trillions of plastic fragments polluting the air, rivers and oceans and harming species. Microscopic plastic also poses multiple human health risks, entering the body as people consume food, drink water and inhale tiny particles.

The PureCycle technology relies on using chemical solvents to strip away the coloring and chemical additives or plasticizers that give polypropylene special characteristics such as rigidity or pliability. The company says that the end product, polypropylene resin pellets, can then be used to manufacture new polypropylene products.

When the company first announced its technology in 2017, news accounts described the company and its plans as groundbreaking. And in calls with Wall Street analysts as recently as last year, company executives expressed optimism about PureCycle’s future.

The company routinely invokes the global abundance of polypropylene, labeled as a No. 5 plastic, and the threat that the plastic poses to the environment. 

“We have to remember, every year approximately 850 billion pounds of plastic and 170 billion pounds of polypropylene are globally produced from fossil fuels,’’ CEO Dustin Olson said in November. “Every year approximately 16 billion pounds of polypropylene is produced in the U.S., and every year less than 5 percent of polypropylene is recycled.”

“The world wants circularity,” Olson added then, using a term for products based on reuse rather than the extraction of natural resources like fossil fuels. “The world wants a new and real plastic solution, and PureCycle is positioned to change the paradigm, and deliver a technical solution that the world so desperately needs.”

However, the company does not lack for critics, among them 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 plastic pollution and waste.

Dell, who has been following PureCycle since it was founded in 2015, said she believes the recent SEC filings may signal the beginning of the end for the company. While there is no shortage of polypropylene waste for potential recycling, she said, this type of plastic is too difficult to recycle into what the Food and Drug Administration would consider safe for use with food products. 

“The feedstock is the problem,” she said this week. “The company cannot predict what feedstock they will get” from household recycling bins, where people pitch all sorts of plastics with different chemical makeups. Some discarded plastic bottles may be contaminated by the residue from household hazardous wastes like oil or pesticides.

“It’s like baking a cake,” Dell said. “You don’t come into a bakery with different ingredients every day.”

The variable feedstock complicates a process that relies on toxic solvents to strip away plastic additives in the polypropylene, she said. While the company describes the output as “like-virgin” polypropylene, the FDA has not entirely agreed.

So far, the only post-consumer plastic waste that the FDA will allow the company to recycle into food-grade plastics is drink cups from sports stadiums, a category that Dell describes as a trivial sliver of the polypropylene waste stream. With consumer product companies making promises to use recycled content in much of their packaging materials, focusing on drink cups from stadiums won’t get them very far, she said.

Dell said the actual recycling rate for polypropylene is less than 1 percent, and that the byproduct is typically used to make things like orange plastic traffic cones, though not by PureCycle.

The company announced in 2021 that it had become the official plastics recycling partner of the Cleveland Browns football team, and last year it added the Cincinnati Bengals as a partner. PureCycle has also teamed with the Orlando Magic basketball team to recycle cups.

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Canada’s single-use plastic regulations face their first legal test today as the plastics lobby and the federal government head to court.A federal court judge will hear arguments from lawyers on all sides from Tuesday to Thursday in Toronto.The federal judge, who is not expected to deliver a ruling for months, must consider whether Ottawa was justified when it listed plastic products as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.”This is one of the largest environmental court cases that we have seen in Canada,” said Anthony Merante, plastics campaigner at Oceana Canada, an intervener in the case.”This is about tackling Canada’s second most pertinent environmental crisis, which is the global plastics pollution crisis.”The Liberal government relied on a scientific assessment of plastic pollution published in 2020. It found that plastic pollutes rivers, lakes and other water bodies, harming wildlife and leaving microplastic fragments in the water we drink. That report was soon followed by several federal policy and regulatory moves, culminating most recently in the federal government officially announcing dates for a ban on the manufacture, sale and import of certain plastic products.The ban affects checkout bags, straws, stir sticks and cutlery. Some of these prohibitions have already taken effect and some won’t happen until 2025.The federal government announced which single-use plastics will be covered by a national ban in 2022.

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Dive Brief:

A1 Organics, Colorado’s largest composter, is changing its accepted materials list to be more restrictive. The goal is to reduce the growing amount — currently 10% — of material it receives that is too contaminated to effectively process while maintaining final compost product quality standards. 
Only food scraps and yard and plant trimmings will be accepted starting April 1. Traditionally accepted fiber materials like paper towels and coffee filters no longer will be accepted, and neither will packaging or service ware — even if it is labeled “compostable.” The only food and yard scrap collection bags that will be allowed are three gallon versions certified by the Compost Manufacturing Alliance.
Nonprofit recycler Eco-Cycle is among the organics haulers and municipalities that are working with A1 Organics to educate customers about which items to put in curbside compost bins to prevent contaminated loads from being sent to landfill.

Dive Insight:
As curbside organics programs have expanded across the U.S., so too has contamination. Bits of glass, plastic and metal are commonly cited contaminants. A1 Organics says that these fragments in the final compost product affect resale quality, and contaminated compost can’t be sold to certified organic farmers. And debate grows over whether or not compostable packaging does, in fact, break down or if it is a contaminant.
“Contamination is a serious problem,” said Rhodes Yepsen, executive director at the Biodegradable Products Institute, via email. “It’s about keeping the wrong items out of compost bins like glass and conventional plastics, all of which BPI supports through its labeling requirements, consumer testing, and a national public policy program.”
Last summer, A1 Organics began inspecting all incoming truckloads and rejecting those with unacceptable levels of contamination. It said in last week’s material change announcement that contaminants can’t effectively be removed from a mixed load, so the presence of contamination requires the entire load to be rejected.
Colorado nonprofit recycler Eco-Cycle cautioned in a newsletter last week that haulers who see unacceptable items in customers’ curbside carts may choose to not collect them. “We share your concern with this strict new standard. We also fully support it as a means for A1 Organics to create a high-quality compost product made from clean compost materials,” it stated.
More organics program operators are questioning the viability of continuing to collect commonly accepted fiber and “compostable” products. The University of Wisconsin-Madison had a composting program since 2009 that was canceled in 2021. The organics processing equipment for years struggled with non-organic items, as well as paper items that slowed down the system. And in 2019, Oregon composter Rexius stopped accepting compostable packaging due to its inability to effectively handle the resulting contamination.
Although one objective of compostable packaging is to reduce contamination from other types of packaging in compost, A1 Organics says not all of these items break down fully or as quickly as needed — even those labeled as “certified” compostable. The company’s material change announcement states that traditional certification standards “measure compostability based on laboratory conditions, not actual field conditions. Meaning some ‘compostable’ items don’t fully compost with our technology.”
BPI provides third-party certification for compostable products, and Yepsen says the product certification is sound. 
“BPI certified products have been used successfully in composting programs across North America for decades, breaking down completely, boosting food scrap diversion rates, and even reducing contamination,” he said. “The US Composting Council has resources for composters to navigate the decision to accept compostable products, looking at operating conditions, equipment, market needs, economics, etc., but the science of compostability and validity of BPI’s certification are not in question.”
Organics companies and municipalities are investing in new processing equipment to produce a cleaner compost product. Phoenix Public Works installed a “depackager” at its composting facility last fall to separate food and beverages from their packaging, which eliminates manual sorting. And Teton County Integrated Solid Waste and Recycling in Wyoming recently received $300,000 in grants to pilot an air knife density separator, which separates small, light, unpickable items like stickers.
The cities of Boulder and Denver are helping to spread the word to residents about the changes to the region’s composting programs. Last fall, Denver voters approved an ordinance that expands the city’s composting program and requires that apartment complexes and a variety of food waste-producing businesses begin offering composting options. Last year, an extended producer responsibility law for packaging passed in Colorado; it included clauses related to composting, including clarifying funding to support contamination reduction in composting and to support the processing of compostable packaging.
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Whole Foods lags in reducing plastic pollution, report says | The Hill Skip to content SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images Customers who shop at Whole Foods are getting their groceries with a side order of plastic, a new report has found. After early progress in removing single-use plastic from its stores, Whole Foods’ efforts to …

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A previously unknown disease in seabirds caused by the ingestion of plastic has been found on Lord Howe Island by scientists from the United Kingdom and Australia.Named plasticosis, the newly classified disease is caused by plastic that repeatedly injures soft tissue and leads to the formation of extensive scar tissue in a bird’s stomach.Impacted scar tissue does not operate like healthy tissue and can impact organ structure and function.The discovery was made by a cross-disciplinary team that included scientists from the UK’s Natural History Museum and Australian institutions, which collaborated as part of a global team under the banner of Adrift Lab and classified the disease.Adrift Lab researcher Hayley Charlton-Howard said it raised concern about plastic ingestion in other species, including humans.Plastic ingested in oceanic foodFlesh-footed shearwater birds on Lord Howe Island off New South Wales regularly consume plastics, with scientists surmising plastic ingestion starts at hatching.

LUZIRA, Uganda (AP) — Flowering plants rise as if by magic from Lake Victoria onto a wooden boat, giving it a leafy ambiance that enchants many visitors.The initial attraction becomes more compelling when tourists to Uganda

Doing right by the planet can make you happier, healthier, and—yes—wealthier. Outside’s Head of Sustainability, Kristin Hostetter, explores small lifestyle tweaks that can make a big impact. Write to her at [email protected].
I’m standing in front of my recycling bin holding an empty cardboard carton of organic milk. I want to recycle it. Part of the reason I bought this milk, which was about a buck more than the stuff in the plastic jug, is that for several years now I’ve been waging a war against plastic in both my personal and professional life.
Cardboard is one of the most recyclable materials in the world. But a little voice inside my head is nagging, “What about that plastic coating on the inside? Does it matter? It’s still mostly cardboard…right?”
I hope for the best, drop it in the bin, and just like that, I’ve “wishcycled.”
Turns out, my cardboard milk container is not recyclable here in northern Vermont, despite the carton’s How2Recycle label advice. But if I saved it and brought it to my mom’s house in Massachusetts, I could throw it in her bin. (Want to know if you can curbside-recycle cardboard milk and juice containers? Plug your address in here.)
Wishcycling is when you put something in the recycle bin because you want to recycle it. You hope it will get turned into some shiny new object. But you don’t really know if it will and so you decide to let someone else down the line figure it out for you.
Your intentions are good, but you’re actually creating a huge pain in the ass for recycling facilities.
Wishcycling Versus Reality
“Wishcycling adds financial, labor, and environmental burdens throughout every recycling system around the world,” says Michele Morris, director of marketing and communications of the Chittendon Solid Waste District in Vermont, which owns the recycling facility near my home in Stowe, Vermont. “A worker will have to manually pull that thing off the conveyor belt and send it to the landfill, when you could have made that choice and avoided all those impacts throughout the process.” Morris says she sees some wild items come through the facility: shoes, bicycle tires, garden hoses, styrofoam coolers, plastic toys, and even the odd bowling ball or two.
The antidote to wishcycling is pretty simple: Don’t make assumptions and take the time to learn which items are recyclable in your area. I googled “town dump Stowe Vermont”  and found this page which has a tab spelling out what I can recycle where I live.
There’s no magic Google phrase for all locales, though. If you live in a city, say Chicago, try “recycling Chicago.” Within a few clicks you’ll find what you need. If you have specific questions not answered there, find the contact page and pick up the phone. “What’s accepted in your area depends on how far you are from processors and how much recycling your community generates, among other factors,” says Morris. “All these can vary not just regionally, but even within one state.” Some examples of things that can vary region by region: different types of plastics, and yes, those milk cartons.
“People love to say that recycling is broken,” says Stefanie Valenti, editorial director of Waste360. “It’s not, but it is disjointed. The infrastructure hasn’t evolved along with all the different types of materials, mainly plastics, that have come out. The waste management industry is investing lots of money in improving its logistics, but it’s a slow process.”
The whole concept of recycling is based on economics. Recycling was a $2.9 billion business in 2020 and like all markets, it’s based on supply and demand. There’s big demand for certain types of materials, like cardboard Amazon boxes and plastic Miracle Whip jars. But for some materials—like milk cartons—there are fewer processors who can break down the multi-layered material and therefore less of a recycling market for it.
“When in doubt, give a shout or throw it out,” says Morris. “Learn the rules where you live and have faith that those rules are designed to capture the most important and impactful materials while keeping out the undesirable stuff. If you’re not sure, trash it.”
I think back to the thousands of recycling blunders I’ve made over the years: the unused plastic cutlery from Yum Yum Thai, the Scotch tape dispensers, the chipped pint glasses. (Yes, all of those things are no-no’s according to “the container rule,” below.)
But according to Morris, we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. If we all focused on what she calls “The Big Five” most common recycling mistakes, it would be a huge win for the recycling world and the planet.
The Big Five Curbside Recycling Mistakes
Plastic Bags
Filmy plastic (aka “soft film”) of any kind, including zipper-locks, bubble wrap, plastic padded Amazon envelopes, garbage bags, wrap from toilet paper, and bread bags, don’t work in any single-stream recycling system.
Left: When plastic bags make their way into the single-stream recycling system, they tangle up in the machinery and wreak havoc. Right: When properly recycled, plastic bags get baled and sold to recyclers. (Photo: Boulder Country Recycling Center)
Why it’s a problem: Soft film jams machinery. Workers have to hit the kill switch on the whole operation and manually pull it out of the system. It can also tangle up with other valuable recyclables and then the whole mess gets landfilled rather than sold and repurposed. And if you bag perfectly good recyclables, like plastic water bottles and paper, the whole bag will get landfilled because workers don’t have the bandwidth to unbag and sort them.
The solution: Many grocery stores across the country accept soft film and recycle it properly. Find a local market by entering your zip code here.
Un-Rinsed Containers
Why it’s a problem: Two reasons: Old peanut butter and congealed sauce from your General Tso chicken degrades the value of the material you’re recycling (which defeats the whole purpose). And it can also pose health and safety risks to human workers who have to handle the nastiness and deal with the rats and wasps that get attracted to the facility.
Left: This peanut butter jar is not fit for the bin. Right: After 15 minutes with my puppy, it’s ready to recycle. (Photo: Kristin Hostetter)
The solution: Give your stuff a quick rinse (no need for soap or elbow grease) to remove the majority of the gunk. Or better yet, save water and give your pet another reason to love you. Dogs and cats do a very good job of licking food containers clean.
Rigid Plastic
Single-stream recycling is designed to take rigid, single-use plastic containers from food, drinks, and nonhazardous cleaning materials like shampoo and laundry soap. But don’t assume all plastic is single-stream recyclable. On most plastic, you can find a number inside a triangle of chasing arrows or letters next to it (like PET or HDPE). The numbers and letters, called Resin Identification Codes (or RICs) indicate the type of plastic, but they were never designed for consumer education. “They were created for end-market recyclers and processors to ensure consistency within each bale of materials,” says Morris.
Morris suggests ignoring the numbers and instead getting familiar with your local recycling rules. She says a good general approach is using the container rule, which simply means single-use rigid plastic containers only, like water, soda, and salad dressing bottles, salad containers, and shampoo bottles. The system isn’t designed to take durable plastic items like storage bins, flip-flops, pens, toys, sunglasses, or hampers because items need to be sorted and baled with like products. The recycler can’t collect enough pens, for instance, to create a marketable 35,000-pound load for them to sell. “On the other hand, we know that the overwhelming majority of containers we get will be the types of plastics we want—the types we can sell to processors to be turned into new raw materials.”
Why it’s a problem: While almost anything is technically recyclable, in real world terms there are a bunch of factors at play. First, Morris says, you need to have enough homogenous material (supply) to make it worthwhile from a labor, cost, and space perspective for the facility to collect. Next, you need a recycler willing and able to sort and bale that material. Then you need a marketer to collect the bales and sell it to processors. And finally, you need a processor willing to buy the material (demand) at a cost that sufficiently pays everyone along the supply chain for their labor and transportation and still nets a profit for them. “That’s why we target the common items. We know there is supply and we know there is demand,” she says.
The solution: Ask yourself, “Is this a single-use container?” If yes, bin it, regardless of the numbers or letters inside the arrows. If not, trash it. And try to avoid buying anything plastic if you can.
Scrap Metal 
The container rule applies here, too. Only empty metal food, drink, and nonhazardous cleaning materials containers belong in your bin, like drink, soup, and olive oil cans.
Why it’s a problem: Other metal objects like silverware, bottle caps, metal jar lids, blades from safety razors, and wire hangers can be extremely dangerous for workers and damage recycling machinery.
The solution: Save those items and find a local scrap metal recycler (just Google it!). Metal has value—you might even make a few bucks.
Batteries
Batteries—especially lithium ions—are huge no-nos for curbside recycling and have caused a remarkable number of fires at recycling facilities, landfills, transfer stations, and even during transport.
Dumpster fires, like this one in 2022, are disturbingly common at recycling centers, many of which stem from improper recycling of batteries. (Photo: Boulder Country Recycling Center)
Why it’s a problem: Batteries are extremely sensitive to heat and friction. And, trust me, there’s a whole lot of friction going on at recycling centers. Think: complex mazes of converter belts, metal teeth, grinding gears, vibrating steel mesh, and high-powered magnets and vacuums.)
The solution: Save them in a box and ask your town or local recycling center for the nearest drop-off.
Kristin Hostetter is the Head of Sustainability at Outside Interactive, Inc. and the resident sustainability columnist on Outside Online.