A host of cutting-edge plastics processing technologies, known collectively as ‘chemical recycling,’ are releasing large quantities of toxic and hazardous substances into the environment. But the majority — while making fuel and chemicals — are producing no recycled plastic, according to a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

With over 240 million metric tons of new plastics generated every year, a growing global mountain of plastic waste now threatens to destabilize Earth’s operating system,  potentially closing the habitable window of climate and biogeochemical conditions that human civilizations have relied upon for survival over the past 12,000 years.

The United States is one of the world’s top plastic producers, but less than 9% of what it makes is currently recycled, mostly through the established process of mechanical sorting and shredding. Plastic industry representatives claim that so-called cutting edge ‘chemical recycling’ or ‘advanced recycling’ technologies, which use heat or solvents to convert waste plastic into fuels or chemical feedstocks, are the best recycling solution. But environmental groups, including NRDC, have raised concerns over the greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution generated by these processes.

Chemical recycling creating pollution?

The NRDC investigation collated publicly available data in the summer of 2021 from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) databases and state environmental permits for chemical recycling facilities across the United States. They identified eight sites that were either already operating or expected to become operational in the near future.

EPA records revealed that several of these recycling facilities were disposing of large amounts of hazardous waste, containing chemicals such as benzene — a known carcinogen — as well as lead, cadmium and chromium. State-level environmental permits for six facilities allow for the release of hazardous air pollutants, including chemicals that can cause cancer or birth defects.

“The facilities were releasing or permitted to release a variety of hazardous air pollutants,” said NRDC Senior Scientist and report author Veena Singla. “That’s certainly of concern for the communities in direct proximity.” Those communities, the report found, were disproportionally low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. About 380,000 people live within 3 miles of the eight facilities and may be impacted by their toxic emissions.

Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, a not-for-profit project based at Bennington College in Vermont, and a former EPA regional administrator, described NRDC’s investigation as “invaluable,” adding that, “every elected official who’s thinking about supporting [chemical recycling] facilities should read the report first.”

However, Plastics Industry Association Vice President of Government Affairs Matt Seaholm, accused the NRDC report of utilizing “cherry-picked examples, incomplete data, and unsubstantiated claims.” He said that “Attacks on advanced recycling technologies tend to follow the same pattern: ignoring the advancements and investments from many different companies, making unrealistic calls to end plastics production, and ignoring industry positions on waste-to-fuel recovery. NRDC’s report is no different.”

Singla invited the industry to provide substantiation for Seaholm’s claims: ”If they are aware of additional data on more facilities, or for these facilities, we’d be very happy to look and do an updated analysis.” She noted that the investigation included all publicly accessible data available at the time of analysis.

The American Chemical Council and the World Plastics Council did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment.

Plastic-to-fuel conversion: Greenwashing incineration?

Chemical recycling is being marketed as an alternative to mechanical recycling that can meet the growing demand for recycled plastic and reduce the volume of waste being incinerated or ending up in landfills. However, chemical plastic-to-plastic recycling projects have been besieged by problems as they attempt to scale-up from promising laboratory studies into commercially viable enterprises, and five out of eight facilities identified in the NRDC report were instead converting waste plastics into combustible fuel.

“Producing fuel from plastic is not a circular process,” said NRDC’s Singla. Based on the data their investigation obtained, “this is not a solution for a circular, non-toxic materials cycle for plastic.”

Technologies such as pyrolysis and gasification degrade plastics in high-temperature chambers, often in low-oxygen conditions, to produce a liquid or gas that can be further processed into fuel or chemicals. Although the industry claims these processes can be used to generate new plastic, the NRDC report found no evidence that this is happening in practice. And since the low-grade fuels and chemical waste produced are ultimately burned, critics argue these techniques are simply multi-step incineration processes, generating greenhouse gas emissions and hazardous waste without alleviating consumer demand for virgin plastics.

Despite these concerns, pressure is mounting on politicians and policymakers to classify chemical recycling — including plastic-to-fuel processes — as a manufacturing technology and not solid-waste incineration. Sixteen U.S. states have already passed  recycling legislation that redefines chemical recycling facilities as manufacturers, exempting them from stricter reporting requirements imposed on solid waste recyclers, and similar bills have been advanced in other states including New York.

“That’s really concerning,” commented Singla. “There’s already a lack of transparency and reclassifying [of chemical recycling facilities] would narrow that further,” she said.

The EPA is currently evaluating how to regulate pyrolysis and gasification technologies under the Clean Air Act, with industry lobbyists fiercely campaigning to prevent these high-temperature degradation techniques from being classed as incineration.

Could chemical recycling hurt global efforts to curb plastic pollution?

Chemical recycling is coming under the global spotlight just as the world comes together to acknowledge and address the plastic crisis. In early March, 175 countries agreed on a UN framework to fight global plastic pollution from cradle-to-grave, reigniting optimism among campaigners. However, environmentalists warn that flexibility in the framework over how individual nations meet recycling targets could leave the door open for exploitation by industry lobbyists seeking policy incentives and regulatory exemptions for plastic-to-fuel techniques.

Some experts say that chemical recycling, and particularly technologies that generate combustible fuel rather than new plastics, are not the plastic-waste solutions the world is so desperately seeking. “I was really disappointed with what we found [in our report], because the plastic waste crisis is so visible and so imminent and I wanted there to be some additional solutions. Unfortunately this isn’t it,” Singla concluded.

Chemical recycling is “a public relations attempt used by the petrochemical industry to try to hold back actual solutions to the growing plastic pollution problem,” said Enck. She encouraged state lawmakers in the U.S. to introduce legislation prohibiting chemical recycling facilities, extending producer responsibility to discourage unnecessary plastic packaging, and incentivizing plastic bottle return programs.

Citation:

Singla (2022) Recycling Lies: “Chemical Recycling” of Plastic Is Just Greenwashing Incineration (Issue Brief).

Banner image: Plastic waste being dumped in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Plastics production exploded after World War II, and its pollution of water, land and air is now a global crisis. Image by Ted Auch/FracTracker Alliance.

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Among rolling hills around the southern tip of majestic Lake Kivu, huge layers of plastic waste ride the water and block the turbines of the largest hydroelectric plant in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Ruzizi dam is polluted by thousands of bottles, cans and other objects thrown into the lake, which stretches 90 kilometres (56 miles) along the border between DR Congo and Rwanda.

“Since the lake flows towards the Ruzizi River, all the waste thrown into it comes here little by little,” Lievin Chizungu, production manager at the dam’s power station, told AFP.

The mountainous terrain and rainy climate around lakeside Bukavu, capital of South Kivu province, do not help.

“The rainwater carries the waste into the lake and then into the river,” Jovy Mulemangabo, an engineer for the national electricity company (SNEL) in south Kivu, told AFP.

Chizungu says piles of waste can “reach a depth of 14 metres” (almost 46 feet). Divers clean the river bed to keep debris from clogging the turbines. If waste gets trapped, towns in the area are deprived of power.

Other employees clean the surface, using barges.

“I have been doing this job for 13 years,” Byunanine Mubalama told AFP. “Every day there is garbage I have to clean up.”

— ’The impact is huge’ —
But it is not enough. One of the four units in the plant was damaged by debris at the end of January, and it is still down.

“The impact is huge. We have a deficit of 6.3 megawatts out of 30 total MW that we must produce not only for South Kivu, but also for neighbouring North Kivu province and for Burundi,” Chizungu said.

Garbage also caused an alternator to fail at the Ruzizi 2 power plant about 25 km south of Bukavu. With the damage at both plants, they are 20 MW short, Chizungu said.

This has provoked “many power outages in Bukavu and Uvira”.

Nicole Menemene, 29, collects plastic waste on the lake’s shores to make baskets, flowerpots, stools and nightstands.

She runs a private company called Plastycor that transforms trash into “beautiful and useful” objects.

“We do the work by hand,” Menemene said.

The company has 10 employees, but her goal is to “industrialise” their work. With her project and other local efforts, Menemene hopes to see a “90 percent reduction of Lake Kivu’s pollution”.

— ‘We have to teach people’ —
Education is a crucial first step in reducing the lake’s plastic pileup, Chizungu said.

“First, we have to teach people that they cannot dump waste in the lake,” he said, adding that authorities should crack down on people tossing garbage in the waters.

But for some local residents, it is not so simple.

“Our houses are crammed together on small plots. There is no way to manage garbage,” Mathilde Binja said. “I have no choice but to throw it into Kawa river, which dumps into the lake”.

The city does offer garbage collection and disposal services for $3 to $5 (2.70 to 4.50 euros) per month, Malgache Malyanga, director of Bukavu Household Waste Management Program (PGDM), told AFP.

“Many inhabitants prefer to throw their garbage out on the road at night or in the lake,” Malyanga said.

This could be either from ignorance or lack of funds to pay for waste removal services, he added.

To combat the plague of plastic waste filling the world’s lakes, oceans and lands, the United Nations launched negotiations in March in Kenya for a global treaty against plastic pollution.

As a mum of three on a single-income budget, Melissa Beeton is determined to make every household purchase count. 

“I pretty much just got sick of buying toys,” she said.

“There’s not a whole lot of disposable income for us to spend on stuff that’s not going to be used all the time.”

For the past year, Ms Beeton has been a member and volunteer at her local toy library in Townsville in north Queensland, which allows her to rent from a large collection of toys each month for a subscription fee.

“We’ll get board games, puzzles, there are some beautiful wooden toys – really expensive wooden toys – that we probably wouldn’t be able to afford to purchase normally.

“It’s made a huge difference for us … and it’s really supported a whole lifestyle shift.”

There are more than 280 not-for-profit toy libraries across the country, from major city centres to small rural towns.

The Townsville Toy Library reopened its doors on Sunday after a three-month hunt for a new space to house its growing collection.

The library has about 300 members and 2,000 toys on its shelves.

Hundreds of families attended the opening and the queue of eager borrowers stretched out the door. 

President Catherine Cipollino said she expected membership to grow significantly as families looked for solutions to alleviate soaring household costs, including groceries and fuel.

“Everything’s going up except our payslips – it is very tough at the moment,” Ms Cipollino said.

“I have a 14-year-old, and back when he was younger, I would be spending around $15 for a toy to take with him to a party.

Members can borrow up to eight toys a month, with the collection catering for babies to children aged 12.

For Townsville environmental scientist Stephanie Duce, the decision to rent toys for her young children is about sustainability as much as money-saving.

“They get sick of toys so quickly that it’s really exciting each month for them to get a new batch of toys, and also to learn that we don’t need to keep everything – we can borrow things and then give them back,” Ms Duce said.

“Waste is a huge issue at the moment, and most toys now are made of plastics and degrade and break down into microplastics that damage the environment and particularly the ocean.

“So in a small way, I guess this helps to offset that and not drive more and more demand for them.”

In just 45 minutes, Reid Harlocker and his team collected 18 pounds of trash from the northern Pacific Ocean.

“It’s awful,” he said, seated in his Hayden home Friday morning. “The pollution, it’s there.”

Harlocker returned from his ocean voyage with Pangea Exploration on March 8. He and the crew spent a month in the northern Pacific Ocean and on the remote Palmyra Atoll. They observed the horrific Great Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre, which is one of Earth’s systems of circular ocean currents formed by wind and forces created by Earth’s rotation.

“I realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about ocean trash,” Harlocker said. “I now know the situation isn’t nearly as bad in the Atlantic as it is in the north Pacific.”

But the Atlantic Ocean is catching up, he said.

Harlocker is passionate about effecting change surrounding plastics recycling. A semi-retired communications engineer, he’s determined to learn as much as possible and spread the word about what needs to be done.

“Let’s be real honest about this. Plastics pollution starts right here,” he said. “We don’t recycle our plastics here. Our plastics are mostly ending up in that landfill up there. They’re leaching carcinogens into the water table. That’s a fact.”

He said he’s screened along the St. Joe River “and pulled up all kinds of crap that’s up there.”

“There’s plastics that people discard and they’re getting washed down the river. Ultimately they’re ending in the ocean,” he said. “This is a real problem. We have to stop.”

He said a lot of the plastics used now didn’t exist in the 1970s.

“Now it’s here,” he said. “We don’t need this s—. We really don’t. It all goes down to corporate profits and greed. The oil companies do not want to recycle plastic; they want to sell the new plastic. We’re going to have to create incentives to do this.”

Because U.S. recycling was dependent on China for so many years, America’s domestic recycling infrastructure was never developed, Harlocker said.

“There was no economically efficient way to handle recycling when the market disappeared,” he said. “Without dedicated investors, recycling infrastructure won’t be sufficient.”

A landfill is “a waste of waste,” he said. “We need to be reusing that waste.”

He shared a few stats from Columbia University.

“According to the (Environmental Protection Agency), in 2018, there were 292 million tons of municipal solid waste generated by Americans. Only 94 million tons were recycled or composted.”

He said 66% of discarded paper or cardboard was recycled, 27% of glass and only 8% plastics.

“How do we deal with this? We have to develop a domestic market in the U.S. for recycled materials,” he said. “Part of the problem is that the oil companies are fighting against it. They’re paying off our congressmen as much as they can.

“Here’s where we start to make a change — we require municipalities, institutions and the federal government to use recycled materials,” Harlocker said. “When that starts, now there’s a market.”

He said legislation could force petrol chemical companies to commit to recycled materials for recycling plant investments. Recycling should not be an expense to taxpayers or municipalities, he said.

“It should be an expense to the producers,” he said. “That is exactly what they have done in Europe.”

Harlocker’s trip wasn’t all doom and gloom. He’s now a certified open-ocean sailor. He experienced monsoon-like rain and howling winds. He witnessed a rare sighting of a melon-headed whale pod.

He also had the pleasure of meeting inquisitive booby birds.

“One night we had five of them on the bow, all looking for a place to hang out for the night, not to mention there’s a lot of flying fish going over our boat,” he said.

Harlocker will continue to educate himself and others about the issue of plastic pollution. He plans to hold presentations in the community and rally people to join the cause.

“The pollution is heartbreaking,” he said. “There are so many things to do out there. We could all concentrate on doing something that’s good.”

Contact Harlocker: reidharlocker57@gmail.com