This is Part 2 in a 3-part series about the failure of plastics recycling.
Read Part 1, about a groundbreaking report showing plastics recycling doesn’t work, here.
Read Part 3, about some potential solutions to this problem, here.
Sandy Field describes her town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, as “three hours from anything significant.” Field, a freelance science writer and climate activist with the Climate Reality Project, likes this characteristic and wanted to raise her son surrounded by rural beauty—farms, forests, and the Susquehanna River, which was voted Pennsylvania’s River of the Year in 2023. The Appalachian waterway is shallow, less than six feet deep in some places, wide, not navigable by big boats, and prone to flooding.
It’s along this river, in the tiny neighboring community of Point Township—named “Point” because it’s where the west branch and the north branch of the Susquehanna meet—that Encina, a chemicals company, has proposed the construction of a new “advanced recycling” a.k.a. chemical recycling plant, which will burn plastic trash in incinerators to break it down to make chemicals and synthetic fuels. According to Encina, the plant could bring $2 billion to the local economy through the facility’s construction and 300 associated jobs.
The plant, if constructed, would accept up to 450,000 tons of hard-to-recycle waste plastic each year. Workers would sort and wash the plastic and then burn fossil fuels to melt the plastics down into their chemical building blocks—which include over 13,000 types of chemicals—to retrieve just four for reuse—benzene, toluene, xylene, and propylene. Field says those four chemicals will then be put on railcars and transported to new customers right along the river.
“The advertising from Encina and other so-called advanced recycling companies suggests that it’s a healthy and climate-friendly process, something we would all want to get behind,” says Cynthia Palmer, senior petrochemical analyst for Moms Clean Air Force. “Unfortunately, when you study the details, you realize these are a particularly dangerous type of incinerators that burn plastic trash and turn it into hazardous air pollutants, chemical wastes, and heavily contaminated industrial fuels. Sometimes they resell the fuels, but more often, they use them to power the incinerator.”
The Susquehanna will be used to wash plastic and cool the chemical recycling process, before the water is treated and poured back between the river banks. Benzene, a known carcinogen that can cause leukemia, is of particular concern, as is PFAS from the plastic waste, which contaminates the water during the washing phase.
“If the river does flood or the trains do derail, we’ll just be another East Palestine,” said Field. “It’s the same family of chemicals.” In the past 22 years that Field has lived along the river, she says there have been at least five significant floods. Flooding will only increase in frequency and intensity under climate change.
Soon, more communities might be facing similar “advanced recycling” plants popping up in their own backyards. The plastics industry is using “advanced recycling,” instead of traditional mechanical recycling, to justify its plans to triple plastics production by 2050, since, the industry argues, the plastics it’s producing could be recycled. The American Chemistry Council, a trade group for petrochemical and plastics producers, stated in 2022 that the U.S. could support 150 such incinerators around the country, claiming such an investment would generate over 48,000 jobs.
So far, only 11 chemical recycling facilities have been built in the U.S. Not all 11 are operational, and most aren’t running at capacity. One facility in Oregon is slated to shut down next month. Even if all 11 of these facilities were up and running, the incinerators would process less than 1.3% of U.S. plastic waste. Four of the plants—those located in Ohio, Oregon, and North Carolina—are classified as generators of hazardous waste by EPA, and eight are located in federally defined environmental justice communities, or those with lower than average incomes or higher than average concentrations of people of color.
Field and her neighbors first heard about the Encina project during an open house the company held in the spring of 2022. Since then, she co-founded a group, Save Our Susquehanna, to highlight flaws in Encina’s plans. They’re concerned about water pollution—under current federal laws, microplastics and forever chemicals like PFAS aren’t regulated in wastewater. Field says without regulations, these pollutants, among many others, could easily enter their drinking water.
Her group is also concerned about air pollution. High temperature is required to combust the plastic, and Encina has declared the recycling will be a self-powered process. That means a product of the “advanced recycling”—pyrolysis oil—could be used to fuel the plant.
Fuels from pyrolysis oil are lethally toxic. The air pollution produced from burning the jet fuel created from pyrolysis oil is expected to cause cancer in one in every four people exposed across their lifetime, according to a 2023 ProPublica investigation into a Chevron petrochemical facility in Mississippi. The boat fuel ingredients created with pyrolysis oil are expected to cause cancer in every single person exposed over their lifetime.
“In other words, you’re doomed,” says Palmer. “These are astronomical cancer risks.”
Encina is treated like a manufacturer under Pennsylvania law, so the facility will have even more exemptions from regulations that could mitigate pollution, like scrubbers in smokestacks or more stringent emissions monitoring.
“The plastics industry wants to carry out this so-called advanced or chemical recycling, and they want to carry out processes that are cheap without air pollution controls, monitoring, or reporting requirements,” says Palmer. “So they’ve been doing everything they can to reclassify these incinerators as manufacturing or recycling.”
In at least 24 states, the plastics industry has successfully passed laws reclassifying “advanced recycling” as manufacturing instead of incineration to skirt regulations. Now, says Palmer, these same groups, led by the American Chemistry Council, are working on the federal level to try and remove “advanced recycling” incineration from pollution control requirements under the Clean Air Act.
Meanwhile, residents like Field who just want to enjoy natural rural beauty all over the country are frustrated with the lack of transparency over just how bad “advanced recycling” really is for not only the environment, but the health of the local community.
“Not only does this recycling process not work,” says Field, “it’s not economically viable and it’s not going to solve the plastics crisis.”
Learn more about Moms’ work on “advanced recycling.”
TELL CONGRESS: PROTECT OUR FAMILIES FROM PLASTIC INCINERATION POLLUTION