Date: May 4, 2026
To: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20460
Subject: EPA Proposed Rule concerning Standards for Air Curtain Incinerators, the use of Commercial and Industrial Soild Waste Incinerators in Disaster Recovery, and the Removal of Pyrolysis Incinerators from the OSWI Rules
Docket Number: EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0068
To EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin:
Thank you for this opportunity to offer comments on your proposed consolidation and weakening of the rules on air curtain incinerators, the exemption of incinerators from air pollution controls during disaster recovery, and proposal to remove pyrolysis incinerators from the Other Solid Waste Incinerator (OSWI) rules. Moms Clean Air Force vigorously opposes all these proposals and urges EPA to abandon them without delay.
Removal of Title V Requirements for Air Curtain Incinerators
Air curtain incinerators are open combustion chambers or fire boxes, open pits, or trenches that are used to combust wood products, disaster debris, and other wastes. Air is streamed across the top, thus the “air curtain.”
The “storm generated wood” and other “wood waste, yard waste, and clean lumber” that are burned in these open-air combustors are often anything but clean, despite EPA’s dozens of references to clean wood, vegetative waste, and clean lumber. This is not the idyllic campfire from our childhoods. Much of the wood waste is treated with copper- and petroleum-based compounds or involves composite wood products such as particle board and plywood made from formaldehyde-based resins, thermoplastic polymers, and other toxic materials.
Burning such materials releases extremely hazardous emissions straight into workers’ lungs and surrounding communities—everything from fine particulate matter to incomplete combustion products such as dioxins, formaldehyde, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals.
Despite these harmful pollutants, EPA is proposing to remove the Title V permitting requirements for air curtain incinerators that “only burn wood wastes, yard wastes, and clean lumber.” The agency considers the Title V requirements “unnecessarily burdensome” for incinerator operators—a term that it repeats 35 times over the course of 17 pages in its quest to unravel air pollution controls. EPA’s interest in maximizing incinerator industry profits appears to trump any concern about the health burdens faced by children and families forced to breathe toxic air pollution.
It would be regrettable if these dangerous polluters managed to sidestep Title V requirements. Title V permits, introduced in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, serve as legally enforceable, umbrella-style operating permits for significant polluters. The permits centralize all applicable air quality requirements into a single document and help to ensure compliance, enforcement, and accountability. For example, the permits could describe the permissible conditions for startup, preventing the most dangerous emissions by requiring that standard fuels be burned in the combustion unit until it gets hot enough to reach the desired destruction efficiency—prior to introducing wastes into the combustion unit. Title V permits mandate regular monitoring, recordkeeping, and reporting of emissions data, and they include public notice and comment periods before permits are issued.
Absurdly, the proposal suggests that removing Title V permitting requirements will lead to better health outcomes: “requiring title V permitting for these ACI [Air Curtain Incinerators] could adversely affect public health, welfare, or the environment by diverting resources toward permitting activities unlikely to generate additional health or environmental benefits.” This is contrary to the track record: Title V permits help to ensure compliance with emission standards, require monitoring, and compel mandatory reporting for major pollution sources, which helps reduce harmful emissions. EPA has described its Title V program as the crown jewel of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, “in many ways the most important procedural reform contained in the new law.”
The EPA proposal continues, “We do not anticipate any changes to emissions because no new emission standards are being set.” It is misleading to suggest that procedural requirements have no relation to pollution outcomes. This is a slap in the face to frontline communities and to Congressional drafters (and conscientious EPA public servants) who have worked to advance the transparency, accountability, and enforceability of pollution controls, and to build permitting consistency among environmental statutes (e.g., the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act). In EPA’s own words from its website, “these [Title V] requirements will greatly enhance the ability of Federal and state agencies to evaluate its air quality situation.” It is undeniable that there are ways to improve the Title V permitting program, but exiting its requirements is not one of them.
EPA acknowledges that making it this easy to operate open-burning uncontrolled incinerators could incentivize their use since they will be cheaper and easier to operate.
EPA even admits that emissions could increase, under its proposal, but the agency quickly dismisses this suggestion as irrelevant, claiming that EPA is unable to quantify the emissions changes but thinks they “would be small.” EPA states, “With the removal of title V permitting requirements and the likelihood of associated net cost savings and the associated reduced overall cost of operation, there could be an increase in ACI use. This potential increase in ACI use could generate increased emissions. We are unable to quantify emissions changes of this nature for this proposed rulemaking but anticipate that they would be small, particularly given the retention of existing opacity limits for these units. We anticipate net savings…”
The Federal Register notice’s 33 references to “costs” make clear that EPA is focused almost entirely on saving pennies for the incinerator operators.
This part of the EPA proposal applies to open-air combustors that burn wood waste, yard waste, and “clean lumber.” If these are truly the only wastes under consideration, the rush to burn these materials in air curtain incinerators is even more irrational given the beneficial alternatives. More economic and ecological options include chipping, grinding, and mulching of vegetative waste (woody debris, branches, trees), and composting organic debris, food waste, and leaves. Meanwhile, non-vegetative materials such as scrap metal can be recycled or landfilled.
Use of Commercial and Industrial Solid Waste Incinerators in Disaster Recovery
EPA is proposing to allow Commercial and Industrial Solid Waste Incinerators (CISWI) units to operate during disaster recovery or other emergencies without complying with Clean Air Act Section 129 pollution controls and other requirements. For an initial eight weeks, the incinerators would be allowed to operate without telling EPA or state authorities or even the local communities that they are incinerating disaster debris with no pollution controls in their midst. For the following months the operators would simply need to notify EPA, offering a reason for the extension.
This proposal would result in a one-two punch for people whose lives have just been shattered by floods, fires, hurricanes and other disasters, chemical leaks, fires, explosions, bioterrorism, and other emergency situations. The EPA proposal would allow incinerator operators to burn disaster debris without pollution controls. They would amount to kicking disaster-stricken families when their lives are at rock-bottom, smothering communities with dioxins and other carcinogens. Such exposures subject families to acute respiratory effects and to years and decades of waiting and worrying, not knowing if or when they and their children will show signs of terminal illness. It takes only tiny quantities of pollutants like lead, mercury, PCBs, beryllium, PFAS, and dioxins to cause serious damage to the cardiovascular, immune, reproductive, endocrine, gastrointestinal, and central nervous systems. The resulting cancers and other ill-effects can emerge at any time following the exposures—altering and sometimes ending the lives of young children or teenagers or adults.
Disaster debris includes such materials as PVC and other plastic waste, asbestos, furniture, electronics, and treated wood products, in addition to PFAS from firefighting foams. The Los Angeles fire, for example, left a toxic chemical nightmare in its wake, even in homes that were “spared.” Scientists encountered intact houses full of arsenic, lead, beryllium, and other extraordinarily toxic chemicals, the result of burning headphones and other plastics, pesticides, paint, vehicles, microwave ovens, and construction materials, among other things. These materials become intermingled in emergency situations. It would be highly unlikely and unusual for incinerator operators to take the needed time and expense to segregate these materials, so instead the materials all get burned together.
When incinerated, disaster debris releases dangerous emissions, everything from beryllium to dioxins to heavy metals. One of the most widely used sources of toxic chemical emissions is PVC plastic, found in structural siding, flooring, wire insulation, plumbing lines, molded furniture, wall coverings, and other products. PVC is made from vinyl chloride, chlorine, phthalates, flame retardants, heavy metals, and other chemicals. Burning PVC plastic without pollution controls is extremely harmful to surrounding communities, contaminating the air with toxic pollutants such as phosgene, hydrogen chloride gas, dioxins, benzene, 1-3 butadiene, formaldehyde, mercury, lead, and cadmium. These chemicals can set off a cascade of health effects including both solid-tumor cancers and blood-related cancers.
Removing Pyrolysis Incinerators from the Pollution Control Standards of the Clean Air Act
Hidden in the middle of the 17-page Federal Register Air Curtain Incinerator notice is a single unrelated paragraph: A proposal to exempt pyrolysis incinerators from the safeguards of the Clean Air Act. These “pyrolysis/combustion units” include the very incinerators that the chemical industry has been greenwashing with Orwellian and deceptive terms such as “advanced recycling,” “chemical recycling,” “circular materials management,” and simply, “manufacturing.” Removing these plastics-burning incinerators from Clean Air Act protections would incentivize their use and enable them to operate without crucial federal air pollution standards. The petrochemical industry seeks to burn waste plastics in dozens or even hundreds of communities across America, polluting the air with dioxins, heavy metals, and other hazardous chemicals.
Specifically, EPA is soliciting comment on removing the reference to “pyrolysis/combustion units” from the definition of “municipal waste combustion unit” in its Other Solid Waste Incinerator rules under Section 129 of the Clean Air Act. The action would leave these incinerators uncontrolled and above the law, free to release unlimited amounts of hazardous air pollution. EPA’s proposal does not offer an alternative regulatory basis for these units, and none exists.
EPA is tiptoeing around procedural transparency requirements in stashing this solicitation in a completely separate rule. Burying the pyrolysis proposal, unannounced, in six sentences stuck in the air curtain proposal, deprives the public of fair notice and can be deemed arbitrary and capricious by courts.
EPA claims that it is seeking “resolution of this longstanding issue” of whether to deregulate these incinerators. That is misleading. In truth, these units have been regulated for decades under Section 129 of the Clean Air Act. It was only under the first Trump Administration in 2020, at the behest of the chemical industry, that EPA proposed to remove these incinerators from air pollution control requirements. EPA received “significant advance comments” on that 2020 proposal. The following year, EPA issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to gather more details on these “pyrolysis/combustion units,” including how they are used, the inputs and products of the processes, and emissions from these processes. In that solicitation, the Agency was flooded with public comments urging EPA to keep regulating pyrolysis incinerators under Section 129 of the Clean Air Act. In 2023 the Agency withdrew its 2020 proposal to remove pyrolysis/combustion units from the Clean Air Act pollution control requirements.
Plastics pyrolysis incineration does not work
The plastics industry seeks to use these dual-chamber incinerators to burn plastic waste, transforming it into air pollution, synthetic gas, hazardous wastes, and pyrolysis oils that are used to make heavily contaminated fuels. These facilities have a track record of safety violations, fires, explosions, technical failures, and economic collapse, all while generating large amounts of hazardous waste and toxic air pollution.
Despite these drawbacks, pyrolysis incinerators are central to the chemical industry’s claims that that have found a solution to the plastics crisis, thus enabling the industry to justify its plans to triple plastics production by 2050. In practice, these heavily greenwashed “advanced recycling” facilities end up harming people, contaminating the environment, and sucking resources out of communities—rather than serving as the economic stimulus they are made out to be. Facility operators make grand promises to states and communities: jobs, revenue, economic development, and the diversion of waste from landfills. In practice these promises do not materialize, and instead we observe systemic financial failure and toxic emissions across the industry.
Pyrolysis incinerators drain economic resources from communities and states. For example, the proposed Empire Diversified Energy pyrolysis facility in Follansbee, West Virginia, was approved for $40 million in bonds and bridge loans, but has been projected to support a maximum of 63 total jobs including direct, indirect, and induced employment. Do the math: that’s nearly $635,000 per job. The project has been estimated to increase total county tax revenue by less than 0.2% of Brooke County’s 2024 budget. Missed payments on state-issued bonds in 2023 and 2025 raise further unresolved questions about project viability.
Plastics pyrolysis incinerators release harmful air pollutants
Plastics are made by combining fossil fuels with synthetic chemicals. A 2024 report funded by the Norwegian Research Council found more than 16,000 chemicals in plastic, with at least 4,200 presenting significant hazards to human health and the environment. These include PFAS, phthalates, bisphenols, flame retardants, heavy metals, and other toxic chemicals. Plastics are identified by their polymer type but can contain up to 70 percent chemical additives by weight.
Incinerating plastic waste releases hazardous chemicals into the air, land, and water. While all combustors are heavily polluting, the selection of incineration technology and the choice of waste materials make a difference, as do the time, temperature, and turbulence. Municipal waste incinerators (such as those used for burning household trash), for example, operate at higher temperatures (commonly 900 to 1,100 degrees Celsius) and often incorporate excess oxygen to ensure complete combustion of the solid waste. By contrast, the reduced oxygen and relatively low operating temperatures (roughly 300 to 800 degrees Celsius) in pyrolysis incinerators, and the presence of PVC plastic, can promote incomplete combustion and the formation of dioxin precursors.
Without the safeguards of Section 129 of the Clean Air Act, this can result in the release of potent carcinogens such as dioxins, furans, PAHs, PCBs, benzene, and formaldehyde. Dioxins are known as “the most toxic poison on earth,” and a single gram can kill tens of thousands of people. The most dangerous type of dioxin is 2,3,7,8-TCDD, which is 900 times more toxic than arsenic and 1,000 times more toxic than potassium cyanide. This congener of dioxin can form in plastic pyrolysis incinerators, especially in the presence of chlorine.
In addition, pyrolysis facilities release into surrounding neighborhoods heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic, plasticizers, chlorinated and brominated flame retardants, and PFAS, known as “forever chemicals.” Exposure can increase the risk of cancers, birth defects, Alzheimer’s, respiratory ailments, and other harms. These chemicals are especially injurious to children, whose bodies are undergoing rapid and delicate developmental phases, and whose immune systems are physiologically immature.
Many of these incinerators are in communities of color and in low-income neighborhoods that are already overburdened by other sources of air pollution. Enabling these facilities to sidestep the Clean Air Act to emit harmful pollution without limits in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color is textbook environmental racism.
The chemical industry argues that these pyrolysis systems are complex, so we should not jump to conclusions about expected emissions. We fully agree that there are many intersecting variables. But that very complexity is all the more reason that we need “sunlight” on these operations and adherence to the solid waste combustion standards of the Clean Air Act. Allowing the wild west in pyrolysis facility operations—no pollution standards, no Title V permits, no specs on heating and cooling procedures, no monitoring, no transparency—puts workers and communities in harm’s way.
Pyrolysis incinerators generate vast amounts of hazardous wastes and heavily contaminated pyrolysis oils
The outputs of these facilities include large amounts of hazardous wastes. The Regenyx facility that shut its doors in Tigard, Oregon, for example, was generating one ton of hazardous waste for every three tons of plastic waste processed. Much of the hazardous waste (benzene, toluene, xylene, 1,2-dichloroethane, heavy metals, and other materials) was transported offsite to be burned in cement kilns.
In addition to air pollution and toxic waste, these incinerators produce large amounts of heavily contaminated pyrolysis oils, which can be made into highly toxic fuels. A 2023 investigation showed just how dangerous these fuels really are: A Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, received EPA approval to use the pyrolysis oils derived from incinerating plastic as ingredients to make jet- and boat- fuel. EPA scientists calculated that the air pollution from burning the jet fuel is expected to cause cancer in one in every four people exposed over a lifetime. The boat fuel ingredient is even more toxic: every person exposed over a lifetime would be expected to get cancer. This risk level is one million times higher than what EPA usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times higher than the chances of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. Represented by Earthjustice, a community group near the refinery, Cherokee Concerned Citizens, sued EPA in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On September 20, 2024, EPA stated that it would withdraw and reconsider its approval for Chevron’s plan to produce 18 plastic-based fuels, based on “potential infirmities with the order.”
The Clean Air Act Section 129 limits the allowable emissions from pyrolysis incineration
The Clean Air Act requires strict emission limits—and monitoring, reporting, and permitting requirements—for only two types of sources of hazardous air pollutants: “incinerators” and “major sources.”
Most pyrolysis incineration facilities would not be large enough to be called “major sources” of hazardous air pollutants because the quantities of hazardous air pollutants they release do not reach the Clean Air Act threshold amounts (10 tons per year of any individual hazardous air pollutant or 25 tons of combined HAPs).
The drafters of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 did not want waste-burning facilities to escape regulation. Thus, they included a special section specifically to address the extremely dangerous air pollution from solid waste incinerators. They had good reason to add this second regulatory pathway: burning solid waste releases potent carcinogens. And many of the pollutants that incinerators emit, including dioxins, cadmium, and lead, are toxic in tiny quantities. They also persist in the environment and accumulate in food sources, human bodies, and even mother’s milk. For example, as noted above, dioxins are toxic in tiny fractions of one gram. Even though the amount of these pollutants does not meet the “major source” 10-ton/25-ton threshold requirements for Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) regulation under Clean Air Act section 112, the quantities of incinerator emissions released by incinerators are more than ample to make people gravely ill. The highly toxic pollutants released by solid waste incinerators cause cancer, asthma, and ADHD, disrupt reproduction, and make our endocrine systems go haywire.
The Clean Air Act includes no other way to regulate the hazardous air pollutants from these incinerators. By illegally removing pyrolysis from the solid waste rules, EPA’s proposal would allow these facilities to burn plastic trash without pollution controls, monitoring, or reporting requirements.
The only way to regulate the extremely dangerous emissions from the pyrolysis incinerators that don’t reach the 10-25- ton thresholds is via the Clean Air Act provisions that Congress enacted specifically to address this pollution: Section 129 of the Act. These provisions specify numerical emissions limits for particulate matter, opacity, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, lead, cadmium, mercury, dioxins and dibenzofurans. The Act defines “solid waste incineration unit” as “a distinct operating unit of any facility which combusts any solid waste material from commercial or industrial establishments or the general public.” [Emphasis added.]
Because they “combust solid waste material from commercial or industrial establishments or the general public,” pyrolysis units are subject to the pollution control standards of Clean Air Act Section 129. EPA has regulated pyrolysis incinerators alongside other incinerators for 30 years. In its very first standards promulgated under the Clean Air Act, the agency went out of its way to specify that “Municipal solid waste combustion includes the direct combustion of MSW or the combustion of MSW gases from pyrolysis or gasification.”
Section 129 defines “solid waste incineration unit” as “any facility which combusts any solid waste material.” As courts have made clear, this section of the Clean Air Act applies to facilities that combust any amount of solid waste material at all. See, e.g., Natural Resources Defense Council v. E.P.A., 489 F.3d 1250 (2007).
The chemical industry wants people to believe that if pyrolysis incinerators are not regulated as incinerators under Section 129 of the Clean Air Act then they will be regulated under some other provision of the Act. That claim is ludicrous, based on the false premise that EPA will someday list pyrolysis as a new category of manufacturing plants to be regulated under Section 112 (the air toxics section that lays out standards for Maximum Achievable Control Technologies, known as MACT).
The chemical lobby is well aware that:
- no such category exists;
- the Clean Air Act does not require EPA to ever create one; and
- EPA has never even created and regulated a new category of area sources in the absence of a statutory mandate (most “area sources” include only the absolute weakest of protections).
And even if—years down the line—EPA created such a new category under Clean Air Act Section 112, the “maximum achievable control technology standards” would still not apply, as most of these pyrolysis incinerators emit less than 10 tons per year of a single air toxic or 25 tons per year of any combination of air toxics. The quantities emitted are not large enough to meet the thresholds (the pollution amounts) required by section 112, but they are more than ample to make people very sick.
As noted above, pyrolysis incinerators’ status as incinerators under Clean Air Act Section 129 has never changed. Although EPA proposed to exempt these incinerators from the municipal waste combustion rules under the Trump administration in August 2020, that proposal was unlawful and never went into effect. In June 2023, EPA withdrew it.
The plastics industry has long sought to evade clean air rules
Reclassifying pyrolysis incinerators as anything other than solid waste incineration would exempt plastics-burning facilities from regulation under federal law, thus enabling the industry to carry out incineration on-the-cheap. Because they would not be required to meet Clean Air Act standards, the incinerators would be free to operate without pollution controls, monitoring, or reporting requirements.
As noted above, the Clean Air Act Section 129 defines “solid waste incineration unit” as “any facility which combusts any solid waste material.” The plastics industry has been seeking to convince legislators and EPA that at least one of the required elements does not apply. They are claiming either that the facilities are not incinerating the waste or that the plastic trash is not solid waste—and therefore Clean Air Act Section 129 could not possibly apply.
Incineration requires oxygen. While it is true that many pyrolysis incinerators operate under low-oxygen conditions, “low” is not the same as “no.” Sometimes, there is a continuous feed of plastics (and thus, air from the outside) into the first chamber, but even when the system is not open there is nonetheless oxygen present from the atmosphere and from the plastic itself. Some combustion of the waste plastics takes place in the first chamber, using the oxygen present, and more combustion of these same wastes takes place in the second chamber, where gases from the first chamber are burned.
Ridding these pyrolysis units of the “incinerator” classification would be a huge gift to the industry. Not only would the rule change reduce polluters’ costs, it would also improve their brand image. Local officials offer up financial incentives to bring manufacturing jobs into their communities, but nobody wants an incinerator in their backyard. In addition to the immense regulatory subsidies (operating without pollution controls) and the public relations victory (shedding the incinerator designation), reclassification could enable these plastics-burning facilities to reduce costly insurance premiums and to bypass zoning laws forbidding incinerators next to locate near daycare centers, schools, and playgrounds.
EPA is proposing to skirt the rules rather than to fix what is broken
Plastics-burning facilities have been misrepresenting their processes in an effort to deceive regulators and the public. Our review of industry plans and permit documents from virtually every EPA region suggests that facilities across the nation—including in Appalachia, the Southwest, West coast, the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Gulf Coast—are misleading state regulators and the public by deliberately characterizing their operations in a manner to evade Clean Air Act air pollution controls. Others are taking advantage of illegitimate exemptions in EPA’s air- and solid waste regulations.
Some pyrolysis incinerators insist that they are not incinerators but rather boilers, reactors, internal combustion engines, thermal oxidizers, prime power engines, and other technologies. See, e.g., the permitting documents for Braven Environmental Zebulon in North Carolina, Nexus Circular McDonough in Georgia, Alterra Akron in Ohio, W.R. Grace in Columbia Maryland, Nexus Circular Fuels in Georgia, Brightmark Ashley in Indiana, ExxonMobil in Texas, Prima America Groveton Plastics Recycling Facility, and Empire Green in West Virginia.
Some also claim that the plastic trash they burn is not actually solid waste, but rather something else, so that the Clean Air Act Section 129 solid waste standards ought not apply. See, e.g., the permits for Empire Green in West Virginia, Brightmark Ashley in Indiana, Fulcrum Centerpoint in Indiana (now shuttered), Clean Seas Belle in West Virginia (pending), and Sobe Youngstown in Ohio.
Still others are taking advantage of exemptions that are illegitimate and out-of-line with the Clean Air Act, including the research exemption claimed by W.R. Grace in Maryland and Clean Seas Belle in West Virginia, and the plastics/rubber exemption asserted by Freepoint Eloy (pending) in Arizona, Freepoint Hebron in Ohio, and Clean Seas Belle (pending) in West Virginia. These exemptions contravene Clean Air Act Section 129, which applies to ALL solid waste incineration. The Clean Air Act does not give EPA the authority to carve out exemptions from the solid waste incinerator rules.
EPA needs to get out ahead of the vast wave of “advanced recycling” pyrolysis incinerators that are in the planning, construction, or operational phases. The answer is not to illegally remove these incinerators from the Section 129 implementing rules, as EPA appears ready to do, but rather to reaffirm EPA’s role as protector of human health and the environment, and to enforce the life-saving air pollution standards found in Section 129 of the Clean Air Act.
Moms Clean Air Force urges EPA to abandon its reckless and misguided proposal. In removing procedural safeguards for air curtain incinerators, allowing commercial and industrial incinerators to operate without air pollution controls in disaster recovery, and exempting pyrolysis incinerators from the Clean Air Act, the proposed actions would jeopardize the health and safety of children and families across America.
Respectfully submitted,
Cynthia Palmer, JD, MPH
Senior Analyst, Petrochemicals
Moms Clean Air Force
Dominique Browning
Director and Co-founder, Moms Clean Air Force
Vice President, Environmental Defense Fund