POINT TOWNSHIP: On the banks of the Susquehanna river in rural Pennsylvania, a quiet, unassuming plot of land is the unlikely backdrop for a simmering debate over chemical recycling, a controversial process for dealing with plastic waste.
The technology promises to transform hard-to-recycle containers, food packaging, lids, mailers and endless other items into usable petrochemicals and is championed in particular by the plastic-producing fossil fuel industry.
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But environmentalists call it a diversion endorsed by those with a vested interest in promoting plastic’s continual use — counter to the key priority of reduction.
Residents near the Pennsylvania plot meanwhile have their own concerns: The brush-covered terrain is the proposed site for the chemical recycling plant by a Texas-based company called Encina and has left those living nearby afraid of toxic contamination.
“They are acting as a refinery,” Point Township resident Annmarie Weber told AFP from her kitchen about a half mile from the site, adding that she fears “air pollution, water pollution, toxic chemicals.”
Unlike standard mechanical recycling, chemical recycling uses heat and chemical solvents to break plastic down into its most basic petrochemical building blocks.
According to Encina’s chief sustainability officer Sheida Sahandy, chemical recycling offers a valuable solution to turn “what was trash into a productive material” — a critical task as oceans and landfills fill up with plastic.
The raw materials created by chemical recycling can be used to make a variety of products like more plastic — but also fuel. While Encina says it won’t produce fuel, many chemical recycling facilities do.
Creation of fuel, says the nonprofit Beyond Plastics, only perpetuates “a cycle of petrochemical extraction, plastic production and burning.” According to Veena Singla, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, chemical recycling plants are often “permitted to release health-harming air pollution. And many of them are large-quantity hazardous waste generators as well.”
