A Houston Firm Says It’s Opening a Billion-Dollar Chemical Recycling Plant in a Small Pennsylvania Town. How Does It Work?
James Bruggers | September 6, 2022 | Inside Climate News
Randall Yoxheimer, chairman of the locally elected board of supervisors here, has seen economic development proposals come and go, but the latest one—a $1.1 billion chemical recycling plant for plastic waste—has left him, and even some scientists, perplexed.
Announced in April, the plant would use first-of-its-kind technology and employ hundreds of workers to turn waste plastic into new plastic. With the promise of taking a bite out of a serious global plastics problem, the new facility sounds like a terrific idea, Yoxheimer said as he sat under the bright fluorescent lights of the township’s office.
The Houston startup company, Encina, that wants to develop the plant seems to have “excellent motives,” he said. But Encina officials provided township leaders with so little information that it’s hard to discern the promises from reality, Yoxheimer said.
“I am used to the way companies present themselves, and this company has been somewhat vague on a lot of things,” he said. “They are not terribly adroit in how they are trying to move forward. After they did that billion-dollar press release, we heard very little from them.”
He said he intends to stay neutral in the matter, which has already stirred considerable local discussion. “But I am concerned about the functionality of this whole thing,” Yoxheimer said. “The fact that it’s prototypical concerns me.”
With the plastics industry facing global pressure to do something to curb its waste that has touched all corners of the planet—microplastics have also been detected in human blood, feces and even human placentas—chemical recycling proposals like Encina’s have sprung up across the United States.
The concept of breaking down plastics into their core chemical elements and then using those chemicals to make new plastics in a sort of “closed loop” or “circular” economy, is advanced by many industry representatives as a desirable goal because it would, in theory, reduce the need to drill for more fossil fuels, the primary source of plastic products.
That’s how Encina officials see their efforts, said Sheida R. Sahandy, the chief sustainability officer and general counsel for the company.
“When we say that it’s circular, the idea is that you get it back to virgin quality, you can just keep reusing it and reusing it or reformulating it into another product and reformulating it into another product,” she said.
Encina, she said, is working diligently to develop its first plant here in Point Township, a small community of suburban homes and farms along the wide-bodied Susquehanna River, about 60 miles north of the state capital of Harrisburg.
But close examinations by environmental advocates and media organizations over the last few years have found few commercial successes with the chemical recycling of plastics, and concerns about environmental risks. They’ve found plants that do little more than make new fossil fuels, and produce a lot of waste, falling short of the promise of a circular economy.
“This whole chemical recycling is a charade,” said 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 plastics pollution and waste. “It’s a hoax. And it’s been perpetrated for 30 years. Every time the public has some interest in, ‘Oh, there’s too much plastic waste,’ they trot it back out again.”
