https://portside.org/2024-09-07/houstons-plastic-waste

This story is a partnership between Inside Climate News and CBS News.

HOUSTON—When the news crew showed up outside a waste-handling business that’s failed three fire safety inspections and has yet to gain state approval to store plastic, workers quickly closed a gate displaying a “no trespassing” sign.

Behind the gate, deliveries of hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic waste from residents’ homes have piled up over the last year and a half. Satellite and drone images reveal bags, bottles and even a cooler spread about, some of the plastic heaped high in bales next to strewn cardboard and tall stacks of wooden pallets.

The expanding open-air pile at Wright Waste Management, on the edge of an office park 20 miles northwest of downtown Houston, awaits what the city of Houston and corporate partners including ExxonMobil call a new frontier in recycling—and critics describe as a sham.

The Houston Recycling Collaboration was formed as a response to low recycling rates in the city, a global problem. Hardly any of the plastic products meant to be used once and tossed can be recycled mechanically—the shredding, melting and remolding used for collection programs across the country. 

The Houston effort adds a new option alongside the city’s curbside pickup: Partners say people can bring any plastic waste to drop-off locations—even styrofoam, bubble wrap and bags—and if it can’t be mechanically recycled, it will be superheated and chemically processed into new plastic, fuels or other products.

One of the city’s industry partners, FCC Environmental Services, which operates a large sorting facility for the city’s curbside recycling program, has opted out of the drop-off collection. In a July 2023 letter, the company raised concerns about the safety of storing plastic waste at a facility that lacks required permits. 

As a member of the [Houston Recycling Collaboration], FCC does not want its reputation and image involved in such irregular and risky practices,” Inigo Sanz, chief executive officer of FCC at the time, wrote in the letter to partners without mentioning the Wright site by name. FCC also complained about the focus on storing waste for future chemical recycling while missing opportunities to recycle some of the plastic mechanically.

Public records requests by Inside Climate News and CBS News also found that the fire marshal’s office for Harris County, Texas, inspected the Wright site three times from July 2023 through April and failed it on each occasion. The inspection reports noted that the company was operating without some of its required fire operational permits, including those for handling “hazardous materials” and “miscellaneous combustible storage.”

A fire inspector visiting the site on April 30 observed “significantly more product” around the facility than during the previous inspection. There were “no fire lanes or means of controlling a fire,” the inspector wrote, and the public right of way was blocked by a new 15-foot tall, 100-foot wide and 500-foot long wall of wooden pallets stacked outside the fence line.

Plastic recycling facilities are notorious for catching fire and sending toxic smoke billowing into the air. All it takes is a trigger: an unextinguished cigarette, sparking from electronic or mechanical equipment, arson, oily rags spontaneously combusting. That’s why conditions at the Wright site worry local environmental advocates, county fire inspectors and at least one independent fire investigator.

“Five acres of paper and plastic piled up with little or no fire suppression: What could go wrong?” said Richard Meier, a private fire investigator in Florida who worked 24 years as a mechanical engineer in manufacturing, including in plastics companies. He reviewed the Harris County fire inspection reports and Google Earth images of the site from earlier this year at the request of Inside Climate News and CBS News.

“You have piles and piles and piles of all this fuel,” Meier said. “Plastic is a refined version of petroleum, and paper is chewed-up wood.”

The fire risk only grows with intense summer heat, for which Houston is known.

“When you are talking about igniting a fuel, it is about adding heat to that fuel. If the fuel is already warm, it takes much less added heat to start an ignition,” Meier said.

The company’s owner declined to comment.

When shown a drone video of the Wright site taken in July, informed of the three failing fire marshal’s inspections and told that Wright’s application to store plastic had not yet been approved by state environmental regulators, the city’s top solid waste official responded with surprise.

“That contradicts some of the information we have in our records,” said Mark Wilfalk. “The last report we had was they are A-OK.”

Wilfalk later said he had been relying on his department’s review of the Wright site and not that of the county fire marshal.

The Clash Over ‘Advanced’ Recycling

Plastic is a modern dilemma much like the oil and gas used to make it, underpinning the global economy even as it chokes the world in waste seeping into our food, water and bodies. About a third of the 430 million metric tons produced each year are tossed after a single use, according to the United Nations.

UN officials have declared plastic a big part of what they call “a triple planetary crisis” of climate change, nature loss and pollution. More than 170 nations are trying to draft a global plastics treaty by the end of this year. In the U.S., lawsuits over plastic pollution are multiplying. So are the calls to reduce production.

“Recycling may be a very, very small portion of the solution, but it is not going to solve this monumental plastic pollution problem that we have,” said Veena Singla, an adjunct assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. She called recycling an “end-of-pipe solution that does not require industry to cut down its production or its profits and its plans for expansion.”

And that, Singla said, means more harm across the plastics lifecycle, from oil and gas drilling to plastic production to plastic waste in rivers and oceans to micro- and nano-plastics in blood vessels.

Made of some 16,000 chemicals, many of them toxic, plastics were never designed for recycling. Globally, less than 10 percent of plastic gets recycled, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group that represents developed nations. In the United States, the recycling rate is even lower at less than 6 percent, according to a 2022 study by two environmental groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics.

Chemical recycling will be different, the industry says. The Houston collaboration, which includes petrochemical giants Exxon and LyondellBasell, part owners of fellow member Cyclyx, offered an opportunity to demonstrate that. 

“The challenge here is the plastic waste. It’s not the plastic,” said Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for advanced recycling, during a late July tour of the company’s chemical recycling facility. Located at its Baytown plant outside Houston, it has been getting its feedstock mostly from scrap and byproduct plastic from industrial sources.

Aerial views of the ExxonMobil Baytown petrochemical complex near Houston, where the company has added a chemical recycling facility for waste plastic. Credit: Carlos Chavez/CBS News

During the collaboration’s roll-out, Houston’s then-mayor, Sylvester Turner, said it would move the city to a “circular economy,” a term without a widely accepted definition but used to suggest products are repeatedly made from waste without tapping new natural resources. Turner said the city and its partners were “sending a message” that “Houston is dedicated to impacting change and setting the example for communities around the country.”

But Inside Climate News in November reported that electronic tracking of plastic waste collected for the collaboration in 2023 showed it wasn’t getting recycled after all, and instead was being stored at Wright Waste Management; that construction of the planned Cyclyx Circularity Center, a sorting facility touted as necessary for the program, was behind schedule; and that Exxon was declining to reveal basic information about its Baytown chemical recycling facility, including details that could support or undermine its chemical recycling environmental claims.

In December, the Cyclyx Circularity Center received $135 million in funding, but its warehouse still sits empty of sorting equipment less than a year before it’s scheduled to begin operations.

Exxon describes its chemical recycling as a type of pyrolysis, where waste plastic is heated to 600 degrees in a reactor without oxygen, converted to products such as ethane or naphtha in oil and gas forms, then sent to other Exxon units for further refining. The process, the company maintains, allows it to “unlock the inherent value of used plastics that might otherwise wind up in a landfill or incineration.”

But critics argue that pyrolysis is energy-intensive manufacturing with a large carbon footprint, not that different from incineration and that it mostly just makes new fossil fuels. 

Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer, former industry consultant and founder of The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that works on reducing plastic pollution, views Exxon’s chemical recycling claims with skepticism. She reviewed public documentation, including Exxon patents, and estimated that no more than 25 percent of the incoming plastic waste to the Exxon chemical recycling facility could be converted into feedstocks for new plastic.

“Any process that effectively destroys 75 percent-plus of the plastic waste … cannot legitimately be claimed as plastic recycling,” Dell said. “ExxonMobil should stop using the words ‘advanced recycling’ to describe their process.”

That’s a position similar to that of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In its 2023 draft national strategy to prevent plastic pollution, the EPA concluded that converting “solid waste to fuels, fuel ingredients, or energy” should not be considered a recycling practice.

California Attorney General Investigates Exxon and Others

While the chemical industry has persuaded more than two dozen state legislatures to pass laws encouraging chemical recycling, it’s also faced withering critiques from opponents and questions about its technical and economic viability.

Last fall, a report by two environmental groups, Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network, attempted to make the case that chemical recycling technology has failed by showing how companies have largely been unable to make it work commercially.

And the 2023 annual sustainability report for the global oil giant Shell released earlier this year revealed that it was backing away from its corporate goal to significantly ramp up chemical recycling of plastic.

“We have concluded that the scale of our ambition to use 1 million tonnes of plastic waste a year in our global chemical plants by 2025 is unfeasible due to a lack of available plastic waste feedstock, slow technology development and regulatory uncertainty,” the company reported.

Scenes from a tour inside the ExxonMobil Baytown petrochemical complex near Houston, where the company has added a chemical recycling facility for plastic waste. Credit: Dwaine Scott/CBS News

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is suing Exxon and other oil companies over alleged deception regarding climate change, is also investigating the oil and gas industry’s role in alleged deceptive public messaging about plastic pollution and recycling. In that investigation, Bonta’s office issued subpoenas to Exxon and the industry lobby groups American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association.

In a written statement this week, Bonta said his investigation was nearing completion.

“The root of our investigation lies in this truth: plastics are wreaking havoc on our environment due to the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign of deception, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis,” Bonta said. “That deception is ongoing today with the industry’s promotion of ‘advanced recycling.’”

Exxon’s Mastroleo declined to comment on Bonta’s investigation but said: “We’ve already processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste through our facility. We have ambitions to go even further to 1 billion pounds. And so to say that’s a myth when we’re actually doing it, I’m not sure I’m aligned with that.”

Exxon officials declined last year, and then again recently, to say what percentage of new plastic the company makes from every pound of plastic waste that it processes at its Baytown chemical recycling facility.

Mastroleo said he didn’t know. A significant amount “goes to fuels,” he said, along with “lubricants, plastic, as well as other products.” He said he considers all of that to be recycling.

“Recycling is taking waste to create new products,” Mastroleo said.

He declined to comment on Shell’s decision to back off advanced recycling of plastic, other than to say of Exxon: “I believe we have a world-class technology organization, a world-class operational organization, and I can lean into that. That’s what gives me confidence. If I were a betting man, I know where I would bet.”

Terry Collins, a professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, has estimated that Exxon would need to build more than 300 facilities with the capacity of its Baytown operation to handle the waste generated by all the plastic the company makes. Globally, Collins said, more than 10,000 such facilities would be needed to process all of the plastic produced on the planet.

Mastroleo acknowledged that Exxon’s effort “is just the start of the journey.”

He added: “We need to work with our communities, with governments and industry to make sure plastic circularity is something that’s real, something that is believable.”

Tracking Plastic Waste

In a garage in Houston, Brandy Deason stuffed some of the plastic waste she has accumulated in recent weeks into a large plastic bag. An empty water container from a hurricane preparedness kit. Styrofoam packing material. Plastic film wrap from a mail-order bed frame. Target shopping bags. Shampoo bottles. Plastic clamshell-style food packaging that once contained tomatoes.

Deason, a climate justice coordinator fighting against chemical recycling of plastic for the Houston Air Alliance, an environmental group, said she tries to minimize her use of plastic but said that’s hard to do.

“Gotta have emergency water in a hurricane,” she explained. “Gotta have some shampoo.”

Most of these materials would not normally get recycled in Houston or pretty much anywhere else in the United States. But the Houston Recycling Collaboration has encouraged residents to do exactly what Deason is doing—to “bag it and bring it,” including “all plastics, all numbers” and “all symbols,” even plastic that does not have any recycling labels,  such as dry cleaner bags and bubble wrap.

The difference between a regular bag of plastic and Deason’s: She slipped an Apple AirTag electronic tracker in before taking it to a Houston recycling drop-off center.

“We want to know what was happening with this stuff,” Deason said. “Is it really going to go to get recycled?”

Her efforts follow those of The Last Beach Cleanup, which last year used electronic tracking to show plastic waste collected by the city for the collaboration was piling up on the ground at the Wright business.

In April, during a public “lunch and learn” webinar, a copy of which Inside Climate News and CBS News obtained through a Texas open records law request, a Cyclyx official described the environmentalists’ tracking of plastic waste to the Wright site in positive terms.

“The geotags were a great thing to show it’s actually going to where we want it to go,” Zach Divin, the director of operations for Cyclyx, said of the collected waste. “That is the site [where] it’s stored.”

But fires at recycling facilities are relatively common. The Last Beach Cleanup has tracked more than 130 globally since 2019 at plastic recycling and sorting facilities, not counting hundreds more that Dell said have occurred in Turkey and India. 

“Should that catch fire,” Deason said, standing near the Wright site, “the emissions coming off of that could be really poisonous to the people that live around here, not to mention a dangerous, large fire like that could spread into a neighborhood.” 

Open Fire Code Violations

Public business records identify Stratton Wright as the president of Wright Waste Management, which is described on its website as “Texas’s premier waste-to-energy logistics coordinator.” It’s been on file with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality as a cardboard recycler since 2016, but on Sept. 26, 2023, months after trackers were showing plastic waste already going to the business, Wright submitted a “notice of intent” to operate a municipal solid waste recycling facility. That application to the TCEQ revealed a plan to store as much as 2.2 million pounds of plastic waste and a request for permission to exceed time limits for plastic waste storage. 

“The longer storage time is necessary as the preliminary processing facility has not yet been constructed,” according to the application, which referenced Cyclyx’s planned sorting facility. “Recycling of this material could not occur if an extension of the storage time were not granted.”

“The application has not been approved and is under review,” said TCEQ spokesman Ricky Richter. “TCEQ is waiting on financial assurance documentation from the applicant.”

Asked about his business last October for Inside Climate News’ November story, Stratton Wright said “everything is on the up-and-up.” But this summer, he declined four direct requests for an interview, instead referring reporters to Cyclyx.

In an interview, Ryan Tebbetts, a Cyclyx vice president, declined to discuss the Wright site’s failing fire marshal inspections or its regulatory status with the TCEQ, referring questions back to Wright Waste Management.

 “Wright Waste Management doesn’t represent us, and they are currently a temporary solution before we can get [our] facility operational,” Tebbetts said.

Cyclyx has been talking about opening its high-tech plastic sorting plant since at least 2022 and had previously targeted its opening for 2024. Last fall, Joe Vaillancourt, the chief executive officer of Cyclyx, told Inside Climate News that the company was awaiting a final investment decision and working through engineering details. In December, the company announced that Exxon and LyondellBasell were together investing $135 million in the sorting facility to pay for operating activities and construction costs, with startup planned for mid-2025.

Cyclyx provided a tour of its giant warehouse, the size of nine football fields, but it was still largely empty except for some bales of plastic waste. One contained a tracking device that showed it had been recently moved from the Wright site, Dell said. (It’s since been moved back, according to the device.)

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us over the next 12 months to get there,” acknowledged Tebbetts, who said the company has been trying to stockpile as much plastic as possible in advance of its startup.

Eventually, this plant should have the capacity to process into small plastic pellets as much as 250 million pounds of plastic waste per year, tailored to the needs of customers conducting different kinds of chemical or mechanical recycling, he said. The company has proven its technology to make customized pellets for various recyclers “on the small scale” in a laboratory setting, he said, and “we are very confident in our ability to deliver.”

Wilfalk, the city’s top solid waste official, said after seeing drone video of waste piles at the Wright site that he was “comfortable” with the way Wright was managing the plastic waste. He thought it was better there than “at the landfill,” where he said “it’d be flying all over the place until it’s being covered.”

Wilfalk also acknowledged receiving the July 2023 letter from FCC, a company with a 15-year contract to receive, sort, recover and sell all materials that Houston residents contribute to the city’s curbside recycling program. For that effort, residents toss limited types of plastic, paper and metals into bins collected by waste haulers at the curb.

FCC questioned why plastic waste collected for the collaboration was to be stockpiled at a location without necessary permits when it could be processed at the FCC-managed site, which it described as a “fully permitted, state of the art, insured facility (owned by the City of Houston) which includes not only the latest equipment for sorting, but also the most advanced systems for safety and fire prevention.”

Without naming the Wright site, Sanz, the chief executive officer of FCC Environmental Services at the time, wrote that “FCC questions whether holding recyclable materials in an unpermitted temporary storage facility would be legal, safe and/or environmentally sound and is not willing to compromise its values on a project with so many uncertainties.”

Wilfalk attributed FCC’s complaints to the possibility that the company is anxious about the collaboration’s new all-plastics approach.

“I think these are areas that … haven’t been explored to the fullest extent, and I think it makes some people in the industry nervous,” he said. “It makes them concerned. But we have to be willing to take some risk, you know?”

FCC declined requests to be interviewed for this story.

The Harris County Fire Marshal’s office said that as of early August, there “remained open fire code violations” at the Wright site, those described in the office’s April 30 inspection.

“It is absolutely not our goal to shut down a business in Harris County,” said fire marshal spokeswoman Brandi Dumas, as long as fire officials feel “the owner or manager is working with us and taking steps to come into compliance.”

Meanwhile, Deason’s latest tracker is now pinging from the site’s plastic waste pile.

Chris Spinder, Ben Tracy and Tracy Wholf of CBS News contributed to this report.

James Bruggers covers the U.S. Southeast, part of Inside Climate News’ National Environment Reporting Network. He previously covered energy and the environment for Louisville’s Courier Journal, where he worked as a correspondent for USA Today and was a member of the USA Today Network environment team. Before moving to Kentucky in 1999, Bruggers worked as a journalist in Montana, Alaska, Washington and California. Bruggers’ work has won numerous recognitions, including best beat reporting, Society of Environmental Journalists, and the National Press Foundation’s Thomas Stokes Award for energy reporting. He served on the board of directors of the SEJ for 13 years, including two years as president. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Christine Bruggers.