Jeremy DeBenedictis, President of Alterra Energy, stands in the storage area of shredded plastics his company receives from recycling facilities in their facility in Akron, Ohio, on September 8, 2022. [AP Photo]
Equity issues in siting plants
In Rhode Island, state lawmakers considered a bill this year to exempt such facilities from solid waste licensing requirements. It was vigorously opposed by environmental activists and residents near the port of Providence who feared it would lead to a new plant in their neighborhood. State environmental officials sided with them.
Monica Huertas, executive director of The People's Port Authority, helped lead the opposition. The neighborhood is already overburdened by industry, she said, so much so that she sometimes has asthma attacks after walking around.
Dwayne Keys said it's unfair that he and his neighbors always have to be on guard for proposals like these, unlike residents in some of the state's wealthy, white neighborhoods. The port area has enough environmental hazards that residents don't benefit from economically, he added. Keys calls it environmental racism.
"The assessment is, we're the path of least resistance," he said. "Not that there's no resistance, but the least. We're a coalition of individuals volunteering our time. We don't have wealth or access to resources or the legal means, as opposed to our white counterparts in higher income, higher net worth communities."
The chemistry council's Baca said the facilities operate at the highest standards, the industry believes everyone deserves clear air and water, and he would invite any detractors to one of the facilities so they can see that firsthand.
U.S. plastics producers have said they will recycle or recover all plastic packaging used in the United States by 2040, and have already announced more than $7 billion in investments in both mechanical and chemical recycling.
"I think we are on the cusp of a sustainability revolution where circularity will be the centerpiece of that," Baca said. "And innovative technologies like advanced recycling will be what makes this possible."
Kate O'Neill wrote the book on waste, called "Waste." A professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, she has thought a lot about whether chemical recycling should be part of the solution to the plastic crisis. She said she has concluded yes, even though she knows saying so would "piss off the environmentalists."
"With some of these big problems," she said, "we can't rule anything out."