Kickstart: The cleanup continues in Ohio

In the two months since a Norfolk Southern Corp. freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, federal agencies have collected more than 9,000 tons of contaminated soil, shipped more than 8 million gallons of contaminated wastewater, conducted 623 indoor air screenings and sued one rail company.

In a March 28 update, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it has overseen soil testing, removal and the backfilling of soil at the derailment site. Excavated areas are "repeatedly tested and soil is continually removed until testing shows levels that are protective of groundwater."

The Feb. 3 derailment of more than 30 freight cars — including cars hauling PVC feedstock vinyl chloride monomer — prompted the release of VCM gas to avoid an explosion. State and federal officials have continued monitoring air, water and soil quality since then.

On March 30, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a news release stating it had filed a lawsuit against Norfolk Southern on behalf of the EPA for damages related to alleged Clean Water Act violation.

The suit seeks to hold the rail carrier "accountable for unlawfully polluting the nation's waterways and to ensure it pays the full cost of the environmental cleanup," Reuters reports.

PN editorial research coordinator Hollee Keller wrote in March that she was going to begin asking the 9,000 or so companies within our rankings database to fill out the occasional extra survey. The idea, as she wrote, was that we could get information to help us determine issues that are important to our readers.

She's out now with her first responses from those surveys, focusing on molders' use of post-consumer recycled materials.

"There is a laundry list of issues with using post-consumer material content in new production," she notes.

You can see the results in the graphic above. While 19 percent said they had no problems, nearly half cited problems such as inconsistent quality, color matching and contamination.

Keep an eye out for future surveys. They should all show up in your email under the subject line "Plastics News is asking."

There's been a lot of interesting news coming from both Washington and the plastics industry since the White House announced its goal to convert 90 percent of plastics' feedstock to bio-based sources rather than fossil fuels.

That's understandable, and as Don Loepp writes in the Viewpoint in this week's print issue of Plastics News, it would also require an unprecedented leap in bioplastics production within 20 years.

In his most recent coverage, Steve Toloken notes that some insiders see a link between the jump in bio-based material and the growth in electric vehicles, another goal of President Joe Biden's administration.

"The shift to electric cars could be a positive for bioplastics, since it should cause feedstocks like corn that now go into biofuels to shift to biochemicals," according to Gerard Ostheimer, co-manager of the BioFuture Campaign, Steve writes.

Just imagine, Ostheimer says, what could happen if all of the acres of corn converted to ethanol were used for bio-based polypropylene.