More than two years after revealing plans to create a massive plastics recycling plant in Pennsylvania — and then facing opposition — Encina Development Group is walking away from the project.
The Woodlands, Texas-based company revealed the decision April 18 to cancel the proposed facility that would have used a chemical recycling method.
Instead, Encina said it will "move forward with the development process for other locations identified in the United States and abroad."
In announcing the move, the company made no mention of local opposition. But the proposed project certainly had some vocal detractors. Instead, the company pointed to other opportunities and customer demand as a key reasons to ditch the Pennsylvania project.
"Encina has had several key projects under review or development in the USA, [Saudi Arabia], and Southeast Asia for more than 18 months. Our extensive research shows that these projects offer Encina opportunities to meet the needs of our customers to provide their end products with ISCC+ circular chemicals to help meet their sustainability goals in the coming years at the scale they are expecting," CEO Dave Roesser said in a statement. ISCC+ is a certification program.
"The demand for these products required that our company reevaluate our engineering design to meet these larger end-product goals for our customers. Ultimately, our facilities must meet these increased demands, therefore, after careful consideration and thorough analysis, Encina's management team has decided not to proceed with the construction of our circular manufacturing facility in Point Township, Pa., but will move forward in our other customer markets," he said.
But as originally proposed, the project would have been significant in size and cost $1.1 billion.
The plan was to use pyrolysis, which breaks down plastics in a process using heat and pressure to produce chemicals that then can be reconfigured into new products. Pyrolysis is just one of handful of processes that fall into the chemical recycling category, which differs from traditional mechanical recycling that does not alter the chemistry of plastics as they are reprocessed.
Save Our Susquehanna is a local citizens group that has been strongly opposed to Encina's plans.
"This project threatened the region's clean air and water and would have harmed our way of life in the area, especially for the people who live next to the proposed facility," said Sandy Field, a member of the group, in a statement. "Community members stood up and spoke out about these unacceptable risks, and Save our Susquehanna is thrilled that Encina will not be building their toxic chemical plant in our area. But we do not wish this plant on others, and we will continue to warn other communities about chemical recycling and the danger it poses to communities."
Encina originally planned to have the facility, located about 55 miles north of Harrisburg, Pa., with a capacity to handle 450,000 tons of post-consumer plastics annually, open later this year.