EPA opens review of chemical recycling rules

An Environmental Protection Agency proposal asking how it should regulate key chemical recycling technologies is drawing a warning from a plastics industry group: Treat it like a normal manufacturing process or risk undermining attempts to improve recycling.

On Sept. 8, the EPA opened formal rule-making on the topic, noting that it's getting more questions about the technologies, "especially with respect to plastics recycling," and that it's finding "considerable confusion" among regulated companies.

It could be a thorny debate, though, because chemical recycling is both a key part of the plastics industry's plans for boosting recycling rates and strongly opposed by environmental groups.

Groups like the American Chemistry Council want EPA to treat permits for the facilities as manufacturing operations, rather than under what they say are more onerous Clean Air Act rules for solid waste incinerators. ACC has been pushing for that point of view in state legislatures around the country and since 2017 has helped pass laws in 14 states regulating them as manufacturing facilities.

But environmental groups have been pushing back, arguing for tighter regulations.

Most prominently, they launched an initiative in December, the Presidential Plastics Action Plan, that presented President Joe Biden's administration with a laundry list of executive actions it could take on its own around plastics policy. That list included denying federal permits for new gasification and pyrolysis plants as well as "facilities that repolymerize plastic polymers into chemical feedstocks for use in new products or as fuel."

But ACC, in a Sept. 27 statement, said the technologies need to be regulated as manufacturing because they produce a product, recycled resin, in processes that do not involve incineration.

ACC said advanced recycling, as it calls the technologies, is "essential" to meeting its goal of all plastic packaging having 30 percent recycled content by 2030, part of a new legislative plan it unveiled in July.

"Regulating advanced recycling as solid waste incineration ... would invoke onerous and inappropriate permitting requirements, severely hampering states' ability to modernize and expand plastics recycling to meet the 2030 goal," the group said.

Joshua Baca, ACC's vice president of plastics, said in a Sept. 29 interview that pyrolysis and gasification will be important for building new recycling systems that can handle materials that weren't widely used when programs were first built several decades ago.

"I think it's easy to say that recycling has failed, [but] at the same time have we provided the proper incentives for it to modernize?" he said. "I think the answer is unequivocally no."

Clear regulations are crucial for private investment, he said.

"We are asking for a set of rules and a level playing field that allows the private sector to continue to accelerate this on a commercial scale," Baca said. "The most important thing that can come from any federal regulation is that there's a level playing field when it comes to advanced recycling."

Baca said regulating the processes as incineration would imply it's the end of life of the product.

"Advanced recycling breaks down the used material to basic molecular building blocks and allows you to use that as a feedstock to produce new products over and over and over again," he said. "That misconception and false narrative that somehow advanced recycling is incineration could not be further from the truth."

Baca said ACC is continuing its state-level efforts as well, with legislation under consideration in Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island and South Carolina, where he said it may be part of an upcoming special session.

"It's a huge priority for us, for our members and for market certainty," Baca said. "[In] an absence of Washington acting, states have traditionally been a place where they're the laboratories of experimentation."

Some environmental groups involved in the December plastics plan said they welcomed the EPA proposal and argued for more restrictions, pointing to air and water emissions and other waste generated by the chemical recycling processes.

"We welcome the EPA's proposed rulemaking on chemical recycling plants," said Denise Patel, U.S. program director for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA). "Whether the waste is burned immediately or burned later, pyrolysis and gasification is clearly just another name for incineration."

She said the Biden administration should step in and stop permitting the facilities because an "absence of federal leadership on this issue has left states to regulate an industry that has exploited this opportunity."

The Center for Biological Diversity, another signatory of the December proposal to the Biden administration, said it was still studying the EPA proposal but said it wants to see solutions that reduce plastics production.

"We are concerned that this is definitely an area that industry is moving into to try and protect the status quo and keep producing more and more plastic and move into these false solutions instead of reducing our production capacity and dealing with the problem upstream," said Julie Teel Simmonds, senior attorney with the center.

"It does seem like a little bit of a Wild West right now in terms of how these facilities are or are not regulated," she said. As well, the EPA needs to look at environmental justice implications of where facilities would be located.

A June report from the International Pollutants Elimination Network said that chemical recycling processes produce their own hazardous waste streams as well as air and water emissions.

It also predicted the factories would have a hard time competing economically with virgin plastic and would likely have their end products burned as fuels.

"There is enough information around techniques like pyrolysis to suggest there will be significant problems, and the concept of chemical/solvent 'purification' suggests that contaminated residue will be a significant hazardous output of these processes," the report said.

The groups argue that it will not be possible to make meaningful cuts in plastic waste in the environment globally without reducing plastic production and limiting its use to more essential items.

"The only solution to the plastic waste piling up in our communities and oceans is to limit plastic production to essential uses and eliminate the use of toxic chemicals in plastics," IPEN said.