States take on chemical recycling policies

The plastics industry's push for chemical recycling legislation in states scored wins in recent weeks, with three more states passing laws the industry says will speed up investment in the new technologies.

But the effort is also meeting resistance in some capitols, including in Michigan and the Northeast, where lawmakers see it as a risky move that means less regulation for unproven technologies.

Since mid-March, Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky have all passed laws that change how chemical recycling is regulated, adopting an approach from the American Chemistry Council that says they are manufacturing plants rather than traditional solid waste operations.

It's been a major political priority for ACC. In the last five years, 18 states have passed similar laws.

The plastics industry and supportive legislators say the new laws provide regulatory certainty that can boost recycling in their states and bring investment in facilities to process harder-to-recycle plastics.

Prapti Muhuri, manager of recycling and recovery at ACC's plastics division, told Michigan lawmakers in a recent hearing that less than 10 percent of plastics are recycled.

"Right now in the U.S., end markets aren't great for those difficult-to-recycle materials," she said, such as flexible pouches, tubes and foams that traditional mechanical recycling operations, focused on bottles, struggle with.

But opponents see the new laws as weakening regulations, and they say that so far at least, chemical recycling has mostly been used to make fuels and not turn waste plastic back into new plastic.

"We have looked at it and have not been successful at finding anyone who has actually managed to do plastic-to-plastic," said Michigan state Sen. Rosemary Bayer, D-Auburn Hills. "Mostly what they seem to be doing is creating fuel at the end and then burning that as energy.

"Making plastic out of old plastic, that's good … but it doesn't seem to be working in this kind of process in other states," she said. "There are people passing bills but the plants themselves aren't actually successful."

Chemical recycling — or advanced recycling, as industry groups call it — breaks down plastics into its building blocks to be rebuilt as new materials.

Skeptics of the technology point to an April 5 announcement from Brightmark Energy and the industrial authority in Macon, Ga., to jointly end plans for the company's $680 million pyrolysis chemical recycling plant there.

That decision came a few months after Macon-Bibb County Mayor Lester Miller withdrew his support, questioning the safety and validity of the project.

But advocates like ACC's Muhuri pointed to new announcements from Wendy's and McDonald's restaurants to begin use of chemically recycled plastic to make new cups and packaging.

In the April hearing in Michigan, she pointed to Alterra Energy in Akron, Ohio; Nexus Circular LLC in Atlanta; and Eastman Chemical in Kingsport, Tenn., as successfully using waste plastics to make chemical feedstocks that either become new plastics or other chemical products.

She told lawmakers that a decade ago the technologies would have been used to make fuels but today the direction, pushed by large consumer product brands, is to use chemical recycling to make new feedstocks for plastics or other petrochemicals.

"I think there's definitely been evolution from companies that were making fuels maybe 10 years ago," Muhuri said. "But I think with the increasing demand from brand owners, which has been led by consumers, they want to make more sustainable products.

"These kinds of midsized companies that were maybe once making fuel, they've been encouraged and have delivered in altering their processes to make a liquid feedstock and not making any fuels," Muhuri said.

It won't be possible for consumer brands to meet their recycled-content goals without scaling up advanced recycling technologies, which has to happen in combination with traditional mechanical recycling of plastics, she said.

"The [consumer packaging goods] companies have made very ambitious commitments to use 25 percent recycled plastic by 2030," she said. "The clock is ticking. If we don't have enabling innovation like advanced recycling, it's not going to catch up."

Besides Michigan, similar changes are being debated in legislatures in New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Rhode Island, where lawmakers are, for the first time, pairing an advanced recycling bill with mandated recycled content in plastic products, said Craig Cookson, ACC's senior director of plastics sustainability.

"I would say the debates and discussion are robust," Cookson said. "I think policymakers, they're really interested in this because they hear from their constituents and they're looking for solutions."

Getting the new regulatory framework has been a major priority for ACC in states since Florida passed the first such a law in 2017.

The main sponsor of New Hampshire's bill, state Sen. Kevin Avard, R-Nashua, said ACC asked him to carry the legislation. He made that disclosure during a legislative hearing in April, in response to a question from another lawmaker.

Avard said the legislation would bring jobs and help the state clean up its plastics waste.

"This bill is about incentivizing private investment to come to New Hampshire and develop another tool for keeping plastic out of the landfills," he said. "There are no other such facilities in the Northeast, and we should want this type of manufacturing in New Hampshire."

Nationwide, Cookson said, about $7.5 billion in investments have been announced with advanced recycling technologies in the last few years.

The legislative debate boils down to whether to treat the plants as solid waste facilities or as manufacturing.

Bayer and other skeptics of changing the rules argue that since the plants take in materials from the solid waste and recycling system, they should be regulated as part of that.

In the April hearing, a skeptic of the industry proposal, Michigan state Sen. Winnie Brooks, D-Grand Rapids, asked Muhuri what part of the state's solid waste regulations that the industry had problems complying with.

"I'm just really curious if there's a specific list of regulations you can't meet," she said. "We have enough problems with environmental contamination and dealing with our waste stream."

At the hearing, ACC representatives did not directly answer her question, but in an interview later, Cookson said solid waste regulations are designed for landfills or materials recovery facilities that sort recycling, not plants that turn waste into new products.

He said the lack of regulatory clarity has been a problem for some companies.

"I'm not going to name specific states or companies, but the short answer is yes," Cookson said. "There have been challenges in the absence of statutory definition that make it clear exactly how these facilities are to be regulated."

ACC believes the facilities should be regulated as manufacturing plants because they produce products, Muhuri said.

Bayer, however, said she's concerned the regulatory switch would wind up loosening rules around the chemical recycling plants for air and water emissions and waste byproducts.

"I'm concerned about shifting the regulation to something that is more relaxed when we can see that this is really an environmental issue more than anything," Bayer said.

Michigan's state regulatory agency, the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, has not taken a position on the bill.

But regulators in New Hampshire said they support a similar proposal in their state because the advanced recycling operations would still have to meet current emissions rules.

"They'd be held to the existing air emissions standards that we have," said Mark Sanborn, assistant commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. "That's why we're comfortable with the language in here, that doesn't impact all of our existing regulatory authority."

ACC's Muhuri said no chemical recycling plants thus far have needed to apply for permits as major polluters with the Environmental Protection Agency, under so-called Title V permits.

"To date, we have not seen any company filing for Title V permits, so all have been below the EPA thresholds for both your hazardous air pollutant and your criteria air pollutants," Muhuri said. "We really don't see, from the environmental side, any downsides."

She pointed to a study sponsored by ACC, from the consulting firm The Good Co., which said that chemical recycling plants have air emissions comparable to automotive manufacturing factories or hospitals and universities.

Lawmakers who support it said they don't want to lose jobs to neighboring states that have changed their regulations.

"We're seeing these types of facilities close to the border in both Indiana and Ohio," said state Sen. Aric Nesbitt, R-Van Buren, sponsor of the Michigan bill. "I would hate to see a number of these facilities and the investments they represent all along the border, because Michigan didn't update our regulations to recognize these new technologies."

Muhuri said if advanced recycling diverted 25 percent of Michigan's hard-to-recycle plastics, that could divert 1 million tons of fossil-fueled based plastics. She said the technologies operating at scale in the state could bring in $350 million a year.

But in New Hampshire, some lawmakers said they worried about unseen consequences of changing the regulatory structure, pointing to what they said were lax regulations that led to drinking water contamination from fluorinated chemicals around a Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics plant.

Saint-Gobain agreed in April to permanently provide clean drinking water to 1,000 impacted New Hampshire homes.

"Are you familiar with the Saint-Gobain plant in Merrimack?" state Rep. Tony Caplan, D-Merrimack, asked an ACC representative. "That's something that we're still dealing with in New Hampshire. And that was really a product of lax enforcement and unforeseen consequences of the chemical industry.

"So would you agree that it might be wise for us not to jump into something like this," he said. "The regulatory framework seems more like a work in progress, to be honest with you."

A local environmental group told a legislative hearing that the state should focus on making less of the types of plastics that are problematic for recycling.

"The bill is basically being advanced by the American Chemistry Council," said Jon Swan, founder of the group Save Forest Lake. "I would prefer that the bill sponsor and the ACC bring forth legislation that suggests they're going to reduce the manufacturing of these plastics that can't be recycled safely.

"Instead, this bill seems to be a greenlighting of the production of more and more plastics," Swan said. "Do we want to be a magnet for out-of-state plastic waste?"