Environmental group NRDC slams chemical recycling as 'greenwashing'

One of the nation's most well-known environmental groups is taking aim at chemical recycling, claiming most is not actually recycling at all.

The Natural Resources Defense Council called out chemical recycling, sometimes called advanced or molecular recycling, as instead making fuels and "releasing hazardous pollutants into communities and the environment."

"Not only are 'chemical recycling' facilities failing at safely and effectively recycling plastic waste; they are releasing harmful pollutants into vulnerable communities and the environment," said Veena Singla, senior scientist at the NRDC, in a March 7 statement.

"And the toxic trail doesn't end there. Further pollution and health harm comes from the burning of dirty fuels created in the process," Singla said.

Daniel Rosenberg is the director of federal toxics policy at NRDC. He had a straightforward description of chemical recycling from his view: greenwashing.

"'Chemical recycling' is just a greenwashing term for burning plastic and not a solution to our plastic waste problem," he said in a statement.

Of particular concern to NRDC is the amount of waste created by chemical recycling processes such as pyrolysis, which processes waste plastic at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to break them down to their molecular constituents.

There also is a social justice issue with chemical recycling, the environmental group said, as these locations are "mostly located in communities that are disproportionately low income, people of color or both."

NRDC said hazardous waste created by chemical recycling also creates problems because it is shipped to "multiple locations across the country — and all the waste disposal methods involve burning."

NRDC specifically took aim at high-profile plastics recycler Agilyx Corp. of Tigard, Ore., one of the early companies in the current wave of chemical recyclers that have attracted some high-profile investors over the years. The group claimed Agilyx "has produced hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic waste in a single year that was sent to incineration."

NRDC previously said a review of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data showed Agilyx sent more than 500,000 pounds of hazardous waste to incinerators in Oregon, Washington, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Indiana in 2019.

Asked to comment on the allegations, Agilyx emailed a statement saying that it shared the view that the world has a plastic waste problem, that not enough plastic is recycled, that too many plastics end up in landfills and our oceans, and that many types of plastics are not [today] being recycled into useful products.

"These are the issues that Agilyx is working to solve," the company emphasized. "As one of the longest-operating companies in chemical recycling technology, Agilyx is a technology provider that enables our customers to convert post-use plastics into new virgin-equivalent plastics.

"The Regenyx Tigard, Ore., facility which is mentioned in the present report was commissioned in 2019 and it converts post-use plastics via a pyrolysis process into a styrene monomer oil. This oil is in turn used by our joint venture partner to create new virgin equivalent polystyrene products. Chemical recycling processors are not producers of any significant amount of hazardous waste. As Agilyx was in the commissioning phase in 2019, the amount of byproduct waste was higher than in the subsequent years. The majority of this material was in fact sent to energy recovery. Most importantly, Agilyx operates within the stringent requirements of our permits with the Oregon EPA, and we are regularly visited by regulators to check our compliance."

This is not the first time that a high-profile group has given a skeptical report on chemical recycling. In 2021, a study by IHS Markit concluded that chemical recycling technologies could take until 2050 to have enough scale to achieve a low-cost position in the marketplace.