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HOUSTON’S PLASTIC WASTE  
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James Bruggers
August 24, 2024
Inside Climate News
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_ Houston seeks to be a national model for plastic recycling. But a
program that started in 2022 hasn’t yet found its footing. _

Plastic waste in May at Wright Waste Management in Houston. , CBS
News

 

_This story is a partnership between Inside Climate News and CBS News
[[link removed]]._

HOUSTON—When the news crew showed up outside a waste-handling
business that’s failed three fire safety inspections and has yet to
gain state approval to store plastic, workers quickly closed a gate
displaying a “no trespassing” sign.

Behind the gate, deliveries of hundreds of thousands of pounds of
plastic waste from residents’ homes have piled up over the last year
and a half. Satellite and drone images reveal bags, bottles and even a
cooler spread about, some of the plastic heaped high in bales next to
strewn cardboard and tall stacks of wooden pallets.

The expanding open-air pile at Wright Waste Management, on the edge of
an office park 20 miles northwest of downtown Houston, awaits what the
city of Houston and corporate partners including ExxonMobil call a new
frontier in recycling—and critics describe as a sham.

The Houston Recycling Collaboration [[link removed]]
was formed as a response to low recycling rates in the city, a global
problem. Hardly any of the plastic products meant to be used once and
tossed can be recycled mechanically—the shredding, melting and
remolding used for collection programs across the country. 

The Houston effort adds a new option alongside the city’s curbside
pickup: Partners say people can bring any plastic waste to drop-off
locations—even styrofoam, bubble wrap and bags—and if it can’t
be mechanically recycled, it will be superheated and chemically
processed into new plastic, fuels or other products.

Exxon and the petrochemical industry call this “advanced” or
“chemical” recycling and heavily promote it as a solution to
runaway plastic waste, even as environmental advocates
[[link removed]]
warn that some of these processes pump out highly toxic air pollution,
contribute to global warming and shouldn’t qualify as recycling at
all.

But the Houston effort illustrates a different problem: Twenty months
into collection, ongoing tracking by environmental groups indicates
the household plastic waste people have dropped off still isn’t
getting chemically recycled. 

A massive plastics sorting plant planned by one member of the
collaboration, Cyclyx International, isn’t on track to open until
the middle of next year. And the plastic mounting at Wright in the
meantime likely will build up even faster because city officials and
their partners expanded their collection program
[[link removed]] in April
from one original drop-off center to eight.

An investigation by Inside Climate News and CBS News that uncovered
Wright’s failed fire safety inspections and missing fire permits
also unearthed a fracture in the public-private collaboration.

One of the city’s industry partners, FCC Environmental Services,
which operates a large sorting facility for the city’s curbside
recycling program, has opted out of the drop-off collection. In a July
2023 letter
[[link removed]],
the company raised concerns about the safety of storing plastic waste
at a facility that lacks required permits. 

As a member of the [Houston Recycling Collaboration], FCC does not
want its reputation and image involved in such irregular and risky
practices,” Inigo Sanz, chief executive officer of FCC at the time,
wrote in the letter to partners without mentioning the Wright site by
name. FCC also complained about the focus on storing waste for future
chemical recycling while missing opportunities to recycle some of the
plastic mechanically.

Public records requests by Inside Climate News and CBS News also found
that the fire marshal’s office for Harris County, Texas, inspected
the Wright site three times
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from July 2023 through April and failed it on each occasion. The
inspection reports noted that the company was operating without some
of its required fire operational permits, including those for handling
“hazardous materials” and “miscellaneous combustible storage.”

A fire inspector visiting the site on April 30 observed
“significantly more product” around the facility than during the
previous inspection. There were “no fire lanes or means of
controlling a fire,” the inspector wrote, and the public right of
way was blocked by a new 15-foot tall, 100-foot wide and 500-foot long
wall of wooden pallets stacked outside the fence line.

Plastic recycling facilities are notorious for catching fire
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and sending toxic smoke billowing into the air. All it takes is a
trigger: an unextinguished cigarette, sparking from electronic or
mechanical equipment, arson, oily rags spontaneously combusting.
That’s why conditions at the Wright site worry local environmental
advocates, county fire inspectors and at least one independent fire
investigator.

“Five acres of paper and plastic piled up with little or no fire
suppression: What could go wrong?” said Richard Meier, a private
fire investigator in Florida who worked 24 years as a mechanical
engineer in manufacturing, including in plastics companies. He
reviewed the Harris County fire inspection reports and Google Earth
images of the site from earlier this year at the request of Inside
Climate News and CBS News.

“You have piles and piles and piles of all this fuel,” Meier said.
“Plastic is a refined version of petroleum, and paper is chewed-up
wood.”

The fire risk only grows with intense summer heat, for which Houston
is known.

“When you are talking about igniting a fuel, it is about adding heat
to that fuel. If the fuel is already warm, it takes much less added
heat to start an ignition,” Meier said.

The company’s owner declined to comment.

When shown a drone video of the Wright site taken in July, informed of
the three failing fire marshal’s inspections and told that
Wright’s application to store plastic had not yet been approved by
state environmental regulators, the city’s top solid waste official
responded with surprise.

“That contradicts some of the information we have in our records,”
said Mark Wilfalk. “The last report we had was they are A-OK.”

Wilfalk later said he had been relying on his department’s review of
the Wright site and not that of the county fire marshal.

THE CLASH OVER ‘ADVANCED’ RECYCLING

Plastic is a modern dilemma much like the oil and gas used to make it,
underpinning the global economy even as it chokes the world in waste
seeping into our food, water and bodies. About a third of the 430
million metric tons produced each year are tossed after a single use,
according to the United Nations
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UN officials have declared plastic a big part of what they call “a
triple planetary crisis” of climate change, nature loss and
pollution. More than 170 nations are trying to draft
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a global plastics treaty by the end of this year. In the U.S.,
lawsuits over plastic pollution are multiplying
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So are the calls to reduce production.

All of that has pressured petrochemical companies to offer solutions.
The major one they suggest: chemical recycling, which the industry
lobby group American Chemistry Council says
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allows more kinds of plastic to be “recaptured and remanufactured
into new plastics and products.”

But critics argue that chemical recycling is more of an unproven
marketing play so plastic production can keep growing than a real fix
for the global crisis.

“Recycling may be a very, very small portion of the solution, but it
is not going to solve this monumental plastic pollution problem that
we have,” said Veena Singla, an adjunct assistant professor of
environmental health sciences at Columbia University. She called
recycling an “end-of-pipe solution that does not require industry to
cut down its production or its profits and its plans for expansion.”

And that, Singla said, means more harm across the plastics lifecycle,
from oil and gas drilling
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to plastic production
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to plastic waste in rivers and oceans
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and nano-plastics in blood vessels
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Made of some 16,000 chemicals
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many of them toxic, plastics were never designed for recycling.
Globally, less than 10 percent of plastic gets recycled, according to
the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group
that represents developed nations. In the United States, the recycling
rate is even lower at less than 6 percent, according to a 2022 study
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environmental groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics.

Chemical recycling will be different, the industry says. The Houston
collaboration, which includes petrochemical giants Exxon and
LyondellBasell, part owners of fellow member Cyclyx
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offered an opportunity to demonstrate that. 

“The challenge here is the plastic waste. It’s not the plastic,”
said Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for
advanced recycling, during a late July tour of the company’s
chemical recycling facility. Located at its Baytown plant outside
Houston, it has been getting its feedstock mostly from scrap and
byproduct plastic from industrial sources.

Aerial views of the ExxonMobil Baytown petrochemical complex near
Houston, where the company has added a chemical recycling facility for
waste plastic. Credit: Carlos Chavez/CBS News

During the collaboration’s roll-out, Houston’s then-mayor,
Sylvester Turner, said
[[link removed].]
it would move the city to a “circular economy,” a term without a
widely accepted definition but used to suggest products are repeatedly
made from waste without tapping new natural resources. Turner said the
city and its partners were “sending a message” that “Houston is
dedicated to impacting change and setting the example for communities
around the country.”

But Inside Climate News in November reported
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that electronic tracking of plastic waste collected for the
collaboration in 2023 showed it wasn’t getting recycled after all,
and instead was being stored at Wright Waste Management; that
construction of the planned Cyclyx Circularity Center, a sorting
facility touted as necessary for the program, was behind schedule; and
that Exxon was declining
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to reveal basic information about its Baytown chemical recycling
facility, including details that could support or undermine its
chemical recycling environmental claims.

In December, the Cyclyx Circularity Center received
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$135 million in funding, but its warehouse still sits empty of sorting
equipment less than a year before it’s scheduled to begin
operations.

Exxon describes
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its chemical recycling as a type of pyrolysis, where waste plastic is
heated to 600 degrees in a reactor without oxygen, converted to
products such as ethane or naphtha in oil and gas forms, then sent to
other Exxon units for further refining. The process, the company
maintains, allows it to “unlock the inherent value of used plastics
that might otherwise wind up in a landfill or incineration.”

But critics argue that pyrolysis is energy-intensive manufacturing
with a large carbon footprint, not that different from incineration
and that it mostly just makes new fossil fuels. 

Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer, former industry consultant
and founder of The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that works on
reducing plastic pollution, views Exxon’s chemical recycling claims
with skepticism. She reviewed public documentation, including Exxon
patents, and estimated that no more than 25 percent of the incoming
plastic waste to the Exxon chemical recycling facility could be
converted into feedstocks for new plastic.

“Any process that effectively destroys 75 percent-plus of the
plastic waste … cannot legitimately be claimed as plastic
recycling,” Dell said. “ExxonMobil should stop using the words
‘advanced recycling’ to describe their process.”

That’s a position similar to that of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency. In its 2023 draft national strategy to prevent
plastic pollution, the EPA concluded
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that converting “solid waste to fuels, fuel ingredients, or
energy” should not be considered a recycling practice.

CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL INVESTIGATES EXXON AND OTHERS

While the chemical industry has persuaded
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more than two dozen state legislatures to pass laws encouraging
chemical recycling, it’s also faced withering critiques from
opponents and questions about its technical and economic viability.

Last fall, a report
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two environmental groups, Beyond Plastics and the International
Pollutants Elimination Network, attempted to make the case that
chemical recycling technology has failed by showing how companies have
largely been unable to make it work commercially.

And the 2023 annual sustainability report
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for the global oil giant Shell released earlier this year revealed
that it was backing away from its corporate goal to significantly ramp
up chemical recycling of plastic.

“We have concluded that the scale of our ambition to use 1 million
tonnes of plastic waste a year in our global chemical plants by 2025
is unfeasible due to a lack of available plastic waste feedstock, slow
technology development and regulatory uncertainty,” the company
reported.

[The ExxonMobil chemical recycling facility at its Baytown
petrochemical complex near Houston. Credit: Dwaine Scott/CBS News]

Scenes from a tour inside the ExxonMobil Baytown petrochemical complex
near Houston, where the company has added a chemical recycling
facility for plastic waste. Credit: Dwaine Scott/CBS News

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is suing
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Exxon and other oil companies over alleged deception regarding climate
change, is also investigating the oil and gas industry’s role in
alleged deceptive public messaging about plastic pollution and
recycling. In that investigation, Bonta’s office issued
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subpoenas to Exxon and the industry lobby groups American Chemistry
Council and the Plastics Industry Association.

In a written statement this week, Bonta said his investigation was
nearing completion.

“The root of our investigation lies in this truth: plastics are
wreaking havoc on our environment due to the fossil fuel industry’s
decades-long campaign of deception, perpetuating a myth that recycling
can solve the plastics crisis,” Bonta said. “That deception is
ongoing today with the industry’s promotion of ‘advanced
recycling.’”

Exxon’s Mastroleo declined to comment on Bonta’s investigation but
said: “We’ve already processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste
through our facility. We have ambitions to go even further to 1
billion pounds. And so to say that’s a myth when we’re actually
doing it, I’m not sure I’m aligned with that.”

Exxon officials declined last year, and then again recently, to say
what percentage of new plastic the company makes from every pound of
plastic waste that it processes at its Baytown chemical recycling
facility.

Mastroleo said he didn’t know. A significant amount “goes to
fuels,” he said, along with “lubricants, plastic, as well as other
products.” He said he considers all of that to be recycling.

“Recycling is taking waste to create new products,” Mastroleo
said.

He declined to comment on Shell’s decision to back off advanced
recycling of plastic, other than to say of Exxon: “I believe we have
a world-class technology organization, a world-class operational
organization, and I can lean into that. That’s what gives me
confidence. If I were a betting man, I know where I would bet.”

Terry Collins, a professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University,
has estimated that Exxon would need to build more than 300 facilities
with the capacity of its Baytown operation to handle the waste
generated by all the plastic the company makes. Globally, Collins
said, more than 10,000 such facilities would be needed to process all
of the plastic produced on the planet.

Mastroleo acknowledged that Exxon’s effort “is just the start of
the journey.”

He added: “We need to work with our communities, with governments
and industry to make sure plastic circularity is something that’s
real, something that is believable.”

TRACKING PLASTIC WASTE

In a garage in Houston, Brandy Deason stuffed some of the plastic
waste she has accumulated in recent weeks into a large plastic bag. An
empty water container from a hurricane preparedness kit. Styrofoam
packing material. Plastic film wrap from a mail-order bed frame.
Target shopping bags. Shampoo bottles. Plastic clamshell-style food
packaging that once contained tomatoes.

Deason, a climate justice coordinator fighting against chemical
recycling of plastic for the Houston Air Alliance, an environmental
group, said she tries to minimize her use of plastic but said that’s
hard to do.

“Gotta have emergency water in a hurricane,” she explained.
“Gotta have some shampoo.”

Most of these materials would not normally get recycled in Houston or
pretty much anywhere else in the United States. But the Houston
Recycling Collaboration has encouraged residents to do exactly what
Deason is doing—to “bag it and bring it,” including “all
plastics, all numbers” and “all symbols,” even plastic that does
not have any recycling labels,  such as dry cleaner bags and bubble
wrap.

The difference between a regular bag of plastic and Deason’s: She
slipped an Apple AirTag electronic tracker in before taking it to a
Houston recycling drop-off center.

“We want to know what was happening with this stuff,” Deason said.
“Is it really going to go to get recycled?”

Her efforts follow those of The Last Beach Cleanup, which last year
used electronic tracking to show plastic waste collected by the city
for the collaboration was piling up on the ground at the Wright
business.

In April, during a public “lunch and learn” webinar, a copy of
which Inside Climate News and CBS News obtained through a Texas open
records law request, a Cyclyx official described the
environmentalists’ tracking of plastic waste to the Wright site in
positive terms.

“The geotags were a great thing to show it’s actually going to
where we want it to go,” Zach Divin, the director of operations for
Cyclyx, said of the collected waste. “That is the site [where]
it’s stored.”

But fires at recycling facilities are relatively common. The Last
Beach Cleanup has tracked
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more than 130 globally since 2019 at plastic recycling and sorting
facilities, not counting hundreds more that Dell said have occurred in
Turkey and India. 

“Should that catch fire,” Deason said, standing near the Wright
site, “the emissions coming off of that could be really poisonous to
the people that live around here, not to mention a dangerous, large
fire like that could spread into a neighborhood.” 

OPEN FIRE CODE VIOLATIONS

Public business records identify Stratton Wright as the president of
Wright Waste Management, which is described on its website as
“Texas’s premier waste-to-energy logistics coordinator.” It’s
been on file
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with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality as a cardboard
recycler since 2016, but on Sept. 26, 2023, months after trackers were
showing plastic waste already going to the business, Wright submitted
a “notice of intent
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to operate a municipal solid waste recycling facility. That
application to the TCEQ revealed a plan to store as much as 2.2
million pounds of plastic waste and a request for permission to exceed
time limits for plastic waste storage. 

“The longer storage time is necessary as the preliminary processing
facility has not yet been constructed,” according to the
application, which referenced Cyclyx’s planned sorting facility.
“Recycling of this material could not occur if an extension of the
storage time were not granted.”

“The application has not been approved and is under review,” said
TCEQ spokesman Ricky Richter. “TCEQ is waiting on financial
assurance documentation from the applicant.”

Asked about his business last October for Inside Climate News’
November story, Stratton Wright said “everything is on the
up-and-up.” But this summer, he declined four direct requests for an
interview, instead referring reporters to Cyclyx.

In an interview, Ryan Tebbetts, a Cyclyx vice president, declined to
discuss the Wright site’s failing fire marshal inspections or its
regulatory status with the TCEQ, referring questions back to Wright
Waste Management.

 “Wright Waste Management doesn’t represent us, and they are
currently a temporary solution before we can get [our] facility
operational,” Tebbetts said.

Cyclyx has been talking
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about opening its high-tech plastic sorting plant since at least 2022
and had previously targeted its opening for 2024. Last fall, Joe
Vaillancourt, the chief executive officer of Cyclyx, told Inside
Climate News that the company was awaiting a final investment decision
and working through engineering details. In December, the company
announced
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that Exxon and LyondellBasell were together investing $135 million in
the sorting facility to pay for operating activities and construction
costs, with startup planned for mid-2025.

Cyclyx provided a tour of its giant warehouse, the size of nine
football fields, but it was still largely empty except for some bales
of plastic waste. One contained a tracking device that showed it had
been recently moved from the Wright site, Dell said. (It’s since
been moved back, according to the device.)

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us over the next 12 months to
get there,” acknowledged Tebbetts, who said the company has been
trying to stockpile as much plastic as possible in advance of its
startup.

Eventually, this plant should have the capacity to process into small
plastic pellets as much as 250 million pounds of plastic waste per
year, tailored to the needs of customers conducting different kinds of
chemical or mechanical recycling, he said. The company has proven its
technology to make customized pellets for various recyclers “on the
small scale” in a laboratory setting, he said, and “we are very
confident in our ability to deliver.”

Wilfalk, the city’s top solid waste official, said after seeing
drone video of waste piles at the Wright site that he was
“comfortable” with the way Wright was managing the plastic waste.
He thought it was better there than “at the landfill,” where he
said “it’d be flying all over the place until it’s being
covered.”

Wilfalk also acknowledged receiving the July 2023 letter from FCC, a
company with a 15-year contract to receive, sort, recover and sell all
materials that Houston residents contribute to the city’s curbside
recycling [[link removed]]
program. For that effort, residents toss limited types of plastic,
paper and metals into bins collected by waste haulers at the curb.

FCC questioned why plastic waste collected for the collaboration was
to be stockpiled at a location without necessary permits when it could
be processed at the FCC-managed site
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which it described as a “fully permitted, state of the art, insured
facility (owned by the City of Houston) which includes not only the
latest equipment for sorting, but also the most advanced systems for
safety and fire prevention.”

Without naming the Wright site, Sanz, the chief executive officer of
FCC Environmental Services at the time, wrote that “FCC questions
whether holding recyclable materials in an unpermitted temporary
storage facility would be legal, safe and/or environmentally sound and
is not willing to compromise its values on a project with so many
uncertainties.”

Wilfalk attributed FCC’s complaints to the possibility that the
company is anxious about the collaboration’s new all-plastics
approach.

“I think these are areas that … haven’t been explored to the
fullest extent, and I think it makes some people in the industry
nervous,” he said. “It makes them concerned. But we have to be
willing to take some risk, you know?”

FCC declined requests to be interviewed for this story.

The Harris County Fire Marshal’s office said that as of early
August, there “remained open fire code violations” at the Wright
site, those described in the office’s April 30 inspection.

“It is absolutely not our goal to shut down a business in Harris
County,” said fire marshal spokeswoman Brandi Dumas, as long as fire
officials feel “the owner or manager is working with us and taking
steps to come into compliance.”

Meanwhile, Deason’s latest tracker is now pinging from the site’s
plastic waste pile.

_Chris Spinder, Ben Tracy and Tracy Wholf of CBS News contributed to
this report._

James Bruggers covers the U.S. Southeast, part of Inside Climate
News’ National Environment Reporting Network. He previously covered
energy and the environment for Louisville’s Courier Journal, where
he worked as a correspondent for USA Today and was a member of the USA
Today Network environment team. Before moving to Kentucky in 1999,
Bruggers worked as a journalist in Montana, Alaska, Washington and
California. Bruggers’ work has won numerous recognitions, including
best beat reporting, Society of Environmental Journalists, and the
National Press Foundation’s Thomas Stokes Award for energy
reporting. He served on the board of directors of the SEJ for 13
years, including two years as president. He lives in Louisville with
his wife, Christine Bruggers.

* Plastic recycling
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* Houston
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* ExxonMobil
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