Factory would have been for ‘chemical recycling,’ notorious for creating hazardous waste, air pollution
ERIE, Pa. – International Recycling Group (IRG) announced Thursday that it is cancelling its plan to construct a facility in Erie, Pennsylvania, that would have turned plastic waste into a material to be incinerated in the steelmaking process at a factory in northwest Indiana.
The planned IRG facility was one of several similar ones proposed by companies around Pennsylvania and the nation, touting a process called “chemical recycling” aka “advanced recycling.” The oil, gas, and petrochemical industries use these benign-sounding terms, although the process incinerates plastic waste rather than recycling it, thereby creating other forms of pollution.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy announced an $182 million loan commitment to fund the facility as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). However, IRG said Thursday that the Department of Energy has held up its funding for an “unspecified duration.” This is the second time in less than a year that a company has halted its plans for such a facility in Pennsylvania.
PennEnvironment’s Zero Waste Advocate Faran Savitz released the following statement in response:
“IRG abandoning its plan is great news for both the Erie area and for Lake Erie, an iconic body of water consistently plagued by plastic pollution. Recycling is a great tool for addressing our waste crisis, but so-called ‘chemical recycling’ is not truly recycling. Neither is burning plastic waste to make steel. While IRG’s proposal appealed to people unfamiliar with this dirty process, in reality, it would just create another facility encouraging our societal addiction to plastic and leading to more burning of fossil fuels.
“In Pennsylvania, like in the rest of the country, plastic pollution is a major problem. We shouldn’t waste time and money on these types of flawed and potentially dangerous waste management approaches. Instead, we should implement safer, proven strategies such as passing policies that limit the use of single-use plastics in the first place and that protect our air, water and climate.”
