This story is a partnership Inside Climate News And watch CBS News. CBS Report documentary, “Advanced recycling: does Big Plastic’s idea work?”.
Nearly 48 million tons of plastic waste are produced in the U.S. each year, and very little of it is ever recycled. The city of Houston says it has a new innovative program that can recycle any type of plastic, calling it a model for the nation, but environmental groups say the program can recycle any type of plastic. The results leave much to be desired,
Brandy Deason, climate justice coordinator for Air Alliance Houston, puts tracking devices on bags when she bags plastic for recycling. She was skeptical of Houston’s program and its claims that it could recycle any kind of plastic. The tracker showed her bags went to a storage site — not a recycling center.
Deason said he doesn’t think the average person in Houston is aware that this is where their recycling ends up.
“I think they get the idea that it’s being taken care of and repurposed,” he said.
The city says it has collected 250 tons of plastic since the end of 2022, but almost none of it has been recycled yet. The plastic is supposed to be brought to a Houston warehouse, where a long-delayed sorting facility has not yet been built.
“We need a large supply of plastic to be ready for startup here, and we want to start that now so we can move forward,” said Ryan Tebbetts, vice president of Cyclix International, one of the companies involved in the recycling program. Tebbetts stressed that the plastic will eventually be recycled.
Plastic is made from oil and gas, and it comes in thousands of chemically different varieties that can’t be mixed together. That’s why less than 10% of plastic is recycled. But Cyclix says it has found a way to separate any kind of plastic and turn it into pellets that can then be recycled.
While Tebbetts admitted the company has never done the process at a large scale, he said the Houston facility is its first. Cyclix is partially funded by ExxonMobil, one of the largest plastics manufacturers on the planet. The company is trying to prove that what it calls “advanced recycling” can help solve the planet’s plastic waste crisis, and the company hopes the Houston program can prove to be a solution across the country.
Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for advanced recycling, said the process “ultimately allows us to take a wide range of plastic waste that has no place to go today and reuse it. Advanced recycling is real. It’s happening. We’re doing it.”
The process uses heat to break down plastic to its molecular level. A small amount of it turns into new plastic, but most of it becomes fuel that is burned, producing emissions that warm the planet. Exxon says it has processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste so far, but the industry has preached advanced recycling for decades and has never made it work at scale.
Plastics manufacturers are now running a new recycling ad campaign – just as Shell Oil ditched its advanced recycling plans, calling them “impractical.” Meanwhile, California’s attorney general is investigating Exxon, accusing the industry of “half a century of deception” about recycling.
When asked if the public can trust a plastics manufacturer when it says it has found a solution to the plastic waste problem, Mastroleo told CBS News, “It’s challenging our integrity. But this is just the beginning, and we’re in this for the long haul.”
Meanwhile, plastic is still accumulating in Houston.
