Three Years' Worth Of Plastic Waste Piling Up At Failing "Advanced Recycling" Plant In 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 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 warn that some of these processes pump out highly toxic air pollution, contribute to global warming and shouldn’t qualify as recycling at all.

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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 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.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24082024/houston-advanced-recycling-plastic-waste-piles-up/