‘Hazardous’ chemical recycling slipped into NC plastics bill, critics say

A plan for state agencies to recycle plastic and reduce single-use plastics took a step forward in the legislature this week.

But language added onto that bill undermines its point by promoting what is known as chemical recycling, critics say.

The process involves using heat and chemicals to break down plastics, which can then be made into new products. But opponents say this incineration process produces harmful toxins, often cancer-causing, that affect the environment and often hit low-income communities hardest.

House Bill 28’s primary sponsor, Rep. Harry Warren, said Tuesday during a House Environment Committee hearing that the bill “was designed to reduce the volume of nonrecyclable, noncompostable waste that the state produces and to improve the efficiency of the existing disposal programs that we utilize.”

The bill requires public agencies to report annually the amounts and types of materials with recycled content that they buy. It also requires the General Assembly to reduce disposable dishes and food packaging and calls for a pilot recycling program within some agencies. The pilot would require these agencies to get rid of disposable items as soon as possible.

What should be considered recyclable and nonrecyclable?

The meat of the debate is in what count as disposable items, which the bill calls “food service ware,” and what is considered recyclable.

In the first draft of HB 28, food service ware was defined as “noncompostable products used by a food provider that are designed for one-time use for serving or transporting prepared, ready-to-consume food or beverages, including plates, cups, bowls, trays, utensils, straws, cup lids, and hinged or lidded containers.”

The committee added an amendment from Rep. Ray Pickett on Tuesday saying food service ware means “noncompostable and nonrecyclable products” and that the term nonrecyclable “does not include post-use polymers or recovered feedstock processed at an advanced recycling facility.”

Environmentalists say this amendment kills the bill’s aim at reducing nonrecyclable material by permitting items processed at advanced recycling facilities that conduct chemical recycling.

Warren, the bill sponsor and a Rowan County Republican, said in Tuesday’s hearing the added terminology was in a previous bill in 2019 but was taken out. That language “probably shouldn’t have ever come out of the bill in the first place,” and “there had been some advances in the recycling process,” Warren said.

“All plastics can’t be dumped together and recycled. They melt at different temperatures, at different components … I just find the amendment to be a friendly amendment,” Warren said. The News & Observer could not reach him for comment.

Pickett, the amendment sponsor and an Alleghany County Republican, declined to comment to The N&O Thursday through an aide.

Rep. Pricey Harrison questioned this new language in the committee on Tuesday.

Elizabeth Robinson, senior vice president at the North Carolina Retail Merchants Association, a nonprofit advocacy group that represents retailers, told Harrison on Tuesday that the language “was to provide a caveat to say that if there were technologies in place to allow for an item in the waste stream to be recycled and have another useful life that this would still allow for that to happen.”

Harrison, a Greensboro Democrat, said she remained “very skeptical of chemical recycling because it seems to be actually more toxic than than other types of recycling.”

“I think this seems to open up the door for a toxic process that may not be of great benefit,” Harrison said.

The committee passed the bill over Harrison’s objection.

Chemical recycling

According to Brooks Rainey Pearson, legislative counsel for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, chemical recycling generates large amounts of hazardous waste and emits hazardous air pollutants.

For her and other environmentalists, she said, the new language creates a loophole for the original purpose of the bill. It also puts dangerous definitions into law that could expand chemical recycling practices in North Carolina, she said.

“We don’t think that something that is creating further environmental harm should be included in the definition of recyclable materials,” Rainey Pearson said.

In January, federal lawmakers urged the Environmental Protection Agency to maintain tight regulations on chemical recycling of plastics, according to Inside Climate News.

For Katie Craig, state director for the North Carolina Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy organization, this definition adding chemical recycling will affect reporting and the pilot program’s call for the reduction of materials that are nonrecyclable. This is problematic “because that has not been a source of proven technology, and therefore a lot of these materials that the bill was initially intended to reduce are kind of remaining in effect,” she said.

Craig said the world has a “very real plastic pollution problem” and that a minimal amount of plastic is recyclable. Most plastic ends up “in our landfills, polluting our green spaces, ending up in our waterways and oceans, and harming wildlife and even our own bodies,” she said.

The best solution is to reduce the use of plastic, she said. “When it comes to chemical recycling, it’s largely an unproven technology that is touted by the industry as a way to continue to put these plastics out into use and increase the production rather than tackle the problem at its source, where we need to be focused on and where this bill was originally intended to focus on as well,” she said.

Craig said NCPIRG originally supported the bill and were “remaining cautiously optimistic that we could get this out of the bill.”

Allows for recycling, supporters say

Another advocacy group present at the committee meeting Tuesday was the N.C. Beverage Association, which represents the state’s nonalcoholic beverage industry.

Trevor Johnson, president of the association, told The News & Observer that it supported the amendment and that “in short, by adding the term ‘nonrecyclable,’ the amendment ensures that our industry’s 100% recyclable containers are accurately defined within the legislation’s definition of “food service ware.’”

Johnson wrote that the association was part of the stakeholder group, along with the N.C. Retail Merchants Association, that worked with Rep. Warren and Rep. Pickett on the legislative language. The association’s main focus was to ensure the term “nonrecyclable” was added back into the bill as it was in the 2019 version, he wrote. Johnson wrote that he did not have “any information to provide on the advanced recycling portion of the amendment.”

Robinson, from the merchants’ association, wrote that the group has worked with Warren since his initial introduction of the bill in 2019.

“We appreciate the willingness of both he and Representative Pickett along with the NC Beverage Association in working with us on the amendment,” she wrote.

“Our goal was to ensure that the term non-recyclable did not inadvertently limit the ability for food service ware to be recycled if there is an avenue available to do so to align with our retail members’ continual focus on new opportunities to reduce waste,” she wrote.

According to Melody Foote, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, the agency is “aware of one company in North Carolina that is doing chemical recycling,” she wrote.

That company is Premirr Plastics in Garner, she wrote.

Foote said DEQ does not have data on the amount of waste the company is recycling and said she would follow up on what sort of oversight chemical recycling facilities have in the state.

On its website, Premirr, a Chapel Hill-based startup, says it is working to recycle polyethylene terephthalate, which is one of the most frequently used consumer plastics, into everyday products via their “patented disruptive cleantech, continuous flow-through process.”

Harrison told The N&O another chemical recycling plant in North Carolina is Braven, located in Zebulon.

The N&O was unable to reach Premirr or Braven for comment.

National debate

Bill language on chemical recycling similar to this has popped up across the country.

A big proponent of this language nationwide is the American Chemistry Council, a trade association for U.S. chemical companies.

On its website the council states they “support policies that recognize the products of advanced recycling as recycling, and policies that recognize advanced recycling as a highly engineered manufacturing process that can produce new virgin equivalent plastics and chemicals and complement mechanical recycling methods currently in use.”

A lobbyist for the council in North Carolina was not available for comment.

Rainey Pearson and Harrison both said it was likely that the council was involved in lobbying for this new language, alongside the two state associations.

“The American Chemistry Council seems to have slipped one over on everybody and has put this seemingly innocuous plastics reductions bill” forward that in fact “just seems to open the door for chemical recycling,” Harrison told The N&O in an interview Thursday.

The bill was first drafted in 2019 and came up again last year. Both times it died in the Senate. It’s unclear if it will fare better this year.

Asked Tuesday why the bill continued to fail, Warren said he had “not received any objections or negativity about it at all from anybody. I’m not allowed to say that there might not be some out there, but no one’s bothered bringing it to my attention.”