Plastics and Health: Preventing False Solutions

As the plastic crisis grows, the plastic and chemical industry is turning to polluting, expensive technologies that mostly involve burning waste to make fuel. They wrongly call this recycling and falsely make the case that these technologies will solve the plastics crisis. Industry is touting these false solutions and greenwashing these toxic technologies calling them “chemical recycling,” “advanced recycling,” or “molecular recycling.” These are all umbrella terms for various toxic technologies, such as pyrolysis or gasification, which burn plastic waste or use high heat to create new plastic products, fuel, and/or chemicals. 

• These are toxic technologies. Facilities utilizing these technologies use and produce hazardous chemicals and waste, and emit toxic air pollutants and greenhouse gasses. Toxic chemicals emitted into the air and waste can cause cancer and birth defects, damage the reproductive system, and lead to other serious health problems. 
• Low-income and communities of color are the most impacted. The facilities using these toxic technologies are often sited in communities that are disproportionately low-income, people of color, or both, exposing these populations to toxic emissions.
• Plastic burning is not recycling. Investigations have found that the majority of “chemical recycling” facilities in the United States are not actually recycling plastic, but rather are burning plastic.
• “Chemical recycling” is financially risky.Chemical Recycling” facilities are expensive to construct and operate and often rely on public grants and bonds to even begin operations. And once they shut down, they could leave states on the hook to clean up any pollution the facilities have caused.

1. Require pyrolysis, gasification and other waste technologies to go through full evaluations and permitting as solid waste facilities. States should reject attempts to reclassify “chemical recycling” facilities as manufacturing or classify plastic waste as “feedstock” rather than solid waste. Reclassification would allow facilities to operate under looser environmental protections, and give companies access to additional funding and tax credits only available to manufacturing facilities.
2. Define recycling accurately. States should also ensure that “chemical recycling” is not allowed to be considered “recycling” under state laws. 
3. Reject Mass Balance Approaches. State decision-makers should resist attempts to adopt recycling credit schemes called mass balance that rely on proportional credit or free allocation schemes.  Such approaches lack transparency and use false accounting to pass off virgin material as recycled content in plastic products. 

While well-intentioned, mandates on minimum recycled content for products it is a false solution that will only result in more exposure to toxic chemicals. Plastic absorbs chemicals that it comes into contact with, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, not to mention the additives that are intentionally added to plastic. All of these chemicals end up in the recycling stream and end up in recycled products.

Researchers recently found hundreds of different hazardous chemicals in recycled plastic pellets and another study found flame retardants in black plastic, an unintentional and regrettable effect of recycling electronics casings. Recycled content mandates should be avoided, especially for food and pharmaceutical packaging. 

Another misguided but well-intentioned solution is “biodegradable” or compostable plastics. Compostable plastics can only fully break down in industrial composting facilities which are not widespread throughout the country. Additionally, these plastics still contain additives, many of which are unidentified and untested, and many of which have been found to contaminate compost. 

Most bioplastic production requires resources including pesticides and fertilizers and has sometimes led to the clearcutting of forests to establish farmland. While there are some new technologies using food waste, algae and mushrooms, these are still emerging and not to scale yet.