The growth of reportedly visible stockpiles of mixed plastic scrap has created unwelcome scrutiny for the Houston Recycling Collaboration effort introduced in Texas’ largest city more than two years ago.

A January 2022 post to the city government of Houston’s website refers to the Houston Recycling Collaboration as consisting of the City of Houston, ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell, Cyclyx International and FCC Environmental Services.

The city says those entities signed a memorandum of understanding to form the collaboration, which it says has as its aim “to significantly increase Houston’s plastics recycling rate and help establish the city as a leader for both mechanical and advanced recycling processes.”

A late August report by CBS News and Brooklyn, New York-based Inside Climate News, however, indicates FCC Environmental dropped out of the organization last year, in part citing safety concerns about mounting stockpiles of discarded plastic.

The lengthy online CBS and Inside Climate News report says the stockpiles are forming at a site in northwest Houston known as Wright Waste Management and includes photos of materials the report’s author says are at the site.

The report’s lead author James Brugger links the stockpiles to chemical (or advanced) recycling investments being made by Collaboration partners ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell and Cyclyx International.

While mechanical recycling efforts have traditionally focused on separating discarded plastics by resin type and (most often) color, some advocates of chemical recycling initially presented it as a way to handle mixed plastics.

Some of that initial confidence in the future of chemical processing for mixed plastics has diminished in the face of research, trial and error efforts or criticism that some chemical recycling allow recycled content to be a relatively minor ingredient in a production process.

For the last couple of years, however, mixed plastics have been collected in and around Houston seemingly in anticipation of end markets coming online.

Brugger and fellow reporters Chris Spinder, Ben Tracy and Tracy Wholf, however, portray the stockpiles at Wright Waste as having failed fire code inspections and as poised to keep growing as collection efforts expand this year and next.

The report indicates Cyclyx International anticipates ramping up its Texas chemical recycling plant in mid-2025. While ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell have invested heavily to chemically convert plastic scrap into new materials at a facility in Baytown, Texas, the report indicates it thus far has been accepting less mixed sources of scrap compared with those collected by the collaboration, including “byproduct plastic from industrial sources.”

Some materials collected by the Houston Recycling Collaboration likely are heading to mechanical recycling facilities, as indicated in the group’s 2022 introductory announcement.

But that announcement also stated residents “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.”

That wide collection net and subsequent stockpiles seem to have caused FCC, a Spain-based waste and recycling firm that operates mechanical recycling material recovery facilities (MRFs) in Texas, to reconsider its membership in the consortium last year.

Citing a letter Brugger says he has seen, he quotes an FCC executive as writing, “As a member of the [Houston Recycling Collaboration], FCC does not want its reputation and image involved in such irregular and risky practices.” Brugger says the letter does not mention the Wright Waste site by name.

However, that location has attracted unwelcome attention in part to Harris County, Texas, fire inspection failures and missing permits, some of which are reproduced in the CBS and Inside Climate News online report.

The report also indicates Wright Waste Management in 2023 notified the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) that it intends to operate a MRF on the site, which a TCEQ spokesperson says is under review.

The final section of the online report includes comments from chemical recycling skeptics and from an ExxonMobil executive who says his company already has processed some 30,000 tons of material in Baytown, defending the process as not being “a myth.”

Courtesy : recyclingtoday.com