Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin recently announced his plan to encourage what is known as advanced recycling, a technology that opens the door to what could become a major expansion in plastic recycling.
Advanced recycling is an umbrella term for technologies that break down used plastics into their molecular building blocks so they can be remade into new products. These technologies work with traditional recycling technologies to expand what can be recycled, creating raw materials for domestic manufacturing.
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“Advanced recycling could help add more than 173,000 jobs and nearly $13 billion in annual payroll to our economy, delivering on President Trump’s promise to bring good-paying manufacturing jobs back home,” Zeldin said. “Under Trump, EPA is committed to making America a leader in this emerging technology.”
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As the president of America’s Plastic Makers, which advocates the plastics industry and supports the modernization and growth of all viable forms of recycling, I applaud this shift.
When technology evolves, the law should evolve with it, so we can unlock innovation, protect our communities, and strengthen domestic manufacturing.
More than 50 years ago, Congress passed the Clean Air Act to protect communities from harmful air pollution. It established strong, science-based standards to reduce pollution, improve air quality, and ensure that economic growth did not come at the expense of people’s well-being. It has been amended several times since, with each revision making a strong law even more effective.
The Clean Air Act still matters today. And we support its mission.
To expand what can be recycled into raw material, we need important clarifications on how Clean Air Act rules apply to pyrolysis, one of the most common forms of advanced recycling. Pyrolysis is a process that uses heat in the absence of oxygen to convert plastics into valuable raw materials.
The current rule was created when this technology was used for other industrial processes, not in plastic recycling. Unfortunately, this has caused pyrolysis to be confused with destruction technologies.
Pyrolysis doesn’t dispose. It manufactures a new product. Treating advanced recycling facilities as disposal is incorrect and makes them costly and difficult to build. The confusion about the treatment of pyrolysis used for advanced recycling has led to potentially dozens of such facilities across the country being left in limbo.
The EPA is now taking an important step by seeking to clarify the issue. It has accepted public comments on a rule that would clarify that advanced recycling should not be treated as incineration.
If that goes ahead, Zeldin has predicted that there could be dozens more advanced recycling facilities operating in the United States than the fewer than 10 in operation now.
That would be extraordinary. One facility in Texas that Zeldin visited returns 50,000 tons of plastic per year into raw materials. That’s 50,000 tons of material per year that isn’t sitting in a landfill right now. Imagine the impact dozens of such facilities could have.
America’s plastics industry already supports more than 5 million U.S. jobs and $1.1 trillion in economic output. If the U.S. can become a global leader in recycling, the resulting job creation and economic output can build on those numbers.
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It is therefore laudable that the EPA has chosen a path of realism over activism, and one that can make substantial inroads into plastic waste without killing jobs and investment in the process.
Should the administration continue along this path, in years to come, we could be looking back to today as the moment the U.S. launched a revolution in recycling and took a major step toward tackling our plastic waste problem.
Ross Eisenberg is president of America’s Plastic Makers at the American Chemistry Council.
