A Texas town has been inundated with mountains of plastic waste that have gone untouched for a year and a half as facilities continue to fail fire inspections.
Wright Waste Management, located 20 miles from downtown Houston, has hundreds of pounds of plastic trash dumped behind a locked gate.
According to reports, no one has touched the trash for over a year and a half. CBS News.
To address the ongoing problem of plastic pollution, the Houston Recycling Collaborative was born, consisting of the City of Houston, ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell, Cyclyx International and FCC Environmental Services.
It was assumed that it would be possible to take any plastic and recycle it mechanically (the traditional method) or burn it chemically to obtain a new plastic or fuel.
However, 20 months into the program, environmental groups discovered that the plastic abandoned by residents had not yet been chemically recycled, according to CBS News.
Cyclyx International is supposed to open another sorting plant in mid-2025, but for now, contamination is building up at the Wright facility, which has failed several fire safety inspections, the outlet said.
The facility does not have the operating permit it needs to store hazardous materials, flammable and combustible liquids, liquefied petroleum gas and other fuels. It also failed the Harris County Fire Department’s fire inspection three times, CBS and Inside Climate News found.
Wright Waste Management, located 20 miles from downtown Houston, has hundreds of pounds of plastic trash dumped behind a locked gate. No one has touched the trash in more than a year and a half.
The company lacked fire lanes and had no means to control a fire if one broke out. documents saying.
More drama ensued after FCC Environmental Services pulled out of the project because it “does not want its reputation and image to be involved in such irregular and risky practices,” CEO Íñigo Sanz said in a statement. letter.
He said he was against recycling plastic solely through chemical methods and that the Houston Recycling Collaborative aimed to “promote both mechanical and chemical recycling.”
He also said he couldn’t bear to simply store hundreds of pounds of plastic in a facility while waiting for chemical recycling to become available.
The Wright facility has submitted a notice of intent to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to operate as a solid waste recycling facility starting with a cardboard-only recycler in September 2023.
It was supposed to be able to take any plastic and either recycle it mechanically (the traditional way) or chemically burn it to make new plastic or fuel. However, 20 months later, environmental groups discovered that the plastic residents had left behind had still not been chemically recycled.
Their application is still “under review,” according to TCEQ spokesman Ricky Richter.
When CBS asked about the fire inspections, owner Stratton Wright referred them to Cyclyx, which said Wright “does not represent us and they are currently a temporary solution before we can get our facility up and running.”
However, Exxon Mobil’s chemical recycling plant in Baytown has been operational and claims to have processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste and expects to reach 1 billion pounds.
Despite this, the US Environmental Protection Agency said chemical recycling should not be considered recycling at all.
Critics argue that chemical recycling is just a promise to keep plastic production high and avoid solving the pollution problem, according to CBS News.
The facility does not have the operating permit it needs to store hazardous materials, flammable and combustible liquids, LP gas and miscellaneous fuels. It also failed a Harris County Fire Department fire inspection three times.
“Recycling may be a very, very small part of the solution, but it’s not going to solve this monumental plastic pollution problem that we have,” Veena Singla, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, told CBS News.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is investigating Exxon for allegedly misleading public messaging about pollution and recycling and the “myth that recycling can solve the plastic crisis.”
However, Exxon points to its figures and says it cannot be a myth given that £60m has already been paid.
“To say that’s a myth, when in fact we’re doing it, I’m not sure I’m aligned with that,” Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for advanced recycling, told CBS News.
More trash is expected to arrive at the Wright facility as the Houston Recycling Collaboration is expanding customer drop-off locations from one to the next in April.
