A report released last week by the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, or CCI, chronicles a “decades-long campaign of fraud and deception” from Big Oil and the plastics industry to promote recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. New documents show that industry executives pushed plastics recycling despite knowing since the 1980s that it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution,” and that recycled plastics would never be able to compete economically with virgin material. 

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent. 

The report’s authors liken the plastics industry’s recycling campaign to Big Oil’s tactics to convince the public that its products don’t cause climate change. Many companies have been involved in both efforts, since plastics are made from fossil fuels. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement.

CCI traces industry support for plastics recycling back to the 1980s, when it was proposed as a response to widespread public concern over the material’s proliferation — especially as litter. With the threat of regulation looming large, industry representatives felt they had little choice but “to recycle or be banned.” 

Even then, the industry acknowledged major and potentially insurmountable hurdles to plastics recycling. Most significantly, there was no market for recycled plastic — it was too expensive and low-quality to compete with virgin material. One document uncovered by CCI — a 1986 report from the plastics industry trade group the Vinyl Institute — noted that “purity and quality demands set for many applications preclude the use of recycled material.” In the end, the report concluded that recycling “merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

Plastics and petrochemical company representatives repeatedly shared similar concerns at industry conferences, in meeting notes, and elsewhere: that plastics recycling consumed too much energy, that it would only work for a small fraction of plastic waste, and that a quickly growing supply of virgin materials would “kick the s–t out of” recycled plastic prices, as one official of the now-defunct American Plastics Council wrote in meeting notes obtained by CCI. 

Davis Allen, an investigative researcher for CCI and the lead author of the report, said many of the new documents came from a former American Plastics Council staffer. Others came from industry document databases maintained by Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, San Francisco. 

The documents, Allen said, strongly suggest that the plastics and petrochemical industries saw recycling as little more than a way to tame public outrage and ward off anti-plastic legislation. One 1994 document quotes a representative of Eastman Chemical saying that, while plastics recycling might one day become a reality, “it is more likely that we will wake up and realize that we are not going to recycle our way out of the solid waste issue.” Another document — handwritten notes from a meeting between Exxon Chemical and the American Plastics Council — quotes Exxon Chemical’s then-vice president saying that, when it came to recycling plastics, “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

Still, trade groups and large petrochemical companies invested heavily in public relations to improve plastics recycling’s image. They touted ambitious goals to increase the recycling rate, and then remained quiet when they failed to meet them, or changed the way they measured their progress. Advertisements “simply repeated the same lies about the viability of plastic recycling,” according to CCI. For example, one 1991 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed that “a bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again.” Meanwhile, educational materials created for use in schools implied that recycling could assuage students’ guilt over using disposable plastic foodware.

By the mid-1990s, the results seemed to have paid off. Industry polling showed that public opinion on plastics had greatly improved and state-level efforts to ban or restrict plastic production had waned considerably — even though the dismal state of plastics recycling had not significantly improved.

Today, most plastic waste gets incinerated or sent to landfills, where it creates hazardous air and water pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, environmental advocates say the “myth” of plastics recycling has facilitated the industry’s unmitigated expansion — plastic production has grown by nearly 230 times since 1950. Plastics are expected to drive nearly half of the growth in global oil demand between 2017 and 2050.

CCI isn’t the first group to document the plastics industry’s deceptive communication practices around recycling. A 2020 investigation from NPR and Frontline found ample evidence that the plastics industry and its trade groups promoted plastics recycling despite knowing it was “costly” and “infeasible.” Two former industry executives told the outlets that recycling was used to “advertise our way out of” negative PR.

Since the mid-2010s, a second wave of anti-plastic outrage has spurred the plastics industry and its lobbying groups to again promote the promise of plastics recycling — only this time, they’re pushing so-called “chemical recycling,” which can supposedly melt plastic into its constituent polymers so it can be turned back into new products. Although chemical recycling technologies have existed for decades, most existing existing facilities — and there are only a few — are still unable to create new plastic products; they mostly turn plastic into chemicals or fossil fuels to be burned. 

Lew Freeman, the Society of the Plastics Industry’s former vice president of government affairs, told Grist in an interview last year that there are “serious questions” about the degree to which chemical recycling can ever work. “The industry seems to be doing the same thing it did 30-some-odd years ago,” Freeman said. 

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers — a subgroup of the petrochemical industry trade organization the American Chemistry Council, which absorbed the American Plastics Council in 2002 — criticized the CCI report as “flawed.” In a statement, he said it “works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today’s recycling technologies.” Eisenberg did not specifically refute any of the claims made by CCI.

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the Vinyl Institute did not address any of the report’s claims but said it was “committed to increasing” the amount of polyvinyl chloride — a kind of plastic — that gets recycled each year. Eastman Chemical and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment in time for publication.

CCI hopes that its report “lays the foundation” for more ambitious legal challenges against the plastics and petrochemical industries. According to Alyssa Johl, CCI’s vice president of legal and general counsel, most lawsuits so far have targeted the makers of specific products — for instance, Keurig, which misleadingly placed the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on coffee pods that couldn’t actually be recycled.

These lawsuits “don’t go far enough,” Johl said. In her view, future cases should target the whole industry — including the fossil fuel producers themselves and their trade organizations, highlighting the integral role they played in promoting recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Such lawsuits are mostly likely to be brought by cities or state attorneys general, Johl said, and they may invoke public nuisance, consumer fraud, racketeering, or conspiracy laws — similar to successful legal challenges that have been brought against the tobacco and opioid industries. 

The most promising push so far has come from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who in 2022 began investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for their role in what he called an “aggressive campaign to deceive the public” about the viability of plastics recycling. That investigation is ongoing. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Petrochemical companies have known for 40 years that plastics recycling wouldn’t work on Feb 20, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

One of those residents is John Beard, the founder, president, and executive director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, as well as a former refinery worker. Beard explains that the industry exploits this allowance to pollute, affecting communities like his without concern for their lives. “We can’t simply stop breathing when they do these things,” Beard said. 

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has an opportunity to take action. Next spring, the federal agency will finalize its proposed regulations that may protect frontline communities like Port Arthur from petrochemical pollution. The proposed rules would strengthen monitoring standards and cut an estimated 6,000 tons of air pollution a year. 

Petrochemical facilities are often clustered in low-income and communities of color along the Gulf Coast, which have long organized against the outsized impacts of pollution and exposure to carcinogenic chemicals. The industry is the largest commercial consumer of oil and gas, processing extracted resources into products like fertilizers, pesticides, soaps, and plastic products. As demand for oil and gas as a fuel declines, many companies are increasingly pivoting to petrochemicals—so advocates say strengthening and enforcing these rules is more important than ever. 

“Historically, the regulation hasn’t matched the risk nearby communities live with every day,” said Dionne Delli-Gatti, the associate vice president of community engagement at the Environmental Defense Fund, a non-profit advocacy group. “We have seen under-regulation in the petrochemical industry for a very long time,” she added. 

The rules, which EPA is expected to finalize in spring 2024, would help address the concerns of the communities who have borne the brunt of this pollution. It would mandate additional monitoring for six chemicals the agency has listed as a priority concern. The proposal would apply to 218 facilities nationwide, nearly 60 percent of which are located in Texas and Louisiana. The map below includes the facilities impacted by the EPA’s proposed rule.

Advocates say to be effective, the new standards must guard against a loophole that allows for the release of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals when sites are starting up, shutting down, or during malfunctions. In 2008, a Washington, D.C. District Court ruled that these kinds of emissions exemptions were illegal. The EPA set 2016 as a deadline for states to revise their rules, eliminating this loophole. Yet many have ignored it. Creating a federal standard will help close that gap.

Currently, the petrochemical industry is allowed to operate with a certain degree of autonomy and secrecy. This is best illustrated through the pollution allowances built into the Clean Air Act. In the case of an extreme weather event, like a hurricane, a facility will release untold amounts of chemicals in order to relieve pressure or shut down. But this can happen during minor weather events too, like when Texas’ electrical grid is strained. Facilities themselves get to decide if a situation is an SSM event. And in some cases, petrochemical facilities will pollute more in a single SSM event than in an entire year of normal operations. 

Earlier this year, a Grist investigation found that this loophole has permitted companies to release 1.1 billion pounds of unpermitted pollution since 2002. Grist concluded that there was a relationship between precipitation and windspeed, and the amount of pollution facilities released: A 1 percent increase in precipitation averaged a 1.5 percent increase in pollution, and a 1 mile per hour increase in windspeed led to a 0.6 percent increase in pollution. As extreme weather events become more common, advocates fear polluting companies’ emissions excuses will increase in frequency. 

Earthjustice, on behalf of Environmental Defense Fund and 15 other environmental and community organizations, submitted technical comments to the EPA calling on the agency to finalize the strongest possible version of the rule. Grassroots organizations, community members and environmental leaders also voiced support for EPA’s proposal–many calling for the safeguards to cover a wider range of chemicals at more facilities throughout the country. Comments from residents living near polluting facilities are critical, said Delli-Gatti, as they offer a nuanced, first-hand perspective on the impacts of toxic pollution, and what can be done to address community needs.  

One of the most important results from the new rules may be an increase in the transparency demanded of companies that pollute, Delli-Gatti said. The proposal would require air quality monitoring at the fence line of chemical facilities. Currently, these companies self-report data on what they’re polluting, often derived from estimates, rather than actual measurements. But these emissions are often underestimated. Monitoring at the facility fence line would provide one way to verify what’s actually being emitted into the air. She argues that more needs to be done to understand the risks people face when exposed to multiple sources of the same chemical, or to several chemicals at the same time–and to ensure that regulations truly protect people’s health. Simply put, advocates say there isn’t enough accurate data about what is being polluted into the air. “Understanding what those emissions are will be really important in knowing exactly what needs to be done,” Delli-Gatti. 

Advocates in Houston are hoping that a strong EPA rule will encourage state environmental agencies to adopt stricter permitting and emissions protocols. In Texas, that means regulating facilities’ risk management plans so companies aren’t allowed to claim they’re protecting communities when they don’t, said Jennifer Hadayia, the executive director of Air Alliance Houston, an environmental justice organization. 

For example, facilities will frequently burn off natural gas through a process called venting or flaring. Companies can say burning these chemicals is necessary to relieve pressure from fuel tanks quickly in order to manage risk. This releases huge amounts of methane — a major contributor to climate change and a driver of poor air quality — into the atmosphere. “Industry would like us to think that flaring is the risk management plan,” Hadayia said. 

Beard says these kinds of excuses bely common knowledge about available alternatives. Reliable backup systems, for example, can reduce pressure of natural gas within the facility system and act as an alternative to venting and flaring. He says the current regulatory process is failing in its obligation to protect communities like his. Beard has recently filed two lawsuits in Texas, one raising objections to adding an additional pipeline to GoldenPass, a liquified natural gas plant in Port Arthur. He’s also filed a second lawsuit questioning the validity of air quality permit applications by Port Arthur LNG, a subsidiary of Sempra. 

“We’re sick and tired of being sacrificed for the oil and gas industry to make billions,” Beard said. “We have a right to be able to breathe clean and free air.”

One of the world’s leading international nonprofit organizations, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) creates transformational solutions to the most serious environmental problems. To do so, EDF links science, economics, law, and innovative private-sector partnerships. With more than 3 million members and offices in the United States, China, Mexico, Indonesia and the European Union, EDF’s scientists, economists, attorneys and policy experts are working in 28 countries to turn solutions into action.

Grist’s editorial team has covered the petrochemical industry previously. This article is sponsored content from EDF and is not connected to Grist’s previous coverage. Sponsors play no role in Grist’s editorial coverage.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Proposed regulations offer hope for communities battling petrochemical pollution on Oct 19, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist Creative.

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The Biden administration on Tuesday sued two corporations behind a petrochemical plant in Louisiana, arguing that the facility poses "unacceptably high cancer risks" to the low-income and predominantly Black residents of nearby communities and demanding significant cuts in toxic pollution.

On behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint asserting that carcinogenic chloroprene emissions from Denka Performance Elastomer's neoprene manufacturing activities at the Pontchartrain Works Site in St. John the Baptist Parish "present an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and welfare."

Under Section 303 of the Clean Air Act, the DOJ asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana to compel Denka, a Japanese company that purchased the plant from DuPont Specialty Products in 2015, to "immediately reduce its chloroprene emissions to levels that no longer cause or contribute to unacceptably high cancer risks within the communities surrounding the facility."

The White House's lawsuit stems from an emergency action petition that Earthjustice and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law submitted on behalf of Concerned Citizens of St. John, a local advocacy group.

Earthjustice attorney Deena Tumeh welcomed the Biden administration's intervention as "a long-awaited answer to the community's repeated calls for immediate action."

"EPA is finally treating this health crisis for what it is—an emergency," said Tumeh. "We hope this complaint will lead to a swift and significant reduction in chloroprene emissions."

"We are grateful that the EPA is finally taking the first steps to protect this community. For too long, St. John has been failed by every layer of government and we are now facing a dire health emergency and the highest cancer risk from air pollution in the nation as a result."

Denka makes neoprene, a synthetic rubber used to produce wetsuits, orthopedic braces, automotive belts, and other common goods, at the plant. Chloroprene, a chemical used to produce neoprene, is emitted into the air at the facility in LaPlace and travels to other towns in the parish, including Reserve and Edgard. Pontchartrain Works Site is the only place in the U.S. where the compound is emitted.

Average chloroprene concentrations in the air near the facility are up to 14 times higher than the levels recommended for a 70-year lifetime of exposure to the chemical, according to monitoring data cited in the complaint. More than 15,000 people live within two-and-a-half miles of the plant. Fifth Ward Elementary School is located a half-mile west and East St. John High School is about a mile-and-a-half north.

"In the aggregate, the thousands of people breathing this air are incurring a significantly higher cancer risk than would be typically allowed, and they are being exposed to a much greater cancer risk from Denka's air pollution than the majority of United States residents face," says the complaint. The risk "is especially grave for infants and children under the age of 16."

Noting that the DOJ's "environmental justice efforts require ensuring that every community, no matter its demographics, can breathe clean air and drink clean water," Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement that "our suit aims to stop Denka's dangerous pollution."

Robert Taylor, director of Concerned Citizens of St. John, said in a statement, "We are grateful that the EPA is finally taking the first steps to protect this community."

"For too long, St. John has been failed by every layer of government and we are now facing a dire health emergency and the highest cancer risk from air pollution in the nation as a result," said Taylor. "EPA must continue to advance environmental justice, as promised."

EPA Administrator Michael Regan reiterated the agency's commitment to doing so, describing Tuesday's move as an escalation in an ongoing fight launched after he spent five days visiting heavily polluted Gulf Coast communities in 2021.

"When I visited Saint John the Baptist Parish during my first Journey to Justice tour, I pledged to the community that EPA would take strong action to protect the health and safety of families from harmful chloroprene pollution from the Denka facility," Regan said in a statement. "This complaint filed against Denka delivers on that promise."

"The company has not moved far enough or fast enough to reduce emissions or ensure the safety of the surrounding community," said Regan. "This action is not the first step we have taken to reduce risks to the people living in St. John the Baptist Parish, and it will not be the last."

As The Associated Pressreported: "The complaint is the latest move by the Biden administration that targets pollution in an 85-mile stretch from New Orleans to Baton Rouge officially known as the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor, but more commonly called Cancer Alley. The region contains several hot spots where cancer risks are far above levels deemed acceptable by the EPA. The White House has prioritized environmental enforcement in communities overburdened by long-term pollution."

Last year, EPA concluded that Black residents of St. John the Baptist Parish are disproportionately harmed by toxic air pollution after Concerned Citizens of St. John and the Sierra Club accused the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the Louisiana Department of Health of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by failing to equally protect people of color. EPA is currently pursuing an agreement with the two state agencies, which have denied the allegations.

"This is a positive move in the right direction... This brings us hope. It's been a long time coming. We need action now for our children and want this to be put in place immediately."

Denka, which has lobbied the federal government for years in a bid to undermine peer-reviewed research revealing the cancer-causing properties of chloroprene, claimed Tuesday in a statement that it "is in compliance with its air permits and applicable law."

"EPA is taking an unprecedented step—deviating from its permitting and rulemaking authorities—to allege an 'emergency' based on outdated and erroneous science the agency released over 12 years ago," the Japanese petrochemical firm said.

Tuesday's lawsuit also names DuPont, which built the Pontchartrain Works Site in the 1960s and produced neoprene there for more than 50 years. The U.S.-based petrochemical giant still owns the land beneath the facility. As Denka's landlord, DuPont may need to provide "permission or cooperation to comply with the court's orders," says the complaint.

As The Guardianreported, "DuPont sold the plant to Denka in 2015 in a secretive deal, which The Guardianlater revealed was motivated by concerns from DuPont that it would face heavier regulation after the EPA's decision to classify chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen."

EPA is expected to propose a new rule for chloroprene emissions on March 31, according to Earthjustice, which said the agency has not updated the rule since it determined in 2010 that the compound is a likely carcinogen capable of causing irreversible damage to people's nervous, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and immune systems.

Speaking to The Guardian about Tuesday's lawsuit, Taylor from Concerned Citizens of St. John said: "This will have a tremendous impact on our struggle here. Over the six years we have been fighting this fight we haven't had anything as great as this to happen in terms of getting concrete action on emissions."

"The state government has totally ignored us—marches on the capitol, rallying—they wouldn't even give us an audience," he added. "And for the administration to come in and do this, it just validates our efforts."

The group's president, Mary Hampton, echoed that sentiment.

"This is a positive move in the right direction," Hampton said in a statement. "This brings us hope. It's been a long time coming. We need action now for our children and want this to be put in place immediately."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

“We could see the glow and plume of smoke from our station, and we’re 4 miles from the scene,” he recalled. “We realized we’re getting something much bigger than what we anticipated.”

When Laderer’s team arrived, alongside the fire departments from roughly 80 other towns across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, they found 38 cars of a 150-car train splayed along the tracks, with some emitting flames that smelled, as Laderer described it, of burning plastic. They would learn in the days that followed that 11 cars contained hazardous chemicals, including the highly toxic compounds vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, which are used in the manufacturing of common plastics. 

By Monday, three days after the February 3 derailment, the Norfolk Southern railroad company had sent in their own officials and contractors to perform a controlled burn-off of the vinyl chloride. The tactic was meant to prevent, as much as possible, more than 100,000 gallons of vinyl chloride from evaporating into the air and seeping into the soil and creek beds surrounding the train, although an as-yet-unknown quantity of it already had. (“Either we were going to blow it up, or it blows up itself,” Trent Conaway, the mayor of East Palestine, explained at a town hall the next week by way of illustrating a frustrating lack of options.)

But the burn didn’t go quite as planned. A towering, bulbous cloud of black smoke erupted from the train in the explosion and then spread over the surrounding area like a pool of oil, where it hung in the low atmosphere for hours and hours. Experts have attributed the smoke’s stubborn refusal to dissipate to a weather phenomenon called an inversion, where warm air that rises into the atmosphere after a sunny day traps the cold air coming off the ground as night falls. “The smoke that was supposed to stay up started banking down a bit on the area,” Laderer explained.

Jeremy Woods, a mechanic for the Darlington-based trucking company and repair shop Lync, described the scent that permeated the air all of Monday night as that of charred PVC pipe, but with a hint of chlorine that reminded him of the YMCA pool. Trisha Blinkiewicz, whose home sits about 4 miles east of the derailment, went to dinner in nearby Chippewa, Pennsylvania, on that same Monday evening. She found the town buried in a low-lying fog that felt thick on the skin, with a distinct, abrasive smell of burnt plastic.

The train that crashed in East Palestine derailed about 20 miles northeast of its destination of Conway, Pennsylvania, one of the industrial towns and small cities that line the Ohio River as it flows west from its mouth in Pittsburgh. The Upper Ohio River Valley — which stretches, roughly speaking, from that mouth down to where West Virginia meets the tip of Kentucky — has been the site of proliferating petrochemical development over the past decade, as oil and gas companies turn their attention away from fuel and toward a much richer prospect: plastics.

Ethane gas fracked from the Marcellus Shale, which extends across Pennsylvania into the eastern edge of Ohio and northern West Virginia, can be “cracked” into ethylene, a flammable gas critical to the production  of plastics used for packaging, bottles, and electrical insulation, among other products. And all of the infrastructure that is required for every step of plastic production and transport — wells, pipelines, refineries, ports, plants — has spread like a spider’s web over the region.

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The accelerating petrochemical development is simply the newest incarnation of industrial exploitation for a region that has been plagued by legacy pollution since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The pressing question is whether the people who have lived here for generations have hit their breaking point, and whether they feel empowered to demand more from the corporations that threaten their homes and the politicians that enable them.

“Honestly, I never expected this big an incident to happen in my entire life, let alone my first month as fire chief,” said Laderer. “And Norfolk Southern are not telling us a lot, and they’ve got me questioning things.”

The unique Appalachian topography of the greater Ohio Valley tends to fortify the pollution created within it, as if the geology that had endowed the region with such bountiful fossil fuel and mineral reserves also cursed it to suffer more for them. Major industrial facilities and railroad hubs are usually established on the river, for ease of both transportation and waste disposal, and the emissions that they produce get trapped by the steep hillsides that frame the tributaries.

Many houses in the rural community of Enon Valley, Pennsylvania sit just a few feet from the railroad tracks. Grist / Eve Andrews

Left: A decommissioned train sits behind the Greersburg Tavern in Darlington, Pennsylvania. Right: A sign in East Palestine, Ohio, expresses hope for the future. Grist / Eve Andrews

The Shell cracker plant, which began operations in the fall of 2022, is a sprawling behemoth on the edge of the Ohio River in Monaca, Pennsylvania, directly across the river from the derailed train’s destination in Conway. The plant, which is widely considered to be a grim arbiter of future petrochemical development in the region, takes locally fracked gas and breaks it down at a molecular level to manufacture the ethylene “nurdles” — translucent plastic pellets the size of a grain of arborio rice — that make up many household and single-use plastics.

Residents of eastern Beaver County, which is quite rural, say that they have not personally felt the adverse effects of the Shell plant. They do not smell chemicals in the air or see nurdles floating in the creeks near their homes, unlike those who live downstream of the plant. They are more or less protected by the same topography that traps pollution around the facilities that create it, with a buffer of hills and hollers that rise and fall between their communities and the plant itself. But the derailment in East Palestine on February 3 brought the more disastrous consequences of plastic production far closer to home.

Ron Stidmon moved from New York City to Enon Valley, Pennsylvania, in 2003, seeking stillness and solitude after having lost several friends in the 9/11 attacks. Enon Valley, which sits a few miles northeast of East Palestine on the border between Beaver and Lawrence counties, is secluded and quiet, dotted with both Amish farms and sprawling properties. Stidmon bought a farm, unsuccessfully tried to make a lot of different crops work, and finally cracked the code of profitability with garlic. He has steadfastly committed to organic practices on his land for 20 years, to the extent where he grumbles when a neighbor burns a tire on an adjacent property.

When Norfolk Southern performed the controlled burn-off of vinyl chloride on February 6, Stidmon recalled, “it looked like the end of the world with the smoke coming up.” He’s now watching the wells and ponds on his property daily, with no other option than to simply wait for testing to learn  if carcinogenic chemicals from the derailment have leached into the aquifer. He’s optimistic that his water supply will be spared of contamination, simply because he’s upstream of the crash.

“If we were a mile or so west, it would be completely different. If the winds had been blowing a different direction, it would have been different,” he said. “It’s a matter of luck — has nothing to do with having a plan, or setting up that we’re safe.”

Stidmon had been anticipating a disaster like this for years. In 2016, he was on the Darlington Township’s Board of Supervisors, where he began to raise the issue of railroad safety. He was concerned by the sheer volume and frequency of trains routed along the track that wraps around Darlington, running north through the village of New Galilee, east across Enon Valley, and over the state border into East Palestine. According to Stidmon, he spent a year trying to get Norfolk Southern to simply provide the number of trains that came through in a day. When months went by and the company never answered, he and a few neighbors got together to stay up for 24-hour shifts, watch the tracks, and count. The figure at which they arrived was 60.

“[Norfolk Southern] won’t do anything to address the people’s concerns to address legitimate problems. They have such a cavalier attitude: ‘This is our track, our business.’ It’s discomfiting to know that anything can happen, with practically no repercussions,” said Stidmon. “You can live your own life as clean as you want, but these guys can destroy everything you’ve done to keep it clean for yourself.”

Jason Blinkiewicz owns the trucking company and repair shop Lync, which is located a little over a mile from the derailment. He lives in Enon Valley, where the railroad runs right in front of his house. (On the night of February 3, he and his wife Trisha found that the engine of the train that had crashed had “cut and boogied” to come sit on the tracks in their front yard.) He, like most of his neighbors and employees, doesn’t trust Norfolk Southern and assurances from the Environmental Protection Agency that the air and water have been safe to breathe and drink. The borough of Enon Valley commissioned independent testing of wells and streams, and the community is awaiting results.

“It’s normalized to some degree because there’s already low air quality in the area,” Blinkiewicz said . “The cracker plant is putting out volatile organic compounds, or what’s the nuclear power plant doing, or how about the coal plant right behind it that they shut down not that long ago? What about the mills in Midland and the steel plant in Koppel?”

But all of those facilities are far enough from Blinkiewicz’s home and workplace that he hasn’t felt their impacts nearly as acutely as those of the derailment. “I think it’s the first time, in my 46 years on this planet, in this area, that it gives you an uneasy feeling about everything,” he said. 

“And as much as it pains me to say, my trust has to lie in our government. Which is hard to do, right? But we have to rely on those government agencies to protect us. That’s what they’re there for.”

On the night of February 15, East Palestine hosted a town hall at the local high school for residents to ask questions of both state and federal EPA officials. (Representatives from Norfolk Southern pulled out hours before the meeting due to “the growing physical threat” to their employees’ safety. Those threats have not been substantiated.) Volunteers with the East Liverpool, Ohio-based community group River Valley Organizing, were standing outside of the high school’s front door passing out flyers for the group’s own town hall to take place the following week.

Amanda Kiger, director of the group, is familiar with the pervasive distrust of government, regardless of political orientation, in the Ohio Valley region. It is hard to have faith in one’s representatives with a centuries-long legacy of politicians whose loyalties have been bought by industry.

“Historical pollution has been just layered on this region for so long,” Kiger said several days later in an interview. Stoneware potteries, coal mines, and steel mills mostly died off to be replaced by refineries, hazardous waste incinerators, unconventional gas wells, and petrochemical facilities. “And when you look at communities that are environmentally devastated, bad and polluting commerce attracts more bad and polluting commerce. They can go: ‘We didn’t do that, they did that, that’s been there for years.’”

Two days before the town meeting, a week after the black cloud of burning vinyl chloride spread over East Palestine and its neighboring towns, residents around the Shell cracker plant about 20 miles southeast started to post reports of a large flame emitting from it.

The flame was evidence of a “flare,” which is a mechanism meant to regulate malfunctioning of the plant’s machinery by expelling excess hydrocarbons into the air. This flaring, while preventing a more disastrous outcome for the plant and its surroundings, pumps volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere. In just a few short months since being operational, Shell has already exceeded its annual allowance of VOC emissions as permitted under the Clean Air Act and the Pennsylvania Air Pollution Control Act. That’s in spite of the fact that the facility has the second-highest permit for VOC emissions in the state. In fact, the environmental organizations Clean Air Council and Environmental Integrity Project intend to sue Shell for the plant’s early violations.

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Amid hopes and fears, a plastics boom in Appalachia is on hold

Beth Gardiner

Due to bureaucratic delays from both Shell (which is required to notify the community of flaring activity) and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, it can sometimes take as long as a month for residents of Monaca and the surrounding towns to learn that a plant malfunction happened. But the resident groups Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community (BCMAC) and Eyes on Shell have asked local “watchdogs” to post whether they’ve observed a flare or felt changes in the scent or feel of the air around the plant.

Anaïs Peterson, a volunteer with Eyes on Shell, notes that in the months prior to the Shell plant’s official opening in November, the group of concerned citizens that she helped convene would see about 40 attendees at their monthly meetings. By January of this year, several months and multiple flaring events into the plant’s operations, that number had tripled. 

“Sometimes the bad things that happen in the community are the moments you can bring folks together,” said Kiger. “And it takes the community coming together to push back on federal and state legislators.

“But am I really sick and tired that my community is the casualty, and we have to be the message-bringers? Absolutely. It’s getting overwhelming.”

On the evening of February 23, dozens of residents from within several miles’ radius of East Palestine crowded into a small storefront on the town’s commercial thoroughfare for River Valley Organizing’s town hall event, spilling out of the main room into the lobby and kitchen. A panel of independent experts in environmental cleanup and hazardous chemicals answered questions from the community. The atmosphere darkened as those in the room processed new information: that the EPA had not been testing air, water, or soil samples for dioxins, potential toxic byproducts of the vinyl chloride explosion that can persist in land and sediment for decades without proper cleanup.

As the evening went on, the questions grew more distressed: When I go home tonight, what is the first thing I can do to make sure the air is clean for my children to breathe? How can I protect my livestock and pets that roam land that might be contaminated with dioxins? Is my home ruined forever? And, above all: How do we make sure Norfolk Southern sees justice for what they’ve done to us?

“You would have tripped over your own shoes without a flashlight, the smoke was so thick — like being in a cave,” said one resident of New Springfield, Ohio, a few miles northwest of the derailment, who expressed concern to the experts assembled that he couldn’t safely grow produce and raise livestock on the land that had been contaminated by that smoke. “We’ve been pretty self-sufficient, and now we’re zero self-sufficient. What do you pay property taxes on 40 acres for if you can’t grow a tomato?”

One of the great, enduring appeals of rural American life is the dream of complete independence. You buy property, build a homestead, grow food, raise your family. Your children play in the creek in the summer and ride sleds down sloping white hills in the winter. But when one powerful corporation’s mishap puts all of that at risk, it becomes clear that a so-called independent existence is only protected through the strength of community.

“I don’t care if you’re red or blue, I don’t care if I beat you up in the bar 10 years ago,” said Jamie Cozza, an organizer for River Valley Organizing and lifelong resident of East Palestine, before urging those gathered to contact every elected official in the region. “We need to come together right now and use our voices, because no one else is going to fight for us.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a growing petrochemical hub, the East Palestine derailment triggers ‘an uneasy feeling’ on Mar 1, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Eve Andrews.

Dear President Biden:

As a little girl growing up in St. James Parish, Louisiana, my family lived off the land. We raised cattle, sowed seeds, and fished the Mississippi River. But what used to be our lifeblood has now turned to poison. Where there were once fig and pecan trees, there are now petrochemical plants. Known to many, including yourself, as "Cancer Alley," with more than 200 deadly plants along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River, my hometown is quickly becoming Death Row.

St. James Parish now has the most polluted air in America, with cancer rates more than 50 percent higher than the national average.

I used to be a special education teacher, a profession I know you admire deeply. Led by God, I left the teaching profession in 2019 to fight for environmental justice full-time in my community. After watching too many in my community become sick, I founded RISE St. James, a faith-based, grassroots environmental organization that started from just one small meeting in my den with my daughter, Shamell, taking notes.

At first we didn't know why we were getting sick. Around us, our family and friends were suddenly falling victim to debilitating illnesses. It felt like almost every day another loved one was receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis and we couldn't figure out why. But it didn't take long to connect these illnesses to the rise of petrochemical plants in our backyards.

When these fancy fossil fuel CEOs marched into our predominantly Black neighborhoods and promised us good jobs and financial freedom, we didn't even have time to bat an eye. We could never have imagined that years later these same companies would turn our land and everything that grows from it into poison.

St. James Parish now has the most polluted air in America, with cancer rates more than 50 percent higher than the national average. Our air is quite literally killing us, and no one seems to really mind. Sure, there have been promises. You yourself uttered the words "Cancer Alley," during your first week in office, something very few politicians of your stature have been willing to do. This has given us hope, and when you sent EPA Administrator Michael Reagan down to visit me and other activists, we were encouraged that change will come.

However, we are still dying, struggling to breath polluted air and without clean water to drink. Our gardens are producing inedible vegetables, and our bath water leaves us itching for days. I myself have developed autoimmune hepatitis and was found to have aluminum and lead in my body after years of living next to mega-polluting chemical plants. It is as if we have been written off as sacrifice zones, an entire community exchanged for a corporate profit. But you can save us. You must save us.

President Biden, I am coming to D.C to honor the hundreds of lives that have been taken from us due to the petrochemical and fossil fuel industry. Joining me will be dozens of other activists who have lost loved ones, and we will be holding a New Orleans style second line funeral procession that will end at your front door. Please meet me there. Let us talk about how we can save my communities and the others like it.

These petrochemical plants are cutting our lives short, and our children are being robbed of their futures. As a fellow devout Catholic and grandparent, I am making a personal plea to you, President Biden. Please save us. You too understand the gut-wrenching pain of losing a loved one to cancer. Help to make it so that no one else in St. James Parish has to feel this pain. Use your power to declare Cancer Alley a State of Emergency, especially St. James Parish, declare a climate emergency, halt the petrochemical build out in the Gulf South and help our children and grandchildren to live long, healthy lives. Meet me in Washington, D.C on October 25th and let us save our children and grandchildren's futures, together.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Sharon Lavigne.

The strategy appears to be working. According to a new report from the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA, 20 states have passed bills to exempt chemical recycling facilities from waste management requirements — despite significant evidence that most facilities end up incinerating the plastic they receive.

“These facilities are in actuality waste-to-toxic-oil plants, processing plastic to turn it into a subpar and polluting fuel,” the report says. Tok Oyewole, GAIA’s U.S. and Canada policy and research coordinator and the author of the report, called for federal regulation to crack down on the plastic industry’s “misinformation” and affirm chemical recycling’s status as a waste management process.

Chemical recycling is an umbrella term that refers to a handful of different processes. The most common ones, pyrolysis and gasification, start by melting discarded plastics under high heat and pressure, either in a low-oxygen atmosphere (pyrolysis) or by using air and steam (gasification). Both processes produce an oily liquid that can technically be re-refined back into plastic. However, despite decades of experimentation, the petrochemical industry has never been able to overcome economic and technological barriers to do so at scale. 

Instead, the fuel produced by most chemical recycling facilities ends up being burned — either onsite or after being shipped to cement kilns and waste processors across the country. This allows companies to generate energy from the discarded plastic, but at great cost to the environment and public health: According to one recent investigation from the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, a single chemical recycling facility in Oregon produces nearly half a million pounds of benzene, lead, cadmium, and other hazardous waste per year, along with hazardous air pollutants that can cause cancer and birth defects. The report also found that, of the eight chemical recycling facilities currently operating in the U.S., six are located near communities whose residents are disproportionately Black or brown. Five of these facilities are primarily “plastic-to-fuel” operations, two are turning plastic into chemical components whose end uses aren’t disclosed, and one claims to be turning carpet into nylon.  

If pyrolysis and gasification can’t turn plastic back into plastic — not economically or at scale, anyway — why does the petrochemical industry want to pass legislation that calls it manufacturing?

Lee Bell, a policy adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, a coalition of more than 600 nonprofit organizations, said there are a couple reasons. First off, it’s a great PR move. What the industry wants, he explained, “is some sort of leverage to prevent regulation, and currently that’s what chemical recycling is.” By convincing lawmakers that they’re giving new life to old plastics, petrochemical companies may be able to stave off more stringent policies to crack down on plastic production. For example, in its opposition to a major plastic-reduction bill that recently passed in California, the American Chemistry Council cited its investments in chemical recycling. 

The other reason is more immediate. Waste management facilities are usually subject to tighter public health and environmental regulations than manufacturing facilities — both at the federal level and by individual states. They may be required to submit toxic air contaminant inventories to regulators, or they may be subject to more stringent pollution caps.

Chemical recyclers don’t want to have to meet these regulations, said Veena Singla, a senior scientist for the NRDC. “They’re trying to duck those requirements and go for the more lax requirements for manufacturing.”

Jed Thorp, state director for the Rhode Island chapter of Clean Water Action, an environmental nonprofit, said he’s seen this firsthand in his own state, in a recent bill that proposed exempting new chemical recycling facilities from waste management regulations. Doing so, Thorp said, would have absolved the facilities’ operators from having to hold public hearings, accept comments from community members, and disclose the plants’ projected pollution.  

The Rhode Island bill, which passed the state Senate in June, was ultimately rejected by House legislators, although Thorp expects it to return next year — potentially with smarter messaging from its petrochemical industry backers. Thorp said he expects groups like the American Chemistry Council to “reinvent the whole argument and talking points on this to be able to better sell it in the future.” 

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the American Chemistry Council rejected the characterization of chemical recycling as incineration and pledged to continue advocating for it to be regulated as a manufacturing process. Matthew Kastner, a spokesperson for the trade group, said that solid waste regulations are often “irrelevant” to the processes involved in chemical recycling and that plastic-to-fuel is “no longer the focus” of most facilities.

According to GAIA’s report, lawmakers have proposed legislation to exempt chemical recycling from waste management regulations in at least five other states, including Michigan and New York. Other bills not tracked by GAIA may provide financial incentives to build more pyrolysis and gasification facilities or explicitly count them as “recycling” in states’ extended producer responsibility laws. (These laws require plastic makers to foot the bill for recycling the products they make.)

The news isn’t all bad, however. GAIA identifies some positive trends, including legislative efforts in Oregon and Minnesota to accurately define pyrolysis, gasification, and other “chemical recycling” processes as incineration — aka waste management. Those bills were ultimately unsuccessful, but Oyewole said they suggest policymakers are catching on to the petrochemical industry’s strategy. 

“Some legislators are learning more and not letting the wool be pulled over their eyes about what these processes are,” she said. 

Another potentially positive sign: The Environmental Protection Agency announced last November that it had begun to consider whether chemical recycling should be regulated under Section 129 of the Clean Air Act. This would define chemical recycling processes as “incineration” once and for all — potentially delivering a forceful blow to the petrochemical industry’s state-by-state legislative strategy, although Oyewole said it’s unclear whether the agency’s determination would override existing state legislation.

Besides restricting plastic production — which is ultimately the most important solution to the plastic pollution crisis — Oyewole suggested some additional actions lawmakers could take to keep chemical recycling in check. For example, they could ban the burning of toxic chemicals that are frequently found in plastics, such as PFAS. Prioritizing environmental justice could also help. One bill introduced in Arizona, for example, would create an environmental justice task force to ensure community-wide participation and input in proposals to build industrial facilities — like chemical recycling plants — in low-income communities and communities of color. 

Expanded public education may also be needed, Oyewole added, in particular to offset the petrochemical industry’s inaccurate use of the word “recycling.” “Thus far, the plastic industry has succeeded in presenting these facilities as positive and necessary by using the misleading labels of ‘chemical’ or ‘advanced recycling,’” GAIA said in its report. 

Singla, with NRDC, offered an alternative way to refer to the process, joking that she should have used “waste-to-fuel” throughout her own organization’s report. That way, “we could have abbreviated it WTF.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The petrochemical industry is convincing states to deregulate plastic incineration on Aug 18, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Bogus Russian motion

China' ideological campaign at home came as Beijing voted for a draft resolution by Russia tabled at the United Nations Security Council calling attention to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine but failing to mention its role as the invading power. The motion was defeated after receiving only two votes: Russia's and China's.

Analysts said the motion was an attempt by Russia to absolve itself of responsibility for the war, while China said there was a need to form a consensus on humanitarian grounds despite political differences.

"Russia's move was aimed at shedding its moral responsibility and to ask for the rest of the world to endorse its invasion of Ukraine," Shih told RFA. "What's bizarre is that it turns the situation into a war between two parties who don't want ordinary people to suffer the destruction brought by war, so are calling on others to help out the refugees and ordinary people."

"It will be harder to confront Russia if it plays the role of rescuer," he said.

Shih said the presence of Russia, which holds the power of veto on the security council, would make it impossible for the U.N. to send peacekeeping forces into Ukraine.

"[Also], if other countries carry out humanitarian aid on its behalf, that will help Russia towards a military defeat of Ukraine," Shih said. "So nobody was going to agree to that."

One the other hand, Russia was able to veto motions by France and other countries condemning the invasion. "It won't recognize itself as the aggressor here," he said.

Beijing's goodwill towards the Kremlin only seems to extend so far, however.

China's state-run Sinopec Group has suspended talks for a major petrochemical investment and a gas marketing venture in Russia,  Reuters reported on Friday.

"The move by Asia's biggest oil refiner to hit the brakes on a potentially half-billion-dollar investment in a gas chemical plant and a venture to market Russian gas in China highlights the risks, even to Russia's most important diplomatic partner, of unexpectedly heavy Western-led sanctions," the agency reported.

Beijing has repeatedly opposed international sanctions against Russia and refused to term Russia's war as an invasion or its actions in Ukraine.

But the CCP is keen to protect its own economy from their economic impact nonetheless.

The report came after U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday that China knows its economic future is tied to the West, after warnings from Washington that Beijing could regret siding with Russia.

Chinese political commentator Chen Pokong said Xi is planning to seek a third term in office at the CCP Party Congress later this year, comparing his extension of time in power to that of Putin.

"Putin's extended re-elections, indefinite re-elections and long-term rule have taught the rest of the world a painful lesson and taken Russian backwards and brought war and danger to the rest of the world," Chen wrote in a commentary aired on RFA.

"Any leader who is obsessed with power and seeks to rule for a long time or for life, regardless of their excuse, will, without exception, bring harm and disaster to their country and people, and quite possibly on the whole of humanity," he said.

"Deep down in their hearts, dictators only care about their own power, fame and fortune, and not about the safety or well-being of the people, let alone the interests of humanity," Chen wrote.

Chieh Chung, a research fellow at the National Policy Foundation on the democratic island of Taiwan, said the big question was whether China would provide military assistance to Russia.

"I don't think Russia lacks conventional ammunition; their problem now is that they can't warehouse these materials and send them to the front line," Chieh told RFA.

"If China wants to give Russia military assistance, it won't be in the form of major weapon's systems," he said, adding that much of China's weaponry is homegrown and incompatible with Russian systems, as well as being easily identifiable.

Electronic components or parts are more likely, as they can't easily be categorized into purely military or civilian in nature.

Former Soviet-era military officer Aqil Rustamzade has predicted that the Russian military will soon run out of electronic components, leaving it potentially unable even to hit any targets within weeks.

Taiwan has now placed an export ban, in line with international sanctions, on its GPS systems that are currently being used by the Russian army, and which Russia can't produce by itself, he said, predicting that stocks are likely to run out soon.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hwang Chun-mei, Hsia Hsiao-hwa and Fong Tak Ho.