Most plastic 'advanced recycling' plants in the United States aren't actually recycling plastic but instead converting it into a dirty fuel, while producing toxic waste in low-income communities, a study by a leading environmental group said Monday.
An estimated 242 million metric tons of plastic waste is generated globally every year, polluting cities and clogging oceans.
But a research report by the Natural Resources Defense Council , a non-profit that has helped influence key legislation since it was founded in 1970, accused the"There has been a lot of energy and enthusiasm around this idea of chemical recycling as a potential part of the solution for the plastics waste crisis," Veena Singla, a senior scientist at the NRDC who authored the brief, told AFP.
But according to the company's own figures, it is shipping hundreds of thousands of pounds of styrene oil to be burned for energy rather than converted back to plastic. Reached for comment, Agilyx told AFP:"We share the view that the world has a plastic waste problem, that not enough plastic is recycled, that too many plastics end up in landfills and our oceans, and that many types of plastics are not being recycled into useful products.It added that the amount of hazardous waste produced by chemical recycling was not"significant."