A Texas city has been inundated with mountains of plastic waste that hasn’t been touched for a year and a half because the disposal facility continues to fail fire safety tests.
At Wright Waste Management, 20 miles outside of downtown Houston, hundreds of pounds of plastic waste are simply stored behind a locked gate.
According to CBS News, the garbage has not been touched for over a year and a half.
To address the ongoing problem of plastic pollution, the Houston Recycling Collaboration was formed, consisting of the City of Houston, ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell, Cyclyx International and FCC Environmental Services.
Supposedly it should be possible to recycle any plastic either mechanically – in the conventional way – or chemically burn it to produce a new plastic or fuel.
But 20 months after the program began, environmental groups found that plastic discarded by residents was still not being chemically recycled, CBS News reported.
Cyclyx International is scheduled to open another sorting facility in mid-2025, but contamination is currently piling up at the Wright facility, which has failed several fire safety inspections, the outlet said.
The facility does not have the required operating permit to store hazardous materials, flammable and combustible liquids, liquefied petroleum gas and other combustible materials, and has failed fire inspections by Harris County Fire three times, CBS and Inside Climate News found.
Wright Waste Management, 20 miles outside of downtown Houston, has hundreds of pounds of plastic trash sitting behind locked gates. The trash hasn’t been touched in over a year and a half.
According to the documents, the company did not have adequate fire access and had no means of controlling a fire that might break out.
Things became even more dramatic when FCC Environmental Services withdrew from the project because it “did not want to associate its reputation and image with such irregular and risky practices,” CEO Inigo Sanz said in a letter.
It said it was against the exclusive chemical recycling of plastics and that the Houston Recycling Collaboration should “promote both mechanical and chemical recycling”.
The company also said it could not sustain storing hundreds of pounds of plastic in a facility while waiting for chemical recycling to become available.
The Wright facility has filed a letter of intent with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to transition from a pure cardboard recycler to a solid waste recycling facility in September 2023.
It was supposed to be possible to either mechanically recycle any plastic – the traditional way – or chemically burn it to make new plastic or fuel. However, 20 months later, environmental groups found that the plastic residents had discarded was still not being chemically recycled.
According to TCEQ spokesman Ricky Richter, their application is still “under review.”
When CBS asked about the fire inspections, the owner, Stratton Wright, referred them to Cyclyx, who responded by saying, “Wright does not represent us and this is currently only an interim solution until we can get (our) facility operational again.”
However, Exxon Mobil’s chemical recycling facility in Baytown is now operational. The company says it has already processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste and hopes to soon reach the one billion pound mark.
Nevertheless, the US Environmental Protection Agency stated that chemical recycling should not be considered recycling at all.
Critics argue that chemical recycling is merely a promise to keep plastic production high and does not actually solve the environmental problem, according to CBS News.
The facility does not have the required operating permit for the storage of hazardous materials, flammable and combustible liquids, liquefied petroleum gas and other combustible materials and has failed the Harris County Fire inspection three times.
“Recycling may be a very, very small part of the solution, but it will not solve our enormous plastic pollution problem,” Veena Singla, adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University, told CBS News.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is investigating Exxon for allegedly misleading public reporting on pollution and recycling and the “myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.”
However, Exxon points to its figures and says that this cannot be a myth as £60 million is already covered.
“I’m not sure I think it’s a myth if we’re actually doing it,” Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for advanced recycling, told CBS News.
The Wright facility is expected to generate even more waste as the Houston Recycling Collaboration increased the number of customer collection points from one to three last April.
