San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The missing equations at Exxon Mobil’s advanced plastic recycling plant
BAYTOWN — Exxon Mobil Corp.’s vision of recycling plastic begins here at its massive petrochemical complex, and in many ways, so does that of the city of Houston and its nearly 2-year-old recycling collaboration with the oil industry.
It’s a vision that remains murky at best. The details are obscured by cheery promotional videos trumpeting environmentally friendly concepts and by corporate claims of the need to protect proprietary technology.
Since last December, Exxon Mobil has touted its “advanced recycling” facility in Baytown, which began operating commercially that month, as one of the largest in North America and potentially the first of others designed to support a “circular economy.” The intent, the corporation says, is to enable its customers — manufacturers and retail brands that use plastic for everything from bottles to car bumpers — to claim they are using plastic with recycled content in order to meet consumer-driven sustainability goals.
Unlike mechanical recycling, which can be used only for a narrow range of used plastics, advanced — or chemical — recycling is billed as suitable for all types, since it breaks them down into basic chemicals that can be used as pure feedstock for new products. Exxon Mobil says the proprietary process used at Baytown will lessen the need to extract new virgin fossil fuels to make petrochemicals for plastics and reduce the amount of unrecycled plastic going to landfills.
Yet the company has declined to reveal some of the most basic information about the new facility, including the source of the plastic waste it has been recycling and how much new plastic it makes from old plastic. Nor will it comment in detail on the chemical process it uses.
Outside experts say they believe the yield of new plastics is very low, and certainly only a tiny fraction of the plastic material that Exxon Mobil continues to manufacture from petrochemicals.
In response to questions from Inside Climate News, the company acknowledged that not all the plastic waste it accepts at Baytown gets recycled into new plastic and that at least some gets turned into transportation fuels — something that its announcement
about starting up the facility and its online description of the technology do not mention.
Claims and skepticism
Yet waste-to-fuel operations are hard to describe as sustainable or “circular,” a term that generally indicates that raw materials are used over and over, not just once or twice.
The shortage of specifics furnished about the Baytown operation has left environmental advocates and some academic experts confused or highly skeptical about Exxon Mobil’s plastics recycling claims. More broadly, it has raised suspicions about advanced recycling itself, which
the chemical industry is aggressively advocating as a key solution to runaway plastic pollution as the United Nations seeks to negotiate a global plastics treaty by 2024.
All of this is focusing attention on the Baytown Complex, a jumble of tanks, pipes, stacks, flares and other equipment sprawling across more than 5 square miles along the 50-mile-long Houston Ship Channel. Described as one of the largest refinery and petrochemical operations in the world, it has been the target of a bitter legal battle over air pollution and permit violations for over a decade. For some neighbors, the advanced recycling operation is just one
more component to worry about.
As the big fish in the Houston Recycling Collaboration, a public-private partnership formed in early 2022 to dramatically boost plastics recycling, Exxon Mobil casts the recycling operation as a plus for all involved.
It will “play an important role by breaking down plastics that could not be recycled in traditional, mechanical methods,” said Karen McKee, president of Exxon Mobil’s Product Solutions company, in announcing the startup. “We are collaborating with government, industry and communities to scale up the collection and sorting of plastic waste that will improve recycling rates and help our customers around the world meet their sustainability goals.”
The company also claims benefits in the climate change arena: Every 1,000 tons of plastic waste that it processes will result in a decrease of 19% to 49% in greenhouse gas emissions, when compared with those generated by processing the same amount of fossil-based feedstock, Exxon Mobil says.
No breakdown of input, output
When the petroleum giant announced late last year that it
had started commercial-scale advanced recycling operations at the Baytown Complex, 25 miles east of Houston, it said it was assessing similar facilities at its operations in Beaumont; Baton Rouge, La.; and Joliet, Ill., as well as at sites in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands and Singapore, with a goal of processing 1 billion pounds of plastic waste per year globally by 2026.
Hinting at Exxon Mobil’s potential in the advanced recycling arena, the Minderoo Foundation, an Australian nonprofit whose causes include battling the plastic glut in the world’s oceans, ranks Exxon Mobil as the largest producer of virgin polymers used to make the single-use variety.
Beyond declining to identify the sources of the plastic it is processing or the volume of new plastic it is making, Exxon Mobil does not specify how much is turned into fuel. Earlier this year, in a new “draft national strategy” to prevent plastic pollution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reaffirmed that it does not regard the conversion of plastic waste to fuels, or energy production, to be recycling.