A NEW PURPOSE?
King of Prussia developer wants facility for plastics recycling
A King of Prussia company plans to develop the former Titus Generating Station in Cumru Township into a plastic recycling facility that would take trash and turn it into plastic pellets.
It would be the first facility in the United States for ReFined Plastics LLC, said Joe D’Ascenzo, president and chief technology officer of the five-year-old advanced recycling company.
The pellets would be virgin grade, meaning they are a quality that could be used by a variety of plastic manufacturers. The material won’t originate in the recycle bin but will come from household trash.
“This technology is proven at scale and Titus will be the first to use garbage destined for a landfill,” D’Ascenzo said. “If it has polymer on it, it can be treated at Titus.”
D’Ascenzo, a Chester County native and graduate of Ursinus College, has a master’s degree in molecular biology from Drexel University. He helped develop the process, some of which is patented.
“Some of things we are doing are world-changing,” D’Ascenzo said.
He said the facility could be running as early as the end of 2022.
The total investment in the project will be approximately $120 million, D’Ascenzo said.
He already has some investors and industry partners and is looking for more. Worst case scenario, he said,
it would be running by the end of 2023, depending on negotiations and satisfying a myriad of regulations. The company received a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
D’Ascenzo has made few public statements about the project. He appeared before township officials in 2018 and the state House Energy and Environmental Resources Committee last year. But a lot of work has gone on already behind the scenes.
“To date we have spent over $3 million,” D’Ascenzo said.
D’Ascenzo said he has been negotiating for two years to buy the 200-acre Titus property from Titus Power and REMA (Reliant Energy Mid-Atlantic).
He plans to hire 150 to 160 people to work at the facility. D’Ascenzo said he also plans to redevelop the property and lease parcels to other companies in the renewable energy sector.
D’Ascenzo has spoken with representatives of Western Berks Landfill, which is an adjacent property and could be a source of waste to convert to plastic. No deals or agreements have been made, he said.
The facility would process 1,600 tons of waste per day, D’Ascenzo said. About 98% of the waste would be converted to virgin grade pellets for use in the plastics industry. The rest would be sorted for recycling or converted into fuel.Titus Station’s three existing boilers with turbines would be recommissioned to provide renewable energy to the grid, its consultant, Toronto-based DigiMax, wrote in a March news release. ReFined Plastics uses a process called pyrolysis, which uses high heat without oxygen to break down waste. It is has been used to turn plastic waste into jet fuel.
Titus history
While developing plans for the facility, D’Ascenzo said he has spoken with about 50 former workers of the storied coal-generating plant that towered over West Shore Bypass and along the Schuylkill River. He said he appreciated how the facility has been part of the fabric of Berks County.
Built in 1948 by Metropolitan Edison Co., Titus it was named after former Met-Ed president O. Titus and was completed in 1951, but did not go online until 1953. The site was selected because of its access to water and coal. Until its closure, coal arrived by Norfolk Southern rail cars as it did in the 1950s. It drew about 2 million gallons of water a day from the Schuylkill for its cooling tower.
The aging power plant began deactivation Sept. 1, 2013, after multiple owners tried to keep up with increasingly rigorous environmental regulations.
Titus Station, which had three coal-fired boilers and two gas-fired or oil-fired combustion turbines with a capacity of 274 megawatts, was fully decommissioned in June 2014. It was one of hundreds of coal-fired plants in the United States that have been decommissioned in favor of cleaner natural gas.
Regulating a new industry
Last week, the state House Energy and Environmental Resources Committee passed a bill that could help advanced recycling businesses like ReFined Plastics. While the Department of Environmental Protection offered input for an amendment to clarify language in the bill some environment groups are critical of it.
State Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, who represents Lehigh and portions of Berks County, was the prime sponsor of the bill, HB 1808.
He said the bill was crafted after he had heard a presentation about a year ago from Agilyx, an advanced recycling company in Philadelphia. Company representatives spoke about struggles they had in the regulatory process.
The problem, said MacKenzie, was that advanced recyclers are not just solid waste disposers or manufacturers. They fall in a middle ground that the companies say are not adequately addressed by state regulations.
Agilyx, based in Oregon, makes jet fuel for a subsidiary of Delta Airlines.
Mackenzie said he consulted representatives of several companies (including ReFined Plastics), municipal waste authorities, industrial waste association and the Pennsylvania Chemical Industry Council to craft legislation to address the issue.
Ultimately the DEP weighed in and the bill was amended. The bill as amended would add definitions of advanced recycling, including operations such as gassification, pyrolysis and post-use polymers to state solid waste law.
“We ultimately settled on the amended language and I think it is an improvement,” Mackenzie said.
The bill could be up for a full house vote the week of June 21, according to Mackenzie. Pennsylvania is not the only state grappling with this new industry and in 2018 the American Chemistry Council published a guide to creating legislation.
“To date only a few states have developed permitting frameworks to address pyrolysis,” the council said in the report. “States should therefore consider new legislation or reform to existing regulations to ensure their permitting frameworks enable the deployment of PTFP facilities and other conversion technologies.”
Environmentalists object
But PennEnvironment, a statewide environmental advocacy group, has objections, specific to the bill and in general about the technology.
“While the amendment makes significant improvements to the legislation, there are a number of questions that supporters of the legislation have, to date, been unable to answer,” said David Masur, executive director pf PennEnvironment. “By reclassifying the facility from a MSW (municipal solid waste) facility to a manufacturing facility — what are the differences in health and environmental regulations? There is concern that they are less stringent for manufacturing facilities than MSW facilities, which could potentially mean more health and environmental risks for local communities. By changing the categorization of the facility, does it open up the facility to facility to be eligible for renewable energy subsidies? If so, that would be a problem because this is not a renewable energy source.”
Masur said processes like these divert attention away from the real issue that society needs to start moving away from singleuse plastics, which are creating a massive environmental problem from cradle to grave.
“Given that the vast majority of plastic does not get recycled, these facilities and policies (and others like them) send the message that we don’t need to reduce, reuse, recycle,” he said in an email. “Which means we’ll have more fracking (since that’s where more and more of the raw materials from plastic are coming from), more plastic litter in our oceans, neighborhoods, and rivers and streams, and the growing problem of microplastics.”
MacKenzie said people who are concerned about the environment should approve of the legislation because it takes plastics out of the waste stream and the main benefit is that the process can handle all kinds of plastics. This kind of recycling also limits the need for petroleum, a main ingredient of most plastic, to be drawn from the ground, he pointed out
The Solid Waste Management
Act requires waste collection facilities to obtain permits from DEP.
“HB 1808 is proposing to eliminate the requirement for a facility that accepts only post-use polymers and converts them through advanced recycling, as those terms are defined in the bill, to obtain a waste permit from DEP to operate,” said John Repetz, DEP community relations coordinator in an email statement. “However, other permits, such as an air quality permit, may still be required. At this time, DEP has not received an application for a facility at Titus Station so any discussion of permitting requirements would be premature.”
D’Ascenzo said he would continue to pursue the project whether Mackenzie’s bill passed or not.