Houston's plastic waste piles up waiting for "advanced" recycling

This story is a partnership between Inside Climate News and CBS News. Watch the CBS Reports documentary, “Advanced Recycling: Does Big Plastic’s Idea Work?” in the video player above.

HOUSTON, Tex.—When the news crew showed up outside a waste-handling business that’s failed three fire safety inspections and has yet to gain state approval to store plastic, workers quickly closed a gate displaying a “no trespassing” sign.

Behind the gate, deliveries of hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic waste from residents’ homes have piled up over the last year and a half next to strewn cardboard and tall stacks of wooden pallets.

The expanding open-air pile at Wright Waste Management, 20 miles northwest of downtown Houston, awaits what the city of Houston and corporate partners including ExxonMobil call a new frontier in recycling — and critics describe as a sham.

The Houston Recycling Collaboration was formed as a response to low recycling rates in the city, a global problem. Hardly any of the plastic products meant to be used once and tossed can be recycled mechanically, the shredding, melting and remolding used for collection programs across the country. 

The Houston effort adds a new option alongside the city’s curbside pickup: Partners say people can bring any plastic waste to dropoff locations — even styrofoam, bubble wrap and bags — and if it can’t be mechanically recycled, it will be superheated and chemically processed into new plastic, fuels or other products.

Exxon and the petrochemical industry call this “advanced” or “chemical” recycling and heavily promote it as a solution to runaway plastic waste, even as environmental advocates warn that some of these processes pump out highly toxic air pollution, contribute to global warming and shouldn’t qualify as recycling at all.

But the Houston effort illustrates a different problem: Twenty months into collection, ongoing tracking by environmental groups indicates the household plastic waste people have dropped off still isn’t getting chemically recycled. 

A massive plastics sorting plant planned by one member of the collaboration, Cyclyx International, isn’t on track to open until the middle of next year. And the plastic mounting at Wright in the meantime could build up even faster because city officials and their partners expanded their collection program in April from one original dropoff center to eight.

An investigation by Inside Climate News and CBS News that uncovered Wright’s failed fire safety inspections and missing fire permits also unearthed a fracture in the public-private collaboration.

One of the city’s industry partners, FCC Environmental Services, which operates a large sorting facility for the city’s curbside recycling program, has opted out of the dropoff collection. In a July 2023 letter, the company raised concerns about the safety of storing plastic waste at a facility that lacks required permits. 

“As a member of the [Houston Recycling Collaboration], FCC does not want its reputation and image involved in such irregular and risky practices,” Inigo Sanz, chief executive officer of FCC at the time, wrote in the letter to partners without mentioning the Wright site by name. FCC also complained about the focus on storing waste for future chemical recycling while missing opportunities to recycle some of the plastic mechanically.

On one visit earlier this year, a Harris County, Texas, fire inspector found the company lacking fire safety permits and observed “no fire lanes or means of controlling a fire,” documents obtained by Inside Climate News and CBS News found. The site had already failed fire inspections twice before, beginning in 2023.

“Five acres of paper and plastic piled up with little or no fire suppression: What could go wrong?” said Richard Meier, a private fire investigator in Florida who reviewed the inspection reports and Google Earth images of the business at the request of Inside Climate News and CBS News. “You have piles and piles and piles of all this fuel,” Meier said. The fire risk only grows with intense summer heat, he said.

Owner Stratton Wright referred reporters to Cyclyx.

Wright Waste Management has been on file with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality as a cardboard recycler since 2016, but on Sept. 26, 2023, Wright submitted a “notice of intent” to operate a municipal solid waste recycling facility. That application to the TCEQ revealed a plan to store as much as 2.2 million pounds of plastic waste and a request for permission to exceed time limits for plastic waste storage.

“The application has not been approved and is under review,” said TCEQ spokesman Ricky Richter. 

In an interview, Ryan Tebbetts, a Cyclyx vice president, declined to discuss the Wright site’s failing fire marshal inspections or its still-pending application with the TCEQ, referring questions back to Wright Waste Management.

“Wright Waste Management doesn’t represent us, and they are currently a temporary solution before we can get [our] facility operational,” Tebbetts said.

FCC declined requests to be interviewed for this story.

The Houston Recycling Collaboration is part of the petrochemical industry’s push for chemical recycling of plastic waste amid growing awareness of the environmental and health risks associated with plastic.

More than 170 nations are trying to draft a global plastics treaty by the end of this year aimed at addressing what the United Nations has called a crisis. In the U.S., lawsuits over plastic pollution are multiplying. So are the calls to reduce production. And California Attorney General Rob Bonta is investigating Exxon and the oil and gas industry’s role in alleged deceptive public messaging about plastic pollution and recycling.

In a written statement this week, Bonta said his investigation was nearing completion. The fossil fuel industry has perpetuated “a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis,” Bonta said. “That deception is ongoing today with the industry’s promotion of ‘advanced recycling.'”

An Exxon official said he could not comment on any potential litigation.

But Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for advanced recycling, said Exxon has “already processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste through our facility. We have ambitions to go even further to 1 billion pounds. And so to say that’s a myth, when we’re actually doing it, I’m not sure I’m aligned with that.”

During a tour of Exxon’s chemical recycling facility at its Baytown plant outside of Houston, Mastroleo said that the company’s technology turns “a significant amount” of plastic waste it processes into fuels.

In its 2023 draft national strategy to prevent plastic pollution, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded that converting “solid waste to fuels, fuel ingredients, or energy” should not be considered a recycling practice.

Last fall, a report by two environmental groups, Beyond Plastics, and the International Pollutants Elimination Network, argued that chemical recycling technology has failed by showing how companies have largely been unable to make it work commercially. And the 2023 annual sustainability report for the global oil giant Shell revealed it was backing away from its corporate goal to significantly ramp up the chemical recycling of plastic, citing lack of plastic waste feedstock, slow technology development and regulatory uncertainty.

Critics argue that chemical recycling is more of an unproven marketing play so plastic production can keep growing rather than a real fix for a global crisis. They cite, for example, harm across the plastics lifecycle from oil and gas drilling to plastic production to plastic waste in rivers and oceans to micro- and nano-plastics in blood vessels.

“Recycling may be a very, very small portion of the solution, but it is not going to solve this monumental plastic pollution problem that we have,” said Veena Singla, an adjunct assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. She called recycling an “end-of-pipe solution that does not require industry to cut down its production or its profits and its plans for expansion.”

contributed to this report.