ExxonMobil Hypes Total Plastics Recycling Program; RFID Tags Show Waste Is Just Dumped
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Marketing materials at Kingwood and the city’s other all-plastics depository, the North Main Neighborhood Recycling Center in North Houston, prominently display the logos of ExxonMobil and its recycling partners, and press releases from those companies and the city have highlighted the new recycling facility at Baytown as part of the collaboration. In public interviews and news reports, ExxonMobil officials have described the Kingwood drop-off location in particular as an eventual source of plastic for the company’s recycling at Baytown.
Some experts were skeptical about the announcements. Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and consultant who founded the plastics-oriented environmental group The Last Beach Cleanup, said she grew suspicious when she read about the Houston Recycling Collaboration’s plans for advanced recycling of a full range of plastics at the Baytown complex. “I’m a chemical engineer, and I know that there are no factories actually recycling some of this stuff,” Dell said between bites of a taco at a restaurant near the Kingwood depository. “So I wanted to know where it went.”
So between June and September, she and volunteers for her group dropped 11 Apple AirTag tracking devices into the bins at the Kingwood and North Main sites. All of the tags led them to an open-air site run by Wright Waste Management 20 miles northwest of downtown Houston, Dell said. Arriving at the location, she found the traced plastic bags and other plastic waste tossed alongside a fence—a fire hazard in the city’s triple-digit summer heat, she noted with concern.
She and other environmental advocates maintain that anyone using the collaboration’s two all-plastics drop-off sites—separate from Houston’s curbside recycling program, which only takes certain plastics—could only have assumed that they were sending their waste to be recycled chemically. Asked about the whereabouts of the plastic collected in Kingwood and North Main, Mark Wilfalk, who leads the city of Houston’s solid waste management division, said at first that the all-plastic waste was being “safely stockpiled in permitted warehouses.” When informed of the evidence that at least some of it was dumped outdoors at Wright Waste Management, Wilfalk acknowledged that the plastic had been taken there, nodding his head. He added that he had spoken with a local fire marshal to make sure that the facility had the permits needed to operate. Stratton Wright, the owner and president of Wright Waste Management, later confirmed that his outdoor business was storing waste from the collaboration’s two all-plastics drop-off locations. “Everything is on the up-and-up,” he said. (The company bills itself as Texas’s “premier waste-to-energy logistics coordinator.”)
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01112023/electronic-tracking-questions-houstons-drive-to-repurpose-plastics/
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