Imagem / Reprodução
New York Times – 23/07/2026
Nationwide, less than 10 percent of discarded plastic gets recycled. A lot of plastic products are tricky to recycle. Most of it goes straight to the landfill.
One possible solution that has emerged in recent years is advanced recycling.
Advanced recycling, also called chemical recycling, uses heat and chemical reactions to break down plastic waste into its molecular building blocks. It’s promising on paper, and the chemicals industry has heavily promoted advanced recycling, as has the Trump administration. However, the industry is running into trouble.
Two advanced recycling sites in the United States recently suspended operations: the Freepoint Eco-Systems plant in Hebron, Ohio, and the Braven Environmental plant in Zebulon, N.C. Both closures followed environmental violations cited by state regulators involving harmful air pollution and hazardous waste.
Now, seven advanced recycling plants remain in the country, barely making a dent in the amount of plastic that’s discarded, according to Beyond Plastics, an environmental advocacy group. That’s down from the group’s tally of 11 facilities in 2023.
The industry’s troubles have bolstered critics who have called advanced recycling a false solution. They say it releases toxic chemicals and cannot reliably and economically be ramped up. It’s a ruse put forward by the plastics industry, they say, to counter a growing recognition that the world must curb plastic production instead.
One of the big attractions of advanced recycling is the possibility that it could offer a path toward a “circular economy” for plastics. Unlike the more traditional mechanical recycling, which involves grinding up plastic to process into new products, advanced recycling can theoretically process mixed or contaminated plastics that otherwise end up in landfills.
One type of advanced recycling called pyrolysis offers a way to transform plastic waste into oil, which can be used as industrial heating fuel, a substitute for diesel or as raw material for producing new plastics. That potentially reduces the need to use fossil fuels to make plastic.
But the troubles at the Ohio and North Carolina plants point to some grave challenges. The Freepoint plant in Ohio stopped operations after being hit with violations for dozens of unreported equipment malfunctions and illegal emissions. It also failed to produce enough pyrolysis oil to meet Ohio’s definition of recycling. That meant it faced reclassification as a waste incinerator, which would have come with stricter regulations.
Freepoint said in a statement that it had shuttered its plant for commercial reasons and that it was working with the Ohio E.P.A. on a safe shutdown.
The Braven plant closed after multiple unresolved hazardous waste management violations, according to North Carolina’s regulatory database.
Josh Kastrinsky, a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, said the state had not issued orders to close the facility nor rescinded any permits. Still, the agency was aware that closure was underway, he said.
The chemicals industry, meanwhile, is backing an effort in Congress, as well as rule-making at the E.P.A., to relax the environmental regulations they must meet.
The Trump administration has been supportive. In November, Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, visited ExxonMobil’s Baytown complex in Texas to tour its advanced recycling operations. He later appeared in ExxonMobil promotional videos and published an opinion article promoting the recycling technology.
Can advanced recycling really work in an environmentally friendly way?
Roger Ruan, a professor in renewable engineering and environment at the University of Minnesota, said that current pyrolysis plants, which tended to produce fuel for burning rather than new plastic, were just an “expensive way to burn fossil fuels.” But he said early failed efforts had given the technology a bad name. He said he still saw a way forward if larger companies with resources and expertise started to adopt the technology.
Jennifer Dunn, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, said that environmental harms are not well understood. Many analyses of pyrolysis technologies don’t account for emissions of pollutants beyond greenhouse gases and basic air pollutants, she added.
The best-case scenario, Professor Dunn said, would be for advanced recycling plants to install the most stringent pollution control devices and continually monitor their emissions, something they’re currently not required to do. But that would make advanced recycling more expensive.
More promising, she noted, was research into new materials that can reduce the use of plastics. Scientists have been trying to develop plastic substitutes from materials like seaweed and algae, for example.
Fonte: The New York Times
