After Chemical Industry Lobbying, EPA Considers Dropping Clean Air Protections For For Plastic Waste Recycling

When former top Environmental Protection Agency official Judith Enck noticed a cavalcade of chemical and plastics industry lobbyists visiting the agency’s Washington headquarters in February, she wondered what could be up. An answer came weeks later: The agency is moving toward resurrecting a proposal from the first Trump administration to ditch Clean Air Act regulations involving one of the industry’s go-to methods for chemically processing plastic waste into new industrial feedstocks or fuels.

The EPA is curiously approaching this by embedding a request for comments on so-called “advanced recycling” via a method known as pyrolysis in a rulemaking on an entirely different category of waste incineration.“I thought, could it be a mistake, or are they quietly trying to push this through?” Enck, a former EPA regional administrator during the Obama presidency, wondered in an interview on Tuesday. Just one paragraph related to advanced recycling of plastics was included in a 17-page Federal Register notice for a proposed rule on wood incineration.

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“It’s not recycling,” said James Pew, director of the federal clean air practice at the environmental group Earthjustice. “To the extent these incinerators produce anything significant other than toxic pollution, a very small portion of the plastic waste they burn is turned into an oily waste that can be fed back into the chemical production process or burned [as] dirty fuel. And it encourages unlimited production of single-use plastics.”

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The details of what the EPA will propose have not yet been revealed. But the agency’s March 17 announcement and supporting documents point to the kind of regulatory relief it sought to provide during the first Trump term—before running out of time. Pyrolysis has largely been regulated as incineration for three decades and has therefore had to meet stringent emission requirements for burning solid waste under the federal Clean Air Act. In the final months of the first Trump administration, the EPA proposed an industry-friendly rule change stating that pyrolysis does not involve enough oxygen to constitute combustion, and that emissions from the process should therefore not be regulated as incineration.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01042026/after-chemical-industry-lobbying-epa-considers-dropping-clean-air-protections-for-plastic-waste-recycling/