EPA Ends Trump-Era Bid to Kill Pollution Rules for Plastics Recycling

Jay Schabel, president of the plastics division at Brightmark, at the firm’s new recycling plant in northeast Indiana, which aims to turn plastic waste into diesel, naphtha, and wax. James Bruggers

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Reversing its own Trump-era proposal, the US Environmental Protection Agency has spurned a lobbying effort by the chemical industry to relax clean-air regulations on two types of chemical or “advanced” recycling of plastics. 
The decision, announced by the EPA on May 24, covers pyrolysis and gasification, two processes that use chemical methods to break down plastic waste. Both have largely been regulated as incineration for nearly three decades and have therefore had to meet stringent emission requirements for burning solid waste under the federal Clean Air Act. 
But in the final months of the Trump administration, the EPA proposed an industry-friendly rule change in August 2020 stating that pyrolysis does not involve enough oxygen to constitute combustion, and that emissions from the process should therefore not be regulated as incineration.
Pyrolysis, or the process of decomposing materials at high temperatures in an oxygen-free environment, has been around for centuries. Traditional uses have ranged from making tar from timber for wooden ships to transforming coal into coke for steelmaking.