Biden Administration Backs Plastic as Coal Replacement to Make Steel. One Critic Asks: ‘Have They Lost Their Minds?’
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James Bruggers
By James Bruggers
August 30, 2024
After a Pennsylvania business scored $182.6 million in loan guarantees with promises the project would fight climate change, environmentalists called on Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to change course.
A Pennsylvania company was getting tens of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees to turn plastic waste into a fuel for steelmaking, claiming the climate would benefit.
“This is one of the craziest ideas I’ve seen,” Williams said of the business plan by Erie-based International Recycling Group. Williams leads the environmental group California Communities Against Toxics, chairs the Sierra Club’s national clean air team and has worked on the technical aspects of environmental regulations for decades. “Have they lost their minds?”
She is among more than 100 representatives of environmental and community groups, including Beyond Plastics, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council, to this week call on U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to reverse the agency’s July decision to commit $186.2 million of Inflation Reduction Act funding to International Recycling Group.
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That commitment is conditional: The company’s plans must undergo an environmental review and meet other financial and technical requirements. The Energy Department asserts that swapping out coke, a coal-derived fuel, in blast furnaces used to make steel will reduce global heat-trapping emissions.
But in their Aug. 26 letter to Granholm, the groups asserted that “burning plastic in place of coal is not a climate solution, it merely substitutes one form of fossil fuel with another.”
Bag It: The Plastics Crisis
Further, Williams said she does not accept the company’s claims that the plastic fuel it wants to make, dubbed CleanRed, won’t add to the already potent toxic air emissions associated with steel production.
“There are no steel mills in the United States that burn plastic,” said Williams, who spent the last four years closely following and commenting on new Environmental Protection Agency air quality regulations on the steel manufacturing industry. “No one has any idea what the emissions profile of burning plastic will be.”
The Energy Department defended its decision to support the proposal, which also includes the construction of a large plastic waste sorting and processing plant in Erie with plans to collect plastic from as far as 750 miles away.
An agency spokesman said the company’s plans align with the Energy Department’s “mandate to deploy innovative technologies that decarbonize our economy while ensuring that the benefits of investments flow to surrounding communities.”
“No one has any idea what the emissions profile of burning plastic will be.”
The spokesman said the project “reinforces President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to create good-paying, high-quality job opportunities in communities across the country and ensure workers benefit from America’s growing clean energy economy.”
For his part, Mitch Hecht, the chairman of International Recycling Group, described his befuddlement at the recent criticism of his company’s plans.
“We are completely baffled by what appears to be a national campaign to attack all plastic recycling,” Hecht said. “It makes absolutely zero sense from any true environmentalist perspective that we are going to just prefer to stop the effort to recycle more plastic.”
A Benefit to Disadvantaged Communities, or a Blow?
Last year, the Energy Department said in a notice to prepare an environmental assessment that the fuel made from plastic waste at the proposed Erie plant would go to the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana.
But now the agency describes its destination only as a steel mill in northwest Indiana, which is where Gary is located, and where its plant is among the nation’s largest polluters.
U.S. Steel this week declined to tell Inside Climate News whether it was making plans to accept the plastic waste. And Hecht declined to comment on where he plans to send the material.
Regardless, Gary residents with the groups Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, which played a central role in fighting a now-dropped plan to turn trash and plastic into jet fuel, and Just Transition Northwest Indiana joined their environmental colleagues in signing the letter.
Dorreen Carey, president of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development. Credit: James Bruggers/Inside Climate News
Dorreen Carey, president of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development. Credit: James Bruggers/Inside Climate News
“Using plastic pellets in the blast furnace iron-producing process not only creates a new and untested environmental hazard in steel mill fence-line communities, but it also threatens steelworker jobs and the sustainability of the mill itself by delaying investments in newer green technologies,” said Dorreen Carey, president of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development.
Among those emerging technologies are those using hydrogen and electricity.
In Erie, Pennsylvania, local residents have been debating the potential merits or environmental problems associated with the plastics proposal since it was announced in 2020.
The project has support from local government and at least two state lawmakers, Reps. Pat Harkins and Bob Merski, both Democrats. They said in a July press release that it would create more than 300 jobs and thanked the Biden-Harris administration for backing the Erie project. The announcement was made in an election year amid a pitched battle over a vital swing state in the presidential race.
Merski called the announcement “a beacon of hope for a cleaner, greener future.” Harkins said: “This substantial investment would catalyze the construction of a state-of-the-art plastics recycling facility, positioning Erie as a national leader in sustainable practices and innovation.”
But Russell Taylor, a retired social studies teacher from Erie, said he’s not opposed to recycling plastic but is worried about the size and scale of the planned facility, increased truck traffic, fire risks and the possibility of microplastic particles from the plant getting into nearby Lake Erie.
Taylor, a spokesman for the local group Our Water, Our Air, Our Rights, also questions the company’s business plan. He said he doubts other communities are going to want to give up the types of plastic waste that can more easily be recycled and have a higher commercial value. That would mean only the hardest-to-recycle, lowest-quality plastic waste would come to Erie, he said.
Already, the letter from environmentalists to Granholm has drawn national attention to his group’s concerns, Taylor said.
“There are so many better ways to spend $182 million to work on the environment,” Taylor said. “What is attractive about this?”
