In a brightly lit room in Houston, activist Malachi Key sifted through a pile of waste, slipped a tracker into a used chicken-salad box and followed its trail. The city’s 2022 recycling initiative had promised to give up to 90% of plastics — even hard-to-recycle single-use items — a new life. That claim stood in stark contrast to the US recycling average, which is below 10%. Suspicious that the promise might be “too good to be true,” Key and colleagues from Air Alliance Houston began tracking the material.
Over 18 months they recorded at least 14 occasions when plastics collected for recycling were moved to third-party storage sites and then left there, not processed. “The accumulated plastic was not actually being recycled,” said Jen Hadayia, executive director of Air Alliance Houston. “Not in any way, shape or form in the way that the City of Houston had been saying.”
The program focuses on so-called advanced or chemical recycling: processes that use heat, enzymes or solvents to break stubborn plastics — bread wrappers, juice pouches, yogurt pots — down to smaller chemical components. Those compounds can, in theory, be reconstructed into monomers or other building blocks to remake plastics that are functionally indistinguishable from virgin material. The American Chemistry Council has promoted chemical recycling as a breakthrough toward a circular plastics economy, and the field has attracted investment and partnerships with companies such as ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell and Cyclyx International.
But critics say the promise obscures serious technical, health and economic problems. Lee Bell, technical adviser to the International Pollutants Elimination Network, notes there are roughly 14,000 different chemicals used as additives in plastics; more than a quarter are hazardous and must be removed and managed as waste. If those additives and other contaminants are stripped out, Bell says, the processes produce large hazardous waste streams that undercut claims of a closed-loop circular system.
Public-health researchers warn recycling facilities themselves can generate environmental and health harms. Veena Singla, a public-health scientist affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, says three US chemical recycling plants produced more than 900 metric tons of hazardous waste over about three years. She added that some facilities are permitted to emit pollutants associated with respiratory illness, cancer and nervous-system disorders. Several plants reportedly produce fuels that are burned as well as materials marketed as recycled plastic — a practice that diverts material away from manufacturing and can increase demand for virgin plastic.
Global plastic production already tops 400 million tonnes a year and is forecast to double or triple by 2050. Bell worries chemical recycling is being used as a public-relations tool to distract from growing production and pollution: “It’s largely a propaganda exercise designed to divert attention away from increasing plastic production and plastic pollution,” he said.
Commercial viability is also uncertain. While the American Chemistry Council has suggested the US could support as many as 150 chemical-recycling plants and nearly $13 billion in annual economic output, build-out has been slow. Bell says there were 11 operational facilities across the US in 2023; since then four have closed amid bankruptcy or because they could not produce enough usable output to remain solvent. In the Houston region — a petrochemical hub with hundreds of firms along the Ship Channel — only one chemical recycling plant remains. ExxonMobil, which operates that facility, reports it has processed more than 68,000 metric tons of plastic waste into products and fuels. Activists remain skeptical, calling chemical recycling a “false solution” that appeals to residents hoping for local answers to waste problems.
Economic realities complicate the picture further. Making plastics from recycled feedstock often costs more than producing them from fossil-fuel feedstocks. Recycled material must compete with cheap virgin petrochemicals, and when oil prices are low, recycling struggles to be cost-competitive.
Back in Houston, the activists who hid the tracker in the salad box waited two months and found it had not been picked up for processing. The City of Houston declined to comment beyond saying it collects from designated points across the city; at present there are just nine such collection locations in a metropolis of nearly 2.5 million people. Private partners in the local recycling effort say they plan to build a joint sorting center, but for Hadayia the real remedy is upstream: cutting single-use plastics at the source. “We didn’t always rely on single-use plastic in the way we do now,” she said. “Bottom line, the true upstream solution to plastic waste is to reduce single-use plastic.”
This article is based on an episode of Living Planet reported by Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor. The investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe fund (IJ4EU) and coordinated by Ludovica Jona, with reporting by Staffan Dahllof, Yann Philippin, Begona Ramirez, Lorenzo Sangermano and Stefano Valentino. Sound design was by Jarek Zaba. Edited by Tamsin Walker.