In a brightly lit room in Houston, Texas, environmental activist Malachi Key searches through a pile of waste, slips a tracker into a used chicken salad box and watches where it goes. The city’s 2022 program promised to give up to 90% of plastics — including hard-to-recycle single-use items — a new life. That’s a striking claim when the US recycling average is under 10%. Key and fellow activists with Air Alliance Houston suspected the promise was “too good to be true,” so they began tracking.
Over the past 18 months they documented at least 14 occasions when plastic collected for recycling was moved to third-party storage sites and 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 centers on “advanced” or chemical recycling — techniques that use heat, enzymes or solvents to break stubborn plastics like bread wrappers, juice pouches and yoghurt pots into smaller chemical compounds. Those compounds can be turned back into monomers or other building blocks to remake plastics, allegedly indistinguishable from virgin material. The American Chemistry Council has touted advanced recycling as a breakthrough that could help create a circular plastics economy, and the sector has drawn investment from US and European interests and partnerships with industry giants such as ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell and Cyclyx International.
But critics argue the technology’s promise masks serious problems. Lee Bell, technical adviser to the International Pollutants Elimination Network, notes there are roughly 14,000 chemicals used as additives in plastics. More than a quarter of these are hazardous and must be removed and treated as waste — undermining claims of closed-loop circularity. “If they do manage to strip the polymers and monomers of these chemical additives and other contaminants, they generate enormous hazardous waste streams,” Bell said.
Public health experts warn recycling plants themselves can create environmental and health harms. Veena Singla, a public health scientist affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, said three US chemical recycling facilities produced over 900 metric tons of hazardous waste in about three years. She also said they are permitted to emit pollutants linked to respiratory illness, cancer and nervous-system disorders. Some plants reportedly produce fuels to be burned as well as materials marketed as recycled plastic — a practice that reduces the amount of material returned to manufacturing and can increase demand for virgin plastics.
Global plastic production exceeds 400 million tonnes per year and is forecast to double or triple by 2050. Bell worries chemical recycling is being used as a public-relations tool to deflect attention from rising production and pollution. “It’s largely a propaganda exercise designed to divert attention away from increasing plastic production and plastic pollution,” he said.
The industry’s commercial viability is also unsettled. The American Chemistry Council suggested the US could support up to 150 chemical recycling plants and generate nearly $13 billion in annual economic output. In practice, progress has been slow. Bell said 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 material to stay solvent. In the Houston region — a hub for petrochemical production with hundreds of companies along the Ship Channel — only one chemical recycling facility remains in operation. ExxonMobil, which runs that plant, says it has processed more than 68,000 metric tons of plastic waste into products and fuels. Activists remain unconvinced, calling the approach a “false solution” that appeals to residents hoping for an answer to local waste problems.
Economics complicate the picture. Producing plastics from recycled feedstock often costs more than making new plastics from fossil-fuel feedstocks. Bell notes recycled plastics must compete with cheap virgin petrochemicals; when oil prices are low, recycling struggles to be cost-competitive.
Back in Houston, the activists who hid a tracker in a salad box waited two months and found that the box had not been picked up for processing. The City of Houston declined to comment, saying it collects from designated points across the city; currently there are just nine such collection locations in a metropolis of nearly 2.5 million people. Private partners in the local recycling collaboration have said they plan to build a joint sorting center, but for Hadayia the real fix 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.