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Opinion: IRG CEO Hecht says plant will deliver plastic pollution solutions, jobs to Erie

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Opinion: IRG CEO Hecht says plant will deliver plastic pollution solutions, jobs to Erie

Mitch Hecht
 |  Your Turn

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After 17 years of dedicated work as an environmentalist trying to solve the number one problem with plastics production — pollution — I brought my vision to build a large-scale mechanical recycling plant to Erie so that we can get on a path to approach the demonstrated recycling success found elsewhere in the industrialized world. This effort was supported by the enormous generosity and vision of the folks at Erie Insurance, and the Prischak family of Plastek Group, who recognized the societal need to remedy the problem of plastic pollution, and to create living wage manufacturing jobs on Erie’s eastside. Last month, more than 270 people who both reside and are employed in Erie, including trade representatives and workers, signed on to a petition to support my project, asserting their belief in job creation for Erie residents, being good stewards of the environment, and embracing new technologies for the steel industry.

After reading the recent articles the Erie Times-News dedicated to our project, it appears that some misunderstandings related to the viability and environmental benefits of plastics recycling have taken hold. Unfortunately, none of the arguments made against our project are based on science-based research by experts in plastics production, waste management systems, recycling or manufacturing. Virtually all of the attacks presented have been conjured up by two organizations that are not from here — PennFuture and Beyond Plastics — and I believe they’ve been imported into Erie to push a highly scripted and disingenuous argument.

People in Erie may know PennFuture from their efforts in 2020 to stop a $100 million Pennsylvania Department of Transportation improvement plan for the Bayfront Parkway during the height of COVID. After two years of litigation, their lawsuit was tossed out in summary judgment by U.S. District Judge Susan Baxter who rejected PennFuture’s claims that PennDOT acted “arbitrarily” in greenlighting the project.

Beyond Plastics, a project out of Bennington College in Vermont founded by a person without any science credentials to her name, has led the charge in pushing falsehoods about the IRG project. Beyond Plastics has claimed in a letter published by this paper that “106 environmental and community groups” oppose our project. That may give someone the impression that the claims of Beyond Plastics carry the weight of 106 environmental scientists. However, when looking at who actually signed this letter, we learned that there were only 10, not 106, organizations represented in the letter, and lots of individuals without any identifiable environmental affiliation. One of these groups was Plaine Products, a for-profit hair and skin care company. Another was something called Meliori Cleaning Products. The “truthiness” goes on from there.

One major falsehood that Beyond Plastics and PennFuture have been peddling is that we intend to burn plastics. Despite repeated efforts to get this canard corrected, it is still a mainstay of the effort to spread fear in the community by conjuring images of the terrible rail disaster in East Palestine, where plastics-carrying railroad cars burned for days. Let’s separate the propaganda from the truth: nothing can “burn” in a blast furnace, including plastic. That’s because the environment in a blast furnace is oxygen-deprived, and as we all know, burning requires oxygen. And at 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit everything put into a blast furnace is volatilized, without any carcinogenic emissions like dioxins or furans being created. Also, because plastic is a hydrocarbon and is replacing a pure carbon (coal), that means less carbon dioxide is being emitted into the atmosphere. This is why countries in the European Union and in Japan have been utilizing the blast furnace as a pro-environment practice to remove waste plastics from landfill for close to 30 years.

These are just two examples of the many falsehoods in the Beyond Plastics letter that was published in the Erie Times-News in late August. There are so many blatantly false claims made in it we cannot cover them all in this short opinion piece. We have posted a response to the letter in full on our website at internationalrecycling.com, and we encourage you to read it.

These are the facts about plastics, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Today almost one-third of all plastic drink bottles are turned back into new products, replacing virgin plastics made by oil and gas companies. Almost one-third of sturdier plastic containers, like milk jugs and water jugs, are turned back into new products. Three million tons of plastic waste are recycled every year in an industry that is financially sound and employs thousands of people. However, none of this information finds its way into the PennFuture or Beyond Plastics storyline that recycling hasn’t worked and will never work. But it happens to be the truth and anyone can check the statistics for themselves on the EPA website.

While we support any effort to cut down on single-use plastics, and we also support some re-use programs, we cannot count on a United Nations treaty to solve this problem. Simply waiting for a reduction in plastics production is no solution at all. Nor does the amount of plastic produced have anything at all to do with how much we recycle. Do we really think if we stop recycling, we will start making the goods we use every single day (e.g. appliances, electronics, clothing, cars, medical equipment, furniture, carpeting, linen, packaging and an infinite number of other essential goods) out of something else? No. We will just make them out of newly produced plastics, and our landfills will grow even bigger.

In the U.S., plastics recycling has certainly fallen far short of the promise that many of us had hoped for 10 or 20 years ago. And for anyone who has ever taken a trip across the ocean, the contrast to our current situation is stark. In the European Union and Japan, recycling of plastics is ingrained as an unquestionable responsibility of being a good citizen. Recycling rates for plastic in these countries are 40% and 80%, respectively.

So why is the recycling rate of plastics in the United States so low? A key challenge to recycling is that we require homeowners to pick up the labor that American waste haulers won’t take on themselves. Americans need to hand-sort their plastics at home and many simply opt out; throwing nonrecyclable plastics into the recycling bin, or tossing recyclable plastics into the trash bin. To make it easier, homeowners should be able to put all plastics in the recycle bin to recycle more of our plastics. Our novel plant design will use cutting-edge, infrared light technology to sort plastic resins 100% by machine. The IRG plant will clean and sell what is recyclable back to manufacturers to replace virgin plastics made from fossil fuels (about 80% of plastics coming to us), and the remaining plastic waste that can’t be turned into marketable resin won’t end up in a landfill. Instead, we’ll use it to replace virgin coal in blast furnaces for iron production. This hybrid approach we developed makes mechanical recycling both more economically attractive and impactful in reducing greenhouse gasses, versus landfilling and continuing to make plastics out of fossil fuels.

The IRG project brings a long-awaited advance in recycling infrastructure that will finally move the needle on our recycling rate nationally; it will bring billions of dollars in economic benefits for the region. It also would reduce our reliance on petrochemical companies to make products out of virgin plastic, the very thing Beyond Plastics and PennFuture claim to be against. In fact, by our estimate if the U.S. could achieve EU recycling rates for plastics, oil companies in the US would lose more than $20 billion annually in revenue from not selling as much newly made plastics.

IRG will create 221 prevailing wage (union-equivalent) jobs. We will continue our youth recycling program and develop a workforce training program for those seeking career advancement. I’ve spent years collaborating with local leaders, including Erie County 2nd District Councilman Andre Horton, and leaders of the environmental justice community who actually live in the environmental justice community, to ensure that this project doesn’t just make Erie a leader in sustainability but also uplifts those who have been overlooked in the past.

Andre Horton: Opinion: IRG recycling plant will be good for the planet – and Erie’s eastside

We support any efforts to fix plastic pollution — whether it’s at the United Nations or in Harrisburg or in Washington, D.C. — but we can’t wait for them to solve the pollution crisis. We have examples around the world of what success looks like, and we are building on other’s success with this project. So here in Erie we have a very clear choice to make: We can either bury our plastic in landfills, or we can recycle it. I choose the planet, and I am proud to bring this recycling plant to Erie.

Mitch Hecht is the founder, chairman and CEO of International Recycling Group.

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