Eco Report – June 23, 2023

Hello and welcome to Eco-Report. For WFHB, I’m Julianna Dailey. And I’m Frank Marshalek. Later on in the program, Environmental Correspondent Zyro Roze explores urban permaculture and village building with Mark Lakeman, the eco architect and place maker behind Portland Oregon’s City Repair Project, which has inspired communities around the world to transform their neighborhoods into art installations and food forests.   And now for your environmental reports: Inside Climate Change reports on the status of a plastics recycling plant in Ashley, Indiana. EcoReport has covered progress at the huge facility earlier and emphasized the dangers posed by this facility. Companies outside Indiana place their dirty plants here because our politicians tolerate pollution. Inside Indiana’s ‘Advanced’ Plastics Recycling Plant there are dangerous vapors, oil spills and life-threatening fires. The Brightmark “plastics renewal” plant can’t get past the startup phase, as former employees raise environmental, health and safety concerns. The plant’s owner is San Francisco-based Brightmark.  The plan here is to store, shred and chop plastic waste and extrude it into pellets. Those pellets are then fed into pressurized “pyrolysis” chambers—the plant has six of them—that use extreme heat to produce a synthetic gas and a dirty “pyrolysis oil,” in what the chemical industry markets as a type of “advanced recycling.”  The plastics industry champions the process as something that makes plastics sustainable, even green, by turning old plastic containers, packaging and the like into new plastic products without the need to extract more fossil fuels to create new plastic feedstocks. But many scientists and environmentalists say pyrolysis is anything but sustainable, describing it as energy-intensive manufacturing with a large carbon footprint that incinerates much of the plastic waste and mostly just makes new fossil fuels.  A fire in May of 2021 is just one of several environmental health or safety challenges the company has faced since it began testing its plant in 2020 while struggling to fulfill its promise of operating “the world’s largest plastics renewal facility” on a commercial scale. The plant has kept the Ashley Fire Department of about 20 members busy, responding to at least six or seven fires since 2020, at least one producing a plume of smoke that could be seen 35 miles away in Fort Wayne.  They remind us of the plastics fire in Richmond.  EcoReport has raised another potential issue: what’s in the emissions.  This type of process often generates dioxins, which are carcinogenic.  These compounds can be eliminated by adding additional combustion of the emission gases.  EcoReport has not been able to learn the details of emissions —Norm Holy Inside Indiana Business reports that by the time it’s expected to come online in 2026, a West Terre Haute-based fertilizer plant will have the capacity to capture and store as much as 1.65 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, making it one of the largest carbon-sequestration projects in the country. Wabash Valley Resources, which was formed in 2016 to acquire a shuttered Duke Energy coal plant in Vigo County, is moving forward with the project after state lawmakers passed