Illinois lawmakers consider amendment to construct advanced recycling facility

Illinois State Rep. Larry Walsh Jr. has introduced House Bill 1616 to amend the state’s Environmental Protection Act (EPA), requiring permitting and construction to commence prior to July 1, 2027, rather than 2025, before a pilot project allowing for a chemical recycling facility is permitted for a locally zoned and approved site in either Will County or Grundy County, Illinois. The proposed chemical recycling facility is not identified in the legislation.

Walsh introduced similar legislation in 2019, House Bill 2491, which passed. That legislation provides that to the extent allowed by federal law, uncontaminated plastics that meet feedstock specifications for a gasification facility or pyrolysis facility and are processed by those facilities into crude oil, diesel, gasoline, home heating oil or other fuels are considered recycled and not subject to regulation as waste.

Several environmental groups have expressed concern related to HB 1616, including the Washington-based Ocean Conservancy, the Chicago-based Alliance for the Great Lakes and the Illinois Environmental Council in Springfield, Illinois.

During a March 15 press conference related to HB 1616, Jen Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council, said the proposed legislation essentially was drafted to expedite the permitting process for a proposed chemical recycling facility in the area. She said the legislation also would allow the facility to be constructed without going through the normal permitting process for solid waste facilities.

“They are looking to this plant to take plastics and convert it to fuel for burning, and this is something we highly oppose,” Walling said. “We do not want to see this move forward in the Illinois House; we’d love to see the governor veto it. It’s a huge toxic risk.”

Walling added that community members in Will County and Grundy County have approached her expressing concerns about increased air emissions if a chemical recycling facility were to be constructed in that area.

Anja Brandon, associate director of U.S. Plastics Policy at the Ocean Conservancy, said states need to regulate chemical recycling as incineration and hazardous solid waste management rather than as manufacturing, noting that chemical recycling includes pyrolysis, which uses extreme heat and pressure to break down chemical bonds in plastic to turn it to oil.

“The technology is essentially plastic-to-fuel [technology] as opposed to real recycling,” Brandon said. “Chemical recycling technologies lock us into needing more virgin plastic to replace the plastic they are burning and turning into oil.”

Brandon added that policymakers and consumers need to hold producers responsible for reducing plastic production, advocating for states to pass extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation to help minimize virgin plastic production. She said, “Facilities like this make it harder to build EPR programs because if you have these types of nonrecycling recycling facilities in your state that artificially inflate your recycling rate or give you credit for burning plastic, we’re never going to achieve real extended producer responsibility. We need EPR that offers strong targets that would exclude these types of harmful chemical recycling technologies.”

Ineos Styrolution America LLC, a polystyrene (PS) manufacturer based in Aurora, Illinois, previously announced plans to build a PS recycling plant in Channahon, Illinois, which is in Will and Grundy counties, in partnership with Agilyx. The 100-ton-per-day facility intends to use Agilyx chemical recycling technology, a form of pyrolysis, to convert discarded PS into virgin-equivalent styrene monomer through depolymerization. The site has encountered development delays reportedly because of the pandemic. 

In 2018, AmSty and Agilyx formed Regenyx, a joint venture to develop a similar facility in Tigard, Oregon, using Agilyx’s pyrolysis technology.