Tag: Chemicals manufacturing

Explosion at Mississippi chemical plant causes ammonia leak, evacuations

[ad_1]

YAZOO CITY, Miss. — An explosion at a hydrogen and nitrogen product manufacturer in Mississippi on Wednesday caused an ammonia leak and forced nearby residents to evacuate, officials said.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a post on the social platform X that emergency officials from across the state were responding to the anhydrous ammonia leak at CF Industries’ plant north of Yazoo City.

No deaths or injuries have been reported, he said.

“Thank you to all of Mississippi’s first responders and emergency managers for quickly responding to the leak,” he said.

Photos and video posted online show a large plume of yellowish smoke rising above the facility, which includes an ammonia plant and four nitric acid plants, among other things.

The facility is able to store about 48,000 tons of ammonia, although the exact amount there when the explosion took place was not immediately clear.

CF Industries said in a statement that there are no injuries, and “all employees and contractors on site at the time of the incident have been safely accounted for.”

Andre Robinson, who lives about a half-mile (800 meters) from the facility, said he and his son were getting ready to make gumbo when he heard what sounded like a sonic boom or a tree crashing on his house.

“There was a boom and then the house shook,” he said.

When he looked outside, Robinson said he saw smoke rising from the facility and started to smell a strong scent of ammonia.

“We’re used to the ammonia smell, but not that bad,” he said, adding that his family has since evacuated to Jackson.

Part of U.S. Route 49E was temporarily closed, according to the Mississippi Department of Transportation.

The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said in a post on X that “air monitoring operations are underway and will continue as long as necessary to ensure public safety.”

Anhydrous ammonia is used as a fertilizer to help provide nitrogen for corn and wheat plants, according to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. If a person touches it when it is in gas or liquid form, they could be burned.

Yazoo City is a small community about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Jackson.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 6, 2025
‘This isn’t some random dude with a duffel bag’: To catch fentanyl traffickers, feds dig into crypto markets | CNN Politics

[ad_1]

Washington
CNN
—

The Biden administration has intensified its focus on tracing cryptocurrency payments that some of the most dangerous Mexican drug cartels use to buy fentanyl ingredients from Chinese chemical companies, the latest step in a renewed attempt to crack down on the multibillion-dollar fentanyl trade that kills thousands of Americans each year.

The use of digital currency has exploded among fentanyl traffickers, with transactions for fentanyl ingredients surging 450% in the last year through April, according to data from private crypto-tracking analysis firm Elliptic.

Federal agents are doing everything they can to catch up. While US diplomats have made fentanyl a point of emphasis in high-level talks with Mexican and Chinese counterparts, behind the scenes, a multi-agency effort is underway to keep pace with the rapidly changing nature of how fentanyl is financed and trafficked into the US. The work goes beyond the cartels to include tracking dark-web forums where Americans buy fentanyl.

Current and former law enforcement officials from across the federal government described to CNN the digital-first tactics the administration is developing to disrupt the fentanyl trade.

The Drug Enforcement Agency is investing in crypto-tracing software and identifying the cartels’ most sophisticated money launderers. The IRS has its most tech-savvy agents tracing payments on dark web forums. And a Department of Homeland Security investigations unit is leading a team of forensic specialists to pore over digital clues from stash houses near the Mexican border.

Federal agents have been tracking the cartels’ finances and supply routes for years, but DHS, in particular, has ramped up its surveillance efforts in recent weeks, multiple US officials told CNN.

There have been some notable busts recently, including nearly five tons of fentanyl seized this spring along the border. But there is still a lot of work left to do, officials caution, and the impact of the current surge may not be felt for months down the road.

Agents have focused on the activities of two Mexican cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which officials say account for the majority of fentanyl on US streets. Sinaloa Cartel, in particular, has developed sophisticated crypto operations to finance its fentanyl business.

“We’re dealing with a Fortune 50 company, which is what the Sinaloa Cartel is,” a US official with knowledge of the matter told CNN. “This isn’t some random dude with a duffel bag” selling fentanyl in daylight.

Cryptocurrency has enhanced cartels’ ability to smuggle fentanyl into the US by allowing them to move vast sums of money instantaneously across a decentralized, digital banking system – all without having to deal with actual banks.

“The speed the criminals can muster, it’s very hard for law enforcement to keep up,” said one top DEA official, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity to describe the agency’s counter-narcotics work.

Cash is still king for the cartels and often preferred for local operations. But the expanded use of digital currency at both the supply and demand ends of the drug trade has made some traditional law enforcement methods obsolete. For example, drug dealers might hold fewer in-person meetings to hand over cash, reducing the opportunities for stakeouts by federal agents, said Jarod Koopman, head of the IRS’s Cyber and Forensics Services division.

Cryptocurrency “eliminates the potential for hand-to-hand transactions,” said Koopman, whose team focuses on illicit financial flows, including dark-web purchases that are multiple steps removed from when the cartels get the drugs over the US border. “So now it’s … in a different world where some of the contacts might be online and we’re trying to facilitate or do transactions in a different manner.”

But digital money also leaves a trail that investigators can follow.

Federal agents have found cryptocurrency addresses written down on scraps of paper at stash houses in Arizona, Scott Brown, special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in that state, told CNN.

In another case, DHS agents monitored a cartel-connected crypto account for over a year until it sent $200,000 to an accountant they were using to launder money, Brown said. After the accountant used the money to buy property in the US, federal agents are working to seize the property, he said.

A “significant portion” of fentanyl is sold over the dark web and paid for in cryptocurrency, Brown said, adding: “That is a vulnerability that we can attack much like we attack the money movements in a traditional narcotics investigation.”

Most of the fentanyl that enters the US comes from ingredients made in China that are then pressed into pills – or packed in powder – and smuggled in from Mexico by drug cartels, according to the DEA.

A US indictment unsealed in June illustrates the scope of the problem. Just one Chinese chemical company allegedly shipped more than 440 pounds of fentanyl to undercover DEA agents in exchange for payment in cryptocurrency. It was enough drugs to kill 25 million Americans, according to prosecutors.

The two cartels, Sinaloa and CJNG, have used their control of the fentanyl trade to develop sophisticated money-laundering techniques that exploit cryptocurrency, according to US officials.

“We’ve identified people in the cartels that specialize in cryptocurrency movements,” the senior DEA official told CNN, describing longstanding efforts to surveil both the cartels.

The Sinaloa Cartel has made hundreds of millions of dollars from the fentanyl trade, according to the Justice Department. Run by the sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the cartel has allegedly used airplanes, submarines, fishing boats and tractor trailers to transport fentanyl chemicals and other drugs. Four of the “Chapitos,” as Guzmán’s sons are known, are under indictment in the US for fentanyl trafficking, money laundering and weapons charges.

With their father in jail, the younger generation of Sinaloa leaders is making more of an effort to cover their tracks and avoid law enforcement scrutiny, including by using cryptocurrency, the senior DEA official told CNN.

In one case, the Sinaloa Cartel laundered more than $869,000 using cryptocurrency between August 2022 and February 2023, according to a US indictment unsealed in April. But that was likely just a fraction of the Sinaloa money laundered during that time, based on the huge profits the cartel has made in recent years.

The scheme involved two of the cartel’s top money launderers directing US-based couriers to pick up cash from fentanyl traffickers and deposit the money to cryptocurrency accounts controlled by the cartel, the indictment said.

“Not every seizure is going to get you to Chapo Guzman,” said Brown, the DHS official in Arizona. “It’s certainly more impactful when we can go after the people that are behind the production of the drugs, behind the production of the precursors, behind the movement of the money, behind running the transportation cells.”

That’s why Brown and his colleagues are trying to make the most of a huge series of fentanyl busts in Arizona and California this spring, when agents seized nearly five tons of the deadly drug, worth over $100 million.

Evidence was quickly shipped to a forensics lab in Northern Virginia, where DHS analysts hunted for digital clues – things like a common cell phone number called by drug runners near border towns or, better yet, a cryptocurrency account connected to one of the Mexican cartels, according to Brown.

Based in Phoenix, Brown’s office oversees a recently announced federal task force that aims to thwart drug sales online by infiltrating dark-web forums and tracking crypto payments. The goal is to find “another vulnerability [in] the larger cartel infrastructure” that agents can attack, he said.

The cartels “are very willing to invest in technology,” Brown said. “That’s one of the things that we need to be equally willing to do.”

Crypto-based transactions can be traced publicly, giving US officials a much clearer picture of the Mexican cartels’ reliance on Chinese chemical companies to produce fentanyl.

The Chinese government banned the sale of fentanyl in 2019. But Chinese chemical companies have since shifted to making fentanyl ingredients instead of the finished product, according to US officials and outside experts.

A recent CNN investigation dug into the activities of US-sanctioned Chinese chemical companies that advertise fentanyl ingredients. When one sanctioned company shut down, another company launched, and told CNN it purchased the sanctioned company’s email, phone number and Facebook page to “attract internet traffic.”

While the amount of fentanyl directly mailed to the US from China fell dramatically following the 2019 Chinese ban, according to a Brookings Institution study, US officials say Chinese companies are still producing and exporting large quantities of fentanyl ingredients.

Chinese companies selling ingredients to make fentanyl have received cryptocurrency payments worth tens of millions of dollars over the last five years, enough to potentially produce billions of dollars’ worth of fentanyl sold in the US and other markets, according to research from crypto-tracking firms.

One of the firms, London-based Elliptic, found 100 China-based chemical companies touting fentanyl, fentanyl ingredients or equipment to make the drugs that accepted payments in cryptocurrency.

Elliptic didn’t identify any cartel-controlled crypto accounts that sent money to the Chinese companies. That could be due to the cartels’ use of middlemen to buy ingredients and the fact that fentanyl traffickers in Europe also buy from the Chinese companies, according to US officials and cryptocurrency experts interviewed by CNN

But that data is still only a partial picture of the problem. The Chinese chemicals industry is worth over a trillion dollars, according to some estimates, and comprises tens of thousands of companies, most of them doing legitimate business.

“It’s impossible to know how many of [those companies] are actually sending chemicals over” to the US that can be used to make fentanyl, a former DEA agent who worked in Mexico told CNN. The former agent spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Barring more cooperation from the Chinese government on the issue, which US officials say has been limited, the Biden administration has sanctioned and secured federal indictments against several Chinese companies allegedly involved in the production of fentanyl. Federal agents, meanwhile, follow the money and look for opportunities to seize it.

“You can at least try to pinch off the financial flow to [the Chinese companies] and then … follow that money trail to whether it’s the Mexican cartels or if it’s in Guatemala or other places, for the actual supply,” Koopman told CNN.

Cryptocurrency has also allowed cartels to diversify the way they move money around the world. The cartels have a network of money launderers in dozens of countries, from Thailand to Colombia, the senior DEA official said.

These money launderers, known as “spinners,” might receive drug money in one type of cryptocurrency and convert it to another to try to obscure the source of the funds.

“They might take Bitcoin and then buy Ethereum with it, and then send the Ethereum to the cartel members,” the senior DEA official said, referring to different types of cryptocurrencies. “The cartels have insulated themselves so they’re not receiving the cryptocurrency directly.”

The cartels also use “mixing” services, or publicly available cryptocurrency tools, to try to obscure the source of their digital money, the DEA official said. That process is also favored by North Korean hackers who launder stolen cryptocurrency to support Pyongyang’s weapons program, CNN investigations have found.

The volatility of cryptocurrency means the cartels often quickly look to convert their crypto to cash by moving it through a series of virtual currencies, the senior DEA official told CNN.

But there are moments in the laundering process where federal agents can strike. A cryptocurrency exchange serving a customer in Mexico might be headquartered in the US, allowing federal agents to issue a subpoena and potentially seize money.

For Brown, the DHS agent in Arizona, the issue is personal: one of his employees had a family member who died of a fentanyl overdose after buying the drug online , he said.

“My people are burned out, and yet they come to work and work exceedingly hard every day,” Brown told CNN.

But he’s optimistic when the subject turns to high-tech methods to hunt the cartels.

“Are they as anonymous as they think they are? Absolutely … not.”

[ad_2]

Source link

August 2, 2023
Hard-working Colombian beetles clean garbage, retire as pets

[ad_1]

TUNJA, Colombia — Three yellow-and-black beetles clung to the shirt of Germán Viasus Tibamoso, a Colombian environmental engineer who uses beetle larvae to transform food waste into fertilizers.

As he encouraged them to move along, he murmured to them in Japanese — trying to get them accustomed, he said, to the sounds of their future homes.

The not-so-little bugs — which can grow up to 17 centimeters (6.5 inches) long — have a remarkably productive and complicated life among the humans who breed and collect them.

Viasus operates a company called Tierra Viva in a rural area around the city of Tunja, a city some 150 kilometers (95 miles) northwest of the Colombian capital of Bogota.

An attempt as a postgraduate student to produce organic fertilizer with worms failed, Viasus said, but he found beetle larvae in the bags of earth that remained. He tried using them instead. And it worked.

Tons of food scraps collected from nearby communities are spread in concrete ditches and covered with earth. Then beetle larvae — the stage between egg and adulthood — are introduced.

They chew through the refuse and their digestive microorganisms transform it into a fertilizer rich in nitrogen and phosphorous.

After four months or so, the product passes through a filter that separates the fertilizer from the larvae, who are at the point of becoming adult beetles.

They mate, and their eggs are used to start the process anew. The adults, however, go on very different journeys. Some are headed for scientific labs. And a lucky few embark on a future across the Pacific in Japan, where beetles are popular as pets, and are even sold over online emporiums such as Amazon.

Tierra Viva has been exporting the bugs — largely Hercules beetles — since 2004, and Viasus said they can bring as much as $150 each.

This year the company sent 100 beetles to Tokyo — down from 300 last year — held in little plastic cases with air holes and food.

The sales are often in the company’s variant of cryptocurrency, called “Kmushicoin” — a variant on a Japanese word for beetle.

Viasus, 52, said he hopes the project can grow and prosper for another century — perhaps with its fertilizer used in reforestation projects.

“It’s very difficult in Colombia … because we do it without any help from the state or any other entity. In any other country of the world, a project like this would get a lot of help,” he said.

———

Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 22, 2022
Sanctioned tycoon says Russia wants to engage on climate

[ad_1]

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — A Russian billionaire under sanctions by the United States and Europe over his alleged ties to the Kremlin said Wednesday that he was not surprised by protests against his country at this year’s U.N. climate talks, but insisted that Russia wants to remain engaged on the issue of global warming because it deeply affects the nation.

Andrey Melnichenko, who heads the climate policy panel of Russian business lobby group RSPP, told The Associated Press that “regardless of the very terrible moment which we all experience now, we will participate, we will observe” at the meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Pro-Ukraine activists disrupted the start of an event hosted by the Russian delegation at the climate talks Tuesday before being escorted out by security staff.

“I wasn’t surprised,” said Melnichenko, who was speaking on the panel alongside Russian delegates. “What’s so surprising? That there are people who are deeply concerned about what’s happening in Ukraine and want to make their opinion known?”

“I completely 100% understand that,” he said.

His comments, while not directly critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, indicate a more nuanced view of the bloody conflict than the official Kremlin line, which describes the war as a “special military operation.”

Since late February the war has devastated Ukraine, with bombs and shelling decimating towns and cities and killing thousands.

The war has resulted in a raft of sanctions being imposed on Russian officials and prominent businesspeople linked to the Kremlin.

Melnichenko — who now lives in Dubai — criticized Western sanctions on Russia, which he said were applied without regard for possible consequences, such as the effect restrictions on fertilizer exports would have on global food prices and Russia’s efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of fertilizers.

“Sanctions were put like a blanket on the Russian economy,” said Melnichenko, who once ran the fertilizer producer Eurochem and SUEK, one the the world’s largest coal companies. “It affects everything. Take for example food and fertilizer supply.”

He claimed the sanctions had affected food supply for “hundreds of millions” of people worldwide.

“Of course, this decision affects Russia’s possibility to move faster on the way of the decarbonization of its economy,” added Melnichenko.

Russian participants at the climate talks in Egypt have kept a low public profile, with no top government officials attending. Although the Russian delegation is half the size of last year’s, it is still larger than that of the United States, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief.

According to Melnichenko, Russia is particularly focused on efforts to reduce emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, along with rules for international carbon markets and carbon offsets — an issue where the Russian government sees great potential due to the country’s huge forests.

Melnichenko said that Russia will continue to export fossil fuels to fulfill demand, and it should be left to markets to decide which forms of energy are the most competitive. Russia is a top exporter of oil and natural gas although it has faced sanctions from EU trading partners. Other countries, like India and China, continue to import Russian oil.

“I believe that Russia’s fossil fuel production (is) very competitive globally in terms of the total cost, externalities included,” he said. “That’s why Russia will be able for a reasonably long period of time, a very long period of time, to maintain quite (a) big share of the fossil fuel market and … benefit from it also.”

Melnichenko, who according to Forbes is worth some $23.5 billion, said the world community should pay more attention to the large share of greenhouse gas emissions that aren’t caused by human activity, such as respiration, decomposition and even volcanoes. Scientists say the global warming measured in recent decades is mainly caused by the large-scale burning of fossil fuels since industrialization.

Asked what role concerns about climate change play in Russian civil society, he said that environmental issues such as air pollution had become more prominent in bigger cities over the past six to seven years

Peaceful protests on the issue were possible, he insisted. “And the government really responds.”

“That’s one of the area where you can have freedom of expression,” he said. “And that’s understandable because it’s pretty safe in terms of the political environment.”

———

Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

———

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 16, 2022
Neighborhoods evacuated near burning Georgia chemical plant

[ad_1]

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Authorities evacuated neighborhoods Monday near a chemical plant where a large fire was burning in coastal Georgia.

Smoke hazards and a risk of explosions prompted officials Monday morning to order people to evacuate three neighborhoods within a 1-mile (1.6-kilometer) radius of the Symrise chemical plant, Glynn County government spokesperson Katie Baasen said. People within a 3-mile (5-kilometer) radius were being told to shelter in place.

The fire sent a thick plume of smoke rising into the air from the plant located outside the port city of Brunswick, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) south of Savannah.

The fire had been contained and was expected to burn itself out, Baasen said in an email message to The Associated Press. She said hazards from the smoke posed the largest concern, though there was also a potential the fire could cause explosions.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 7, 2022
Advanced recycling: Plastic crisis solution or distraction?

[ad_1]

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The plastics industry says there is a way to help solve the crisis of plastic waste plaguing the planet’s oceans, beaches and lands— recycle it, chemically.

Chemical recycling typically uses heat or chemical solvents to break down plastics into liquid and gas to produce an oil-like mixture or basic chemicals. Industry leaders say that mixture can be made back into plastic pellets to make new products.

“What we are trying to do is really create a circular economy for plastics because we think it is the most viable option for keeping plastic out of the environment,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade association for American chemical companies.

ExxonMobil, New Hope Energy, Nexus Circular, Eastman, Encina and other companies are planning to build large plastics recycling plants. Seven smaller facilities across the United States already recycle plastic into new plastic, according to the ACC. A handful of others convert hard-to-recycle used plastics into alternative transportation fuels for aviation, marine and auto uses.

But environmental groups say advanced recycling is a distraction from real solutions like producing and using less plastic. They suspect the idea of recyclable plastics will enable the steep ramp up in plastic production to continue. And while the amount produced globally grows, recycling rates for plastic waste are abysmally low, especially in the United States.

Plastic packaging, multi-layered films, bags, polystyrene foam and other hard-to-recycle plastic products are piling up in landfills and in the environment, or going to incinerators.

Judith Enck, the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, says plastics recycling doesn’t work and never will. Chemical additives and colorants used to give plastic different properties mean that there are thousands of types, she said. That’s why they can’t be mixed together and recycled in the conventional, mechanical way. Nor is there much of a market for recycled plastic, because virgin plastic is cheap, she said.

So what is more likely to happen than actual recycling, said Enck, a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is the industry will shift to burning plastics as waste or as fuel.

Lee Bell, a policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, thinks chemical recycling is a public relations exercise by the petrochemical industry. The purpose is to dissuade regulators from capping plastics production. Making plastic could become even more important to the fossil fuel industry as climate change puts pressure on their transportation fuels, Bell said.

The industry has made roughly 11 billion metric tons of plastic since 1950, with half of that produced since 2006, according to industrial ecologist Roland Geyer. Global plastic production is expected to more than quadruple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Programme and GRID-Arendal in Norway.

The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says the share of plastic waste that is successfully recycled is projected to rise to 17% in 2060 from 9% in 2019 if no additional policies are enacted to restrain plastic demand and enhance recycling, but that wouldn’t begin to keep up with the projected growth in plastic waste. With more ambitious policies, the amount of plastic waste that is recycled could rise to 40% to 60%, according to OECD.

Two groups working to reduce plastic pollution, the Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics, estimated that the U.S. rate for recycling plastic waste in 2021 was even lower — 5% to 6%, after China stopped accepting other countries’ waste in 2018.

The U.S. national recycling strategy says no option, including chemical recycling, should be ruled out. The way to think of these new plants, the industry says, is as manufacturing plants. They should be legally defined that way, and not as waste management. About 20 states have adopted laws in the past five years consistent with that wish. Opponents say it’s a way to skirt the more stringent environmental regulations that apply to waste management facilities.

EXISTING PLANTS

The U.S. facilities currently recycling plastic into new plastic are small — the largest is a 60-ton-per-day plant in Akron, Ohio, Alterra Energy, according to the ACC.

Alterra Energy says it takes in the hard-to-recycle plastics, like flexible pouches, multi-layered films and rigid plastics from automobiles — everything except plastic water bottles since those are recycled mechanically, or plastics marked with a “3” since they contain polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.

“Our mission is to solve plastic pollution,” said Jeremy DeBenedictis, company president. “That is not just a tag line. We all truly want to solve plastic pollution.”

The Ohio facility typically takes in 40 tons to 50 tons per day, heating and liquifying the plastic to turn it back into an oil or hydrocarbon liquid, about 10,000 gallons to 12,000 gallons daily. About 75% of what comes into the facility can be liquified like that. Another 15% is turned into a synthetic natural gas to heat the process, while the remainder — paper, metals, dyes, inks and colorants — exit the reactor as a byproduct, or carbon char, DeBenedictis said. The char is disposed of as nonhazardous waste, though in the future some hope to sell it to the asphalt industry.

The process doesn’t involve oxygen so there’s no combustion or incineration of plastics, DeBenedictis said, and their product is trucked as a synthetic oil to petrochemical companies, essentially the “building blocks on a molecular level for new plastic production.”

The materials they take in, that haven’t been able to be recycled until now, should not be sent to landfills, dumped in the ocean or incinerated, DeBenedictis said.

“That next level has to be a new technology, what you call chemical recycling or advanced recycling. That’s the next frontier,” he said.

“Let’s not kid ourselves here. This is the right time to do it,” added company CEO Fred Schmuck. “There is absolutely no way we can meet our climate goals without addressing plastic waste.”

DeBenedictis said he’s licensing the technology to try to grow the industry because that’s the “best way to make the quickest impact to the world.” A Finnish oil and gas company, Neste, is currently working to commercialize Alterra’s technology in Europe.

The main chemical recycling technologies use pyrolysis, gasification or depolymerization. Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, is skeptical. He says he has been hearing that pyrolysis is going to change everything since the 1990s, but it hasn’t happened. Instead, plastic production keeps climbing.

GAIA views chemical recycling as a false solution that will facilitate greater production of virgin plastic — a high-energy process with high-carbon emissions that releases hazardous air pollutants, Tangri said. Instead, GAIA wants plastic production to be dramatically scaled back and only recyclable plastics to be produced.

“Nobody needs more plastic,” Tangri said. “We keep trying to solve these production problems with recycling when really we need to change how much we make and what we make. That’s where the solution lies.”

EQUITY ISSUES IN SITING PLANTS

In Rhode Island, state lawmakers considered a bill this year to exempt such facilities from solid waste licensing requirements. It was vigorously opposed by environmental activists and residents near the port of Providence who feared it would lead to a new plant in their neighborhood. State environmental officials sided with them.

Monica Huertas, executive director of The People’s Port Authority, helped lead the opposition. The neighborhood is already overburdened by industry, she said, so much so that she sometimes has asthma attacks after walking around.

Dwayne Keys said it’s unfair that he and his neighbors always have to be on guard for proposals like these, unlike residents in some of the state’s wealthy, white neighborhoods. The port area has enough environmental hazards that residents don’t benefit from economically, he added. Keys calls it environmental racism.

“The assessment is, we’re the path of least resistance,” he said. “Not that there’s no resistance, but the least. We’re a coalition of individuals volunteering our time. We don’t have wealth or access to resources or the legal means, as opposed to our white counterparts in higher income, higher net worth communities.”

The chemistry council’s Baca said the facilities operate at the highest standards, the industry believes everyone deserves clear air and water, and he would invite any detractors to one of the facilities so they can see that firsthand.

U.S. plastics producers have said they will recycle or recover all plastic packaging used in the United States by 2040, and have already announced more than $7 billion in investments in both mechanical and chemical recycling.

“I think we are on the cusp of a sustainability revolution where circularity will be the centerpiece of that,” Baca said. “And innovative technologies like advanced recycling will be what makes this possible.”

Kate O’Neill wrote the book on waste, called “Waste.” A professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, she has thought a lot about whether chemical recycling should be part of the solution to the plastic crisis. She said she has concluded yes, even though she knows saying so would “piss off the environmentalists.”

“With some of these big problems,” she said, “we can’t rule anything out.”

———

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

[ad_2]

Source link

October 21, 2022
Advanced recycling: Plastic crisis solution or distraction?

[ad_1]

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The plastics industry says there is a way to help solve the crisis of plastic waste plaguing the planet’s oceans, beaches and lands— recycle it, chemically.

Chemical recycling typically uses heat or chemical solvents to break down plastics into liquid and gas to produce an oil-like mixture or basic chemicals. Industry leaders say that mixture can be made back into plastic pellets to make new products.

“What we are trying to do is really create a circular economy for plastics because we think it is the most viable option for keeping plastic out of the environment,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade association for American chemical companies.

ExxonMobil, New Hope Energy, Nexus Circular, Eastman, Encina and other companies are planning to build large plastics recycling plants. Seven smaller facilities across the United States already recycle plastic into new plastic, according to the ACC. A handful of others convert hard-to-recycle used plastics into alternative transportation fuels for aviation, marine and auto uses.

But environmental groups say advanced recycling is a distraction from real solutions like producing and using less plastic. They suspect the idea of recyclable plastics will enable the steep ramp up in plastic production to continue. And while the amount produced globally grows, recycling rates for plastic waste are abysmally low, especially in the United States.

Plastic packaging, multi-layered films, bags, polystyrene foam and other hard-to-recycle plastic products are piling up in landfills and in the environment, or going to incinerators.

Judith Enck, the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, says plastics recycling doesn’t work and never will. Chemical additives and colorants used to give plastic different properties mean that there are thousands of types, she said. That’s why they can’t be mixed together and recycled in the conventional, mechanical way. Nor is there much of a market for recycled plastic, because virgin plastic is cheap, she said.

So what is more likely to happen than actual recycling, said Enck, a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is the industry will shift to burning plastics as waste or as fuel.

Lee Bell, a policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, thinks chemical recycling is a public relations exercise by the petrochemical industry. The purpose is to dissuade regulators from capping plastics production. Making plastic could become even more important to the fossil fuel industry as climate change puts pressure on their transportation fuels, Bell said.

The industry has made roughly 11 billion metric tons of plastic since 1950, with half of that produced since 2006, according to industrial ecologist Roland Geyer. Global plastic production is expected to more than quadruple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Programme and GRID-Arendal in Norway.

The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says the share of plastic waste that is successfully recycled is projected to rise to 17% in 2060 from 9% in 2019 if no additional policies are enacted to restrain plastic demand and enhance recycling, but that wouldn’t begin to keep up with the projected growth in plastic waste. With more ambitious policies, the amount of plastic waste that is recycled could rise to 40% to 60%, according to OECD.

Two groups working to reduce plastic pollution, the Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics, estimated that the U.S. rate for recycling plastic waste in 2021 was even lower — 5% to 6%, after China stopped accepting other countries’ waste in 2018.

The U.S. national recycling strategy says no option, including chemical recycling, should be ruled out. The way to think of these new plants, the industry says, is as manufacturing plants. They should be legally defined that way, and not as waste management. About 20 states have adopted laws in the past five years consistent with that wish. Opponents say it’s a way to skirt the more stringent environmental regulations that apply to waste management facilities.

EXISTING PLANTS

The U.S. facilities currently recycling plastic into new plastic are small — the largest is a 60-ton-per-day plant in Akron, Ohio, Alterra Energy, according to the ACC.

Alterra Energy says it takes in the hard-to-recycle plastics, like flexible pouches, multi-layered films and rigid plastics from automobiles — everything except plastic water bottles since those are recycled mechanically, or plastics marked with a “3” since they contain polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.

“Our mission is to solve plastic pollution,” said Jeremy DeBenedictis, company president. “That is not just a tag line. We all truly want to solve plastic pollution.”

The Ohio facility typically takes in 40 tons to 50 tons per day, heating and liquifying the plastic to turn it back into an oil or hydrocarbon liquid, about 10,000 gallons to 12,000 gallons daily. About 75% of what comes into the facility can be liquified like that. Another 15% is turned into a synthetic natural gas to heat the process, while the remainder — paper, metals, dyes, inks and colorants — exit the reactor as a byproduct, or carbon char, DeBenedictis said. The char is disposed of as nonhazardous waste, though in the future some hope to sell it to the asphalt industry.

The process doesn’t involve oxygen so there’s no combustion or incineration of plastics, DeBenedictis said, and their product is trucked as a synthetic oil to petrochemical companies, essentially the “building blocks on a molecular level for new plastic production.”

The materials they take in, that haven’t been able to be recycled until now, should not be sent to landfills, dumped in the ocean or incinerated, DeBenedictis said.

“That next level has to be a new technology, what you call chemical recycling or advanced recycling. That’s the next frontier,” he said.

“Let’s not kid ourselves here. This is the right time to do it,” added company CEO Fred Schmuck. “There is absolutely no way we can meet our climate goals without addressing plastic waste.”

DeBenedictis said he’s licensing the technology to try to grow the industry because that’s the “best way to make the quickest impact to the world.” A Finnish oil and gas company, Neste, is currently working to commercialize Alterra’s technology in Europe.

The main chemical recycling technologies use pyrolysis, gasification or depolymerization. Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, is skeptical. He says he has been hearing that pyrolysis is going to change everything since the 1990s, but it hasn’t happened. Instead, plastic production keeps climbing.

GAIA views chemical recycling as a false solution that will facilitate greater production of virgin plastic — a high-energy process with high-carbon emissions that releases hazardous air pollutants, Tangri said. Instead, GAIA wants plastic production to be dramatically scaled back and only recyclable plastics to be produced.

“Nobody needs more plastic,” Tangri said. “We keep trying to solve these production problems with recycling when really we need to change how much we make and what we make. That’s where the solution lies.”

EQUITY ISSUES IN CITING PLANTS

In Rhode Island, state lawmakers considered a bill this year to exempt such facilities from solid waste licensing requirements. It was vigorously opposed by environmental activists and residents near the port of Providence who feared it would lead to a new plant in their neighborhood. State environmental officials sided with them.

Monica Huertas, executive director of The People’s Port Authority, helped lead the opposition. The neighborhood is already overburdened by industry, she said, so much so that she sometimes has asthma attacks after walking around.

Dwayne Keys said it’s unfair that he and his neighbors always have to be on guard for proposals like these, unlike residents in some of the state’s wealthy, white neighborhoods. The port area has enough environmental hazards that residents don’t benefit from economically, he added. Keys calls it environmental racism.

“The assessment is, we’re the path of least resistance,” he said. “Not that there’s no resistance, but the least. We’re a coalition of individuals volunteering our time. We don’t have wealth or access to resources or the legal means, as opposed to our white counterparts in higher income, higher net worth communities.”

The chemistry council’s Baca said the facilities operate at the highest standards, the industry believes everyone deserves clear air and water, and he would invite any detractors to one of the facilities so they can see that firsthand.

U.S. plastics producers have said they will recycle or recover all plastic packaging used in the United States by 2040, and have already announced more than $7 billion in investments in both mechanical and chemical recycling.

“I think we are on the cusp of a sustainability revolution where circularity will be the centerpiece of that,” Baca said. “And innovative technologies like advanced recycling will be what makes this possible.”

Kate O’Neill wrote the book on waste, called “Waste.” A professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, she has thought a lot about whether chemical recycling should be part of the solution to the plastic crisis. She said she has concluded yes, even though she knows saying so would “piss off the environmentalists.”

“With some of these big problems,” she said, “we can’t rule anything out.”

———

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

[ad_2]

Source link

October 21, 2022
Clean Water Act at 50: environmental gains, challenges unmet

[ad_1]

Lifelong Cleveland resident Steve Gove recalls when the Cuyahoga River symbolized shame — fetid, lifeless, notorious for catching fire when sparks from overhead rail cars ignited the oil-slicked surface.

“It was pretty grungy,” said the 73-year-old, an avid canoeist in his youth who sometimes braved the filthy stretch through the steelmaking city. “When you went under those bridges where the trains were hauling coke from the blast furnaces, you had to watch for cinders and debris falling off.”

It wasn’t the only polluted U.S. river. But outrage over a 1969 Cuyahoga fire — the latest in a series of environmental disasters including a 3-million-gallon oil spill off California’s Santa Barbara months earlier — is widely credited with inspiring the Clean Water Act of 1972.

As officials and community leaders prepared to celebrate the law’s 50th anniversary Tuesday near the river mouth at Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga again is emblematic. This time, it represents progress toward restoring abused waterways — and challenges that remain after the act’s crackdown on industrial and municipal sewage discharges and years of cleanup work.

A 1967 survey found not a single fish in the river between Akron and Cleveland. Now, there are more than 70 species including smallmouth bass, northern pike and muskellunge. Limits on eating them have been lifted. The Cuyahoga is popular with boaters. Parks and restaurants line its banks.

“I have folks come into my office routinely from other states and around the world, wanting to see the Cuyahoga River,” said Kurt Princic, a district chief for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. “They want to know how we got from where it was in the ’60s to where it is today. It starts with the Clean Water Act, partnerships and hard work.”

Yet the river remains on a U.S.-Canada list of degraded “hot spots” in the Great Lakes region; it’s plagued by erosion, historic contamination, storm water runoff and sewage overflows. Toxic algae blooms appear on Lake Erie in summer, caused primarily by farm fertilizer and manure.

HALF EMPTY, HALF FULL

The Clean Water Act established ambitious goals: making the nation’s waters “fishable and swimmable” and restoring their “chemical, physical and biological integrity.” It gave the newly established U.S. Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to set and enforce regulations.

“We’ve made tremendous progress,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in an Associated Press interview Friday. “By passing the Clean Water Act, Congress solidified the importance of protecting our lakes, rivers and streams for generations to come.”

Experts and activists agree many waterways are healthier than they were, and cleanups continue. The Biden administration’s 2021 infrastructure package includes $50 billion to upgrade drinking water and wastewater treatment systems, replace lead pipes and cleanse drinking water of toxic PFAS, known as “forever chemicals.”

But the law’s aims have been only “halfway met,” said Oday Salim, director of the University of Michigan’s Environmental Law and Sustainability Clinic. ”If you spoke to most clean water policy advocates today, they’d be pretty disappointed in how long it has taken to get halfway.”

The measure’s crowning achievement, Salim said, is a program that requires polluting industries and sewage treatment plans to get permits limiting their releases into waters. EPA also set pollution standards for 50 industries.

Yet the agency is far behind on strengthening those requirements to reflect pollution control technology improvements, said Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA enforcement chief and executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, which has sued the agency over the delays.

Two-thirds of the requirements haven’t been updated in more than 30 years, the group said in a March report that blamed the outdated ones for “more pollution from oil refineries, chemical plants, slaughterhouses and other industries pouring into waterways.” Pollution control plans for large watersheds and regulatory enforcement are weak, it said, while EPA and state environmental agencies have endured repeated budget cuts.

One result, Schaeffer said, is that more than 50% of lake, river and stream miles periodically assessed are still classified as impaired.

Regan acknowledged EPA has “some more work to do” but had an “aggressive agenda to curtail pollution and upgrade standards and enforcement policies at a pace that science allows us to do.”

“We can’t ignore that the previous administration did not take action,” he said. “We also can’t ignore that we have the same staffing levels that we had in the late ‘80s. I think we’re doing a really good job of beginning to make up for lost time.”

RUNOFF LEFT OUT

The Clean Water Act prompted many states to prohibit laundry detergents containing phosphorus. Some had labeled Lake Erie “dead” as the soaps fueled algae blooms that sapped oxygen and killed fish.

The bans caused a turnaround in the 1980s. Erie was blue once more instead of brown.

Yet the algae blooms were back within a couple of decades — this time because of a problem the Clean Water Act had sidestepped.

Its emission limits and permitting requirements apply to wastes released into waters through pipes or ditches from identifiable sources, such as factories. But it doesn’t regulate runoff pollution from indirect sources — fertilizers and pesticides from farm fields and lawns; oil and toxic chemicals from city streets and parking lots — that flow into waterways when it rains.

Such runoff pollution is now the leading cause of U.S. waterway impairments.

Scientific studies say manure and fertilizer from livestock operations spread on crop fields are largely to blame for sprawling summer algae in western Lake Erie and the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, which receives massive heartland runoff from the Mississippi River. They’re also the top pollutant in Chesapeake Bay.

Environmental groups who have long argued the law allows regulation of large livestock farm pollution sued EPA this month, demanding a tougher approach. But federal and state agencies rely mostly on voluntary programs that provide financial assistance to farms for using practices such as planting cover crops that hold soil during off-seasons and buffer strips between croplands and streams. Farm groups resist making such practices mandatory.

“Agriculture politics are the third rail,” said the Environmental Integrity Project’s Schaeffer. “The farm lobby is powerful.”

Stan Meiburg, director of the Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University and a former EPA deputy administrator, favors requiring farms and other runoff sources to bear costs of environmental damage they cause if a workable system could be found.

“But it’s not clear to me that such a thing exists in the real world,” he said. “I find it unlikely that any legislation any time soon is going to impose wide-scale restrictions on how farmers conduct their activities.”

A more practical approach, he said, is convincing farmers that anti-runoff practices are in their economic interest.

WETLAND WARS

A case argued this month before the U.S. Supreme Court involved one of the longest-running debates about the Clean Water Act: Which waters does it legally protect?

Lakes, rivers and streams are covered, as are adjacent wetlands. But 40 years of court battles and regulatory rewrites have left unsettled the status of wetlands not directly connected to a larger water body — and of rain-dependent “ephemeral” streams that flow only part of the year.

“We want to preserve and protect our ability and statutory authority to regulate in this area,” EPA’s Regan said, describing wetlands as crucial for filtering out pollutants that otherwise would flow downstream. They also store floodwaters and provide habitat for a multitude of plants and animals.

His agency is rewriting rules for those disputed waters, even as the Supreme Court prepares to provide its own interpretation from the case of an Idaho couple who wants to build a house on land with swampy areas near a lake.

“What’s at stake here is at least half the waterways in this country,” said Jon Devine of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The National Association of Homebuilders, which supports the Idaho couple’s challenge of an EPA order to stop work on their house, says states are better suited to oversee isolated wetlands and ephemeral streams than EPA or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which handles some cases.

“The federal government doesn’t have the bandwidth to regulate every single tiny wetland away from anything that would be considered navigable,” said Tom Ward, the group’s vice president for legal advocacy. State regulation was lax 50 years ago but has improved and “they know their waters,” he said.

JUSTICE FOR ALL

Environmental justice — the quest for environmental policies that treat everyone fairly, including communities of color — is a high-profile issue nowadays, although it began with early 1980s protests over a hazardous waste landfill in an impoverished, majority-black community in Warren County, North Carolina.

But for Crystal M.C. Davis, the movement began the day after the infamous 1969 Cuyahoga fire, when Carl Stokes, Cleveland’s first Black mayor, called a news conference and filed a complaint with the state seeking help in cleaning up the river. His brother, U.S. Rep. Louis Stokes, asked Congress for help — another step toward the Clean Water Act.

“The renaissance of the Cuyahoga River is personal to us,” said Davis, who is Black and a vice president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes. “That’s why we have to stop and celebrate, even though there’s still room for improvement.”

Regan, EPA’s first Black administrator, said funding provided by the infrastructure package will help the agency apply the law in keeping with science and in partnerships with state and local agencies.

“So no matter the color of your skin … or your ZIP code, you can enjoy safe, reliable water,” he said.

———

Follow John Flesher on Twitter: @JohnFlesher.

———

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

[ad_2]

Source link

October 17, 2022
DC sues chemical manufacturer over pesticide pollution

[ad_1]

The District of Columbia filed a lawsuit Thursday against Velsicol, claiming it violated the city’s environmental laws by polluting a major waterway, the Anacostia River, and its surrounding environment for decades

WASHINGTON — The District of Columbia filed a lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court Thursday against chemical manufacturer Velsicol Chemical, LLC, claiming it violated city environmental laws by polluting a major waterway, the Anacostia River and the surrounding area for decades.

In a complaint filed by D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, the city alleges that Velsicol produced a pesticide that contained chlordane and marketed it to low-income homeowners in the city from 1945 to 1988. That was the year the chemical was banned for sale in the U.S. by the Environmental Protection Agency over health effects in humans, including tremors, convulsions and cancer.

But Racine claimed at a press conference that Velsicol knew long before that that chlordane could cause cancer, as far back as 1959, yet still sold products that contained the chemical.

Velsicol did not immediately return calls for comment.

As recently as the 1960s, D.C. residents used the Anacostia River for recreation and food, but years of pollution from a variety of sources — sewage, chemical runoff and litter — made the river unusable.

The lawsuit developed out of a decades-long effort to clean up the river, Racine said. Local environmentalists, like Matt Gravatt, chair of the D.C. chapter of the Sierra Club, said the river is almost back to being safe for public use, but not yet.

City departments and environmental researchers have known about the potential harm of chlordane in the Anacostia for decades. The year after the EPA ban, the district put out an advisory warning residents against eating fish caught from the river, in part because levels of chlordane in aquatic life exceeded limits suggested by the Food and Drug Administration.

In the lawsuit, the attorney general’s office said it anticipates the city will spend $35 million remediating sediment contaminated with chlordane and other toxic chemicals. The hope is the award will help pay for the river cleanup.

———

Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.

———

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

[ad_2]

Source link

October 13, 2022