Encina is backtracking on its plans to build a $1.1 billlion (€1.03 billion) chemical recycling plant in Point Township, Pennsylvania by the end of 2024.
The project, announced in 2022 by Encina CEO Dave Roesser, was to have culminated in the construction of a facility able to process 450,000 tonnes of post-consumer plastics per year - waste that is now either landfilled or incinerated. It was to have been the first of its kind to be demonstrated at scale. Encina currently operates only a demonstration plant in Woodlands, Texas, where the company has its headquarters.
The project has now been called off. According to Roesser, the focus will now be on projects currently under review or development in key global markets, which include markets within the United States of America, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and Southeast Asia.
The decision to abandon the Pennsylvania site had to do with the need for more scale, said Roesser.
“Encina has had several key projects under review or development in the USA, KSA, and SE Asia for more than 18 months. Our extensive research shows that these projects offer Encina opportunities to meet the needs of our customers to provide their end products with ISCC+ circular chemicals to help meet their sustainability goals in the coming years at the scale they are expecting. The demand for these products required that our company reevaluate our engineering design to meet these larger end-product goals for our customers. Ultimately, our facilities must meet these increased demands, therefore, after careful consideration and thorough analysis, Encina’s management team has decided not to proceed with the construction of our circular manufacturing facility in Point Township, Pennsylvania but will move forward in our other customer markets.”
From the start, however, the project also encountered strong opposition from local residents, who had expressed concerns regarding the health and environmental impacts of the proposed plant’s plastic waste-to-chemicals process.
The process would have used 2.9 million gallons of water a day from the Susquehanna River, threatening to pollute a vital source of drinking water, according to the project’s opponents. They argued that the process is unproven and pointed to the dangers of shipping chemicals by rail.
“Every community those tracks go through will be at risk,” said Eleanor Breslin, staff attorney with Clean Air Council, which has been supporting residents and applying legal scrutiny on the project.
Encina’s decision to withdraw the plan is a ‘huge win for the residents of Northumberland County, for the six million people who use the Susquehanna for drinking water, and for all Pennsylvanians who have a constitutional right to clean air’ said Alex Bomstein, executive director of Clean Air Council,
“Chemical recycling is not a solution to the plastics crisis. Encina sold false promises to our state, and this must be a wake-up call to elected officials that toxic boondoggles like chemical recycling have no place in Pennsylvania.”
Encina utilises a proprietary catalytic process to convert post-consumer scrap plastic to valuable circular chemical products. The process, called Plastic Fluid Catalytic Cracking (PFCC), converts mixed hard-to-recycle plastics into petrochemical feedstock such as light olefins and BTX aromatics.
These can be used as feedstock materials by plastics producers to produce new polymers after having been tested and ISCC+ certified by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM).