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SCRIPT
[Actuality of three campaigners in Houston, sound of plastic rustling underneath their voices]
JEN: So let's find something. Will this, will that fit? No.
MALACHI: The trick is finding something that's the right size to put the air tag right.
JEN: Right. That the air tag is not gonna get damaged in the process. I don't see, oh, here we go. Is this empty?
MALACHI: We can come with this container right here, maybe.
JEN: Oh, that'll work.
MALACHI: Yeah
JEN: Yep, we found another one.
How much do you know about where your plastic wrappers and bottles end up?
Maybe you’re doing everything right - cleaning them up and sorting them for recycling.
You put them in the correct bin. A truck takes them away.
But …then what?
JEN: Did it beep? If it beeped, that means it's turned on.
MALACHI: Mm-hmm.
JEN: Okay, so then it should be pairing.
MALACHI: Okay. Let's find it.
It’s something most of us don’t really have time to think about.
But in this brightly-lit conference room in central Houston, Texas - they’re doing their own detective work.
THELISA: So that sound beep indicates that the air tag is now paired with the cell phone for tracking purposes. That's pairing, yeah.
These guerilla activists are hiding tracking devices in used plastic salad boxes.
It almost looks like something from an old spy thriller - if James Bond swapped his exploding pen for a pile of dubious-smelling food containers.
JEN: And then we throw it in the bag of all the plastics. And that's, that's all we have to do.
After this, they’ll take their bag to a drop-off point with other foam trays and ketchup bottles - and the hidden tracking device will allow them to follow its journey.
JEN: Sometimes they take different amounts of time. Sometimes they will move from the drop off to the storage location within days. Sometimes it'll be weeks. It really just depends on how full the bin is [...] We haven't had an air tag go offline.
In theory, most of this plastic should be recycled. Their city, Houston, has introduced a recycling programme that says it can take ALL plastics - even those that would usually be hard to recycle.
MALACHI: You know, normally you go to drop off plastic for recycling and they tell you this type can't go here and that type can't go there. Um, but this promise is to take all plastic and recycle it through a process known as advanced recycling.
Advanced recycling. Sounds good right? We’re going to come back to this.
Because, however much you think about your waste you're probably still creating a lot of it.
Globally, we produce more than 400 million tonnes of plastic a year.
The "garbage patch" of plastic waste that's built up in the Pacific is now bigger than Texas.
We're Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor. We're husband-and-wife and we're investigative environment journalists. And in this episode of Living Planet from DW we'll be looking at an emerging industry that's attracting millions of dollars of investment. Could it really solve our plastic problem?
[DRIVING NOISE]
JEN: So here we are. [...] We're gonna pull up and park and drop off the plastics ourselves.
Which is why we’re looking at that recycling programme in Houston.
JEN: This is a pretty typical looking drop off site. It's got, uh, staff here to help with large drop-offs and it's got the open air bins where you can manually drop off your own recycling. So we are going to. Find the all plastics recycling program bin and drop off our plastic.
The three activists - Jen, Thelisa and Malachi - are from a non-profit called Air Alliance Houston.
They’re at one of nine plastic drop–off sites around the city to smuggle in their tracking device.
JEN: You can look in. Oh, that was a good echo. This bin is relatively empty. That means. Probably been emptied relatively recently at their third party site. So it'll be, it'll be a few weeks before the plastic we tag today actually starts moving. Um, but you can hear it. Uh, it's a very large metal bin, pretty traditional for dropping plastic.
We have tagged our plastic and Malachi's gonna put it into the bin.
MALACHI: There you go!
The city says this programme is the first of its kind in the United States.
It’s a partnership with private companies and the advertising says it could eventually lead to up to 90% of plastic being recycled.
That’s a lot more than the average across the US, which is reported to be less than 10%.
But the reason for the subterfuge here, is that these activists don’t believe those promises.
MALACHI: It looks nice. Like there's this promise of, you know, all plastics are accepted. Unlike most recycling places, there's no specific guides on how to sort your plastic. Just put 'em in there. But, uh, yeah, something's too good to be true.
And they say time and again, their tracking devices have picked up something worrying - the plastic waste they’ve left here has not been taken to a recycling plant.
MALACHI: last time we did this study, uh, we found that much of the plastic. In fact, pretty much all the plastic that we tracked, we dropped off air tagged plastic at eight of all eight of Houston's recycling centers and all of that plastic ended up at the same place.
Twice in August 2024, eight times in August 2025, and four times in December 2025 - they say their tags have been moved to the same third-party storage site - and left there.
JEN: The accumulated plastic was not actually being recycled. Not in any way, shape or form in the way that the city of Houston had been saying.
MALACHI: It's all just staying in the same place.
So what’s meant to happen to that hard-to-recycle plastic?
Do you remember that phrase - advanced recycling?
It’s not just Houston.
This is an emerging industry, attracting millions of dollars of investments across the US and Europe.
But how does it work?
I take Dan to our own recycling bin, at home, to try to explain this.
[DAN AND LUCY AT HOME REFLECTION - looking through recycling]
LUCY: OK Dan so luckily our own recycling bin has everything we need to understand this.
DAN: OK.
LUCY: Here’s a transparent plastic drinks bottle. These are already widely recycled using conventional recycling methods or what some people call mechanical recycling.
DAN: Right.
LUCY: But over here on this pile we have different kinds of plastic. Plastic film, pouches, yoghurt tubs, bread wrappers - and lots of soft plastics. If you look at the labels on some of these it actually says do not recycle. That’s because it can’t be recycled in the usual way.
DAN: So these are ultimately ending up in landfill or the incinerator.
LUCY: Yes. But - now the industry says it can recycle these using advanced or chemical recycling, which is using things like heat, or enzymes to break down the plastics into smaller chemical compounds, sometimes including the original monomers. They're turning it back into its original chemical building blocks which can then be reused to produce new plastics. And in the end product - they say you can’t tell the difference with virgin plastic.
The industry says that chemical recycling means plastics can be remade over and over again.
A circular economy.
It’s a tantalising idea.
[AMERICAN CHEMISTRY COUNCIL VIDEO]
“Advanced recycling is a breakthrough for reclaiming used plastics”
These are videos from the American Chemistry Council, which has reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars promoting it.
“... advanced recycling compliments traditional recycling by recovering used plastics that typically are not recycled today. Together, mechanical recycling and advanced recycling can help lead to a circular economy where plastics can be reused to benefit communities and the environment.”
You can see why they believe chemical recycling could change the game.
But perhaps - it’s not quite so simple.
Over the last year, Lucy and I have been part of a group of investigative journalists in Europe looking into chemical recycling.
Between us, we’ve analysed financial reports and scoured planning applications…
Attended conferences, toured factories and heard people sing its praises.
But we’ve also spoken to critics of chemical recycling all over the world.
And we’ve realised - we’ve stumbled across a fight about plastic’s future.
LEE: Largely I think it's a propaganda exercise designed to, divert attention away from increasing plastic production and plastic pollution that's occurring in the environment.
This is Lee Bell, a technical advisor to the International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, which is a global non-profit network.
For years now, he’s been looking into chemical recycling.
And - I think it’s safe to say that he’s not a fan.
LEE: It's a distraction, I think, and largely a propaganda tool.
He believes the industry is over-promoting a solution that he believes has serious flaws.
His problem is not necessarily with the technology itself
But with the plastic waste we’re all putting into it.
Because, he says, the plastics going into the process - from pouches and bottles and wrappers - contain all kinds of different chemicals.
LEE: Most plastics have very high levels of chemical additives. There's thousands that can potentially be added to plastics. [...] Most are unknown in terms of their composition. They're not labeled. Uh, we know that there are something like 14,000 chemicals that are used as additives in plastics and 4,000 or so have been demonstrated to be hazardous.
He says this matters because one of the big promises of some advanced recycling companies is that they can take our mixed, dirty plastic waste and make it new again.
Remember that slogan? The circular economy.
But Lee says, it’s not a perfect circle - because so much of the input is contaminated, it has to be stripped away and treated as waste.
LEE: They struggle, uh, to treat mixed plastic waste because the contamination causes all sorts of problems in the, um, technical processes if they do manage to strip the polymers, uh, and monomers of these chemical additives and, and other contaminants.They generate enormous hazardous waste streams. So much so, uh, that the majority of the material they process simply becomes hazardous waste. And you really have to question why you would put so much energy and money into, uh, technologies that simply convert plastic waste into large quantities of hazardous waste with a really small output in return.
It’s not the first time we’ve heard this complaint.
VEENA: Another major issue that I found is that these facilities are creating significant hazards, pollution and waste.
This is Veena Singla, a public health scientist affiliated with the University of California San Francisco.
VEENA: In the US just three chemical recycling facilities generated more than 900 metric tons of hazardous waste in about three years. These facilities also are permitted to emit health, harming air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, which are respiratory, toxicants benzene, which is a cancer causing chemical and lead, which is a neurotoxicant, especially for children.
Of course, the waste streams and emissions of industrial plants are highly regulated in most places like the US, and Europe. And we don’t have evidence of any risk to people’s health.
But if waste is created, it must go somewhere.
VEENA: And in the US what we see is that these facilities are overwhelmingly cited in marginalized communities. So these are communities that are disproportionately low income people or people of color, or both. And many of these communities are already overburdened with industrial pollution and facilities. So it really doesn't make sense to replace one kind of pollution and problem - plastic pollution - with a whole ‘nother kind of pollution and major problem.
There’s something else, too. A debate over the definition of recycling, itself.
VEENA: A lot of what's happening is not actually recycling any plastic. It's making fuel that will be burned.
The process of chemical recycling plastic creates a number of other products - including fuels.
Should those products be counted as recycled, even though they’re not creating new plastic?
VEENA: Think about making paper, right? You use trees to make paper. The the production, you use the paper and then the end of life, um, if you recycle it, you take that paper, it goes, um, back into making new paper and therefore you don't have to cut down new trees to make more paper. If instead of recycling that paper into new paper, you burned it, it's gone, right? You can't use it to make new paper. You must cut down new trees in order to make new paper.
So turning plastics into fuels is not recycling. It has none of the benefits of recycling. So in those cases. Calling it chemical recycling is somewhat of a misnomer or misleading because it's not recycling any plastic.
Some companies use the fuel created to power the process. And they say it’s creating something useable out of our waste.
But in Veena’s view, chemical recycling simply isn’t creating enough new plastic to make it worthwhile.
VEENA: in 2023, petrochemical companies globally announced about 2 million metric tons of chemical recycling capacity that they were gonna build out by 2027. But 80% of that planned capacity is for fuels not recycling any plastic. [...]
Last year the conference of the Basel Convention, an international treaty which regulates international shipments of plastic, effectively declined to recognise chemical recycling as environmentally sound.
We wanted to put all this to the industry, so we asked the American Chemistry Council, which promotes chemical recycling in the United States.
They didn't want to take part, but pointed us to promotional material which says advanced recycling offers significant environmental benefits and gives value to hard-to-recycle plastics that typically are landfilled.
It's previously said it believes the US could support 150 plants.
But how much is already happening?
Here’s Jen Hadayia again - one of the activists we heard at the start.
She’s the executive director of the non-profit, Air Alliance Houston, in Texas.
She’s been keeping track of the chemical recycling projects local to her.
JEN So there is one operational chemical plastic recycling facility in the greater Houston area, and it is owned and operated by ExxonMobil. That is the only functioning chemical or advanced recycling facility that we are aware of. However, over the years, there are other companies that have announced the intention and they have never materialized.
Houston is a plastics production hub in the US.
Hundreds of petrochemical companies have their bases there.
You’d think if chemical recycling were to thrive somewhere, it would be here.
And yet -
JEN: The bark has been louder than the bite when it comes to this industry, there's been a lot of talk and not a lot of actual functionality.
Is the chemical recycling industry actually struggling to get off the ground?
LEE BELL: We see a lot of announcements. We see a lot of announcements about investment and projects coming up and so on. But if you wait a couple of years, they tend to disappear and, and there tends to be very little progress. And then often you see these proposals pulled.
This is Lee Bell again, from IPEN.
A couple of years ago he looked in detail at chemical recycling projects across the US.
He says he found eleven operational facilities - but since then, four have closed down.
LEE: Either gone bankrupt or, were not able to produce sufficient material to remain economically viable. This, it doesn't look good.
It could be that it’s still early days for the industry.
That they would benefit from support from the government, and better infrastructure.
Or perhaps it’s just normal trial and error for an industry still learning its best practice.
But Lee Bell says he believes there’s a more fundamental problem with the business model, because it’s more expensive to create new plastics from old ones, than to start from scratch with raw materials.
LEE: You have to compete against virgin petrochemicals, plastics, uh, and when the price of oil is low, they cannot compete. It's simply not possible.
The industry target is to recycle 100% of plastic packaging by 2040.
How much can chemical recycling realistically contribute to that?
LEE: in terms of the overall market in projections, if you're looking to 2040, it's been estimated that chemical recycling won't be able to handle more than 2-3%, uh, of all plastic waste generated. And that works out to about 14 million tons. And even if they were able to treat 14 million tons then and, and create 14 million tons of new plastic. Um, then the risks associated with the emissions, the carbon footprint, and the hazardous waste, uh, would outweigh the benefit of using that technology.
One of the things we’ve noticed in our analysis is how many of the world’s biggest petrochemicals companies are backing chemical recycling in one form or another.
Some of the companies now trying to recycle plastic waste are the ones who make it in the first place.
[DAN AND LUCY REFLECTION]
DAN: We hear so much about plastic waste piling up in our oceans, in developing countries, and how we should make changes wherever we can. Metal straws instead of plastic ones, paper bags instead of plastic bags, I think a lot of people assume that we’re collectively slowly reducing how much plastic waste we create, but maybe it’s just not happening quickly enough, or something. But actually that’s not the case.
LUCY: Not at all. I think a lot of ordinary people don’t realise that plastic production is still going up, fast. It’s expected to double or triple by 2050.
DAN: You could say that plastic companies are just responding to demand, from us, consumers and it’s true that there are more of us than ever, globally.
You could say that some plastic is irreplaceable, such as in medical equipment.
And that plastic in packaging can even help to cut carbon emissions, if it’s used to replace metal or glass.
But still - that’s a lot of plastic.
Some projections say we'll be creating more than a billion tons a year by 2060.
No wonder our governments, our local authorities, our waste companies are so keen to find something to do with it.
MALACHI: … I was gonna pull up the plastic tracking spreadsheet on my…
JEN: Oh, yes. Thank you for doing that, because I kind of forgot about that…
MALACHI: …That's on the computer.
Remember those activists we joined in Houston at the start?
What happened to the plastic they dropped off at the city recycling programme with us? The old chicken salad box, with a tracking device inside.
MALACHI: And then we have the MOVE Status, which is a tab that just shows where they ended up.
Two months later, it still hasn’t moved. It’s still in the same bin at the drop-off site.
It hasn’t been moved to the storage yard where their other tagged plastic ended up.
[JEN - IN THE BACKGROUND] … they're all consolidated in one place…
And it also hasn’t yet been recycled.
MALACHI: …that's not what's happening right now….
The City of Houston declined our request for an interview and said they only provide the points of collection for this programme.
We also reached out to the private companies involved in the recycling collaboration but they either didn’t respond while the podcast was in production or didn’t directly address our questions about the collaboration.
They have previously said they are jointly building a sorting center which could eventually process up to 136,000 tons of plastic a year.
LUCY: Houston is a huge city, right? It must produce huge amounts of plastic waste.
JEN: Yes, yes.
LUCY: Some people might be listening to you and thinking, hang on, isn't chemical recycling a great idea here?
JEN: Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States. And we have considerably large landfills. Our two municipal landfills in the Houston area are in the top 10 pollution sources. They're a major source of methane gas. So yes, we are concerned about waste management. We have major landfill issues. We are a very large city. We produce a lot of waste. So yes. The idea that companies could offer a solution to Houstonians that would address some of their plastic waste is attractive, but it's also a false solution.
The community is being sold a story that there's this option for them to reduce plastic waste and that these companies have solved the problem and we know that number one, it doesn't solve the problem. And number two, they're not actually functional.
Almost everyone acknowledges that recycling - all recycling - is worse for the environment than simply not producing the plastic in the first place.
But Jen and her colleagues are worried that that message won’t get through to consumers.
And that having such a well-promoted recycling program in their city will give people the idea that they can carry on as they are, without cutting down their plastic use at all.
THELISA: When I learned that I could take my plastic and put it in and the belief that by putting my plastic in there, I am contributing to help the environment.
Here’s Thelisa Lavergne, also from Air Alliance Houston.
THELISA: I was really proud of that until I started working here and realized that all of my efforts separating plastic from my regular trash really wasn't gonna go anywhere. And the other thing is that I feel for people of Houston and probably even people in other areas, the consumption of plastic, it is a billion dollar industry. And so industry keeps convincing us that they're recycling so we can buy more. So we buy and use more plastic 'cause we are convinced or told that we can recycle it and therefore we're not causing any harm to the environment.
We’ve heard this argument before: that plastic producers want us to believe in recycling so that they can produce more plastic.
And it’s about to be put to the test - in the courts. Because the state of California is in the process of suing one of the world’s biggest, and most valuable oil companies, ExxonMobil.
The lawsuit alleges that Exxon has contributed to a ‘deluge’ of plastic pollution - while telling the public that recycling could fix it.
VEENA: The California Attorney General, Bonta sued ExxonMobil for a number of deceptive practices…
Here’s Veena Singla, the academic, again.
VEENA: they're alleging in this lawsuit that ExxonMobil's, um, marketing and statements and claims to the public about what they're doing with chemical recycling have been misleading and deceptive.
The lawsuit specifically mentions Exxon’s promotion of chemical recycling… calling it a ‘modern-day campaign of deception’.
It says Exxon deliberately conceals the technical limitations of its chemical recycling program and knows it isn’t economically viable.
Is it quite a big moment to see a lawsuit like this against a company like Exxon?
VEENA: I think it's really important that companies are held accountable to the law and to transparency and being truthful in their advertising and claims with the public.
Exxon Mobil told us it has processed more than 68,000 metric tons of plastic waste into new products and new fuels, keeping it out of burn piles and landfills - and said activists clinging to a "narrow definition" of recycling for the purpose of killing the plastics industry, is "propaganda which hurts the planet".
It is counter-suing California’s Attorney General, Rob Bonta, for defamation.
And this debate is certainly broader than just one company. It’s a battle for how we view plastic - the plastic we all use, every day.
VEENA: This message of we can recycle our way out of this problem has been pushed by industry for many, many years, again, decades, to convince the public that the plastic pollution problem is our fault. We're not recycling enough. We're putting things in the wrong bin. We are not sorting our recycling. The problem is, is really us. This idea has become entrenched, I think in, in many people's minds. But again, the reality when you, when you look at the waste management or materials management hierarchy, recycling's not the most impactful or effective intervention. The same companies that are touting their ability to recycle hard to recycle plastics are the same ones making the hard to recycle plastics.
It’s not that recycling can’t be the answer. But it might not be the only answer. We asked the people we’ve spoken to what their solutions would be. Lee Bell, from IPEN, believes it would be more sustainable to change how we make plastic, to make it easier to recycle - by shredding it.
LEE: I think we need to change the composition of plastics to make them safer and more recyclable, then boost mechanical recycling where possible. That would be a much better investment and a much better use of public funds and industry funds than to pursue problematic chemical recycling.
For Jen Hadayia, the activist we started with in Houston it could be even more straightforward.
JEN: Bottom line, the true upstream solution to plastic waste is to reduce single use plastic. That's really what the outcome is. We didn't always rely on single use plastic in the way that we do now. We didn't always walk into a grocery store and all of our fruit was cut up for us and packaged in single use plastic. We used to do things that were more sustainable.
If you produce less plastic waste at the beginning, that's less that has to go to a landfill, that's less that has to be recycled in any way, shape or form.
This investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe fund (IJ4EU). It was co-ordinated by Ludovica Jona, with reporting by Staffan Dahllöf, Yann Philippin, Begona Ramirez, Lorenzo Sangermano and Stefano Valentino. Sound design was by Jarek Zaba.
Includes audio from videos ‘What is Advanced Plastics Recycling?’ and ‘America's Plastic Makers’ by the American Chemistry Council.