IRG's Plastics Plan: Promising in Theory, Precarious in Practice

Contributed

Organizing members of Our Water, Our Air, Our Rights (from left to right) Art Leopold, Russ Taylor, and Juan Llarena spoke with Jeff Bloodworth about their opposition to the IRG plant from the beginning, their doubts centered around environmental sustainability as well as a confusing business plan.

Hope is a sword that cuts both ways. Erie's now-defunct International Recycling Group (IRG) facility is an object lesson in this. The hopeful saw the $300 million dollar facility as an economic and environmental boon. But critics, like the Sierra Club's John Vanco, always suspected "We [would] get hornswoggled." The facts reveal that hope, alone, cannot solve a complicated issue.

The most obvious fact is that humans are drowning in plastic. In 1950, manufacturers made two million tons of it. Seventy-five years later, that figure has spiraled to a gobsmacking 450 million tons produced annually. Every year, the average American sends 290 pounds of plastic waste to the landfill, or worse – the roadside. A synthetic product, plastic, unlike paper, requires hundreds of years to degrade. In the interim, toxic chemicals from micro-plastics seep into water, food, and even the air we breathe. In 2020, Mitch Hecht, IRG's chairman and founder, offered hope and a solution. His $300 million "mega-sized, all-plastics SuperPRF (Plastics Recovery Facility)" offered a "sustainable" panacea to our plastic dilemma – along with 300 "family supporting" jobs.

When it came to IRG, Judith Enck did not see a solution, she saw unanswered questions. The former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and founder of Beyond Plastics told me, "When you hear recycling it sounds like a good thing. But if you spend 1 hour doing your own research, you learn that it [plastic recycling] is more complicated." Unlike aluminum or glass, which are almost endlessly reusable, only plastic types #1 and #2 are, in practice, recycled. Comprising less than 20 percent of all plastics, these can be recycled a handful of times. But this does little about the other 80 percent, plastic types #3-#7. Beyond that quandary, Enck wondered, "Most local governments already have contracts to recycle this plastic. So, where were the #1 and #2 plastics going to come from?"

Recycling plastic offers a hopeful answer to a complicated problem. Optimism nudges us toward the hope that recycling solves the plastic dilemma. Strong, durable, and cheap, plastic is indispensable in products ranging from F-16 fighter jets to iPhones. But the plastics industry reaps huge profits from redundant single-use cups, bags, and the ever-ubiquitous straw. Rather than pivot to glass and paper, IRG offered the idea of unrestrained plastic consumption as sustainably "green." In 2024, the lure of this convinced the Biden administration to conditionally award IRG with a $182 million loan. One Department of Energy official even pleaded to Enck, "You are an environmentalist, why aren't you supporting this?"

Fueling the hope was IRG's location. Hecht bought land for his plant on the lower east side where the Hammermill Paper Company once stood. A designated Opportunity and Environmental Justice Zone, the site came with significant tax breaks. The promise of a $300 million investment and 300 jobs was powerful. County and city, Republican and Democrat, Erie's political establishment swooned. In 2020, Mayor Joe Schember spoke for every elected official, "My team and I are tremendously happy about the International Recycling Group's plan to create the first ever, all-plastics sorting facility right here in Erie."

Russ Taylor understands the political calculus. One of the leaders of Erie's opposition to IRG, Taylor admitted, "Local politicians are always for jobs. Some of the trades unions were also for IRG. $300 million in construction jobs is a lot. It is tough to oppose." Taylor, along with friends Art Leopold and Juan Llarena belong to Our Water, Our Air, Our Rights. The trio told me, "We weren't totally against it. We had questions, if you [Mitch Hecht] had answers. We want good jobs for Erie residents, but we want details. How many permanent jobs in an automated plant? What types of jobs? We never got answers."

Four thousand miles away in Heidelberg, Germany, Mark Osiecki was thinking the exact same thoughts. The Erie native turned engineer may have managed environmental projects across five continents – but he always kept tabs on home. To Osiecki, Erie's lower east side is more than a place, it is family. Osiecki's dad worked at Hammermill for 42 years. The Osiecki clan lived down the street from the plant. Most every important event in Osiecki's early life, from baptisms to first bike rides, occurred in Hammermill's shadow. The site, as he told me, "Is home as home can be, this neighborhood. It is the family stomping ground."

Emotionally attached, Osiecki had also managed projects like IRG. He appreciated the lure of IRG for a "lower east side [that] has been hammered" but also understood plastics recycling. Osiecki told me that from the start, "My antennae and eyebrows went up. It just seemed, Mr. Hecht was so adamant about the environmental angle and so invested in being an environmentalist, it raised my suspicions."

Using publicly available information, Osiecki reversed engineered IRG's business plan. Unlike Enck, he thinks IRG could have been marginally profitable. But he also came to realize, "He [Hecht] was wildly undercapitalized. I looked at his product, it might work if he had the capital. But how can he repay these loans? It is a huge financial burden to make a profit, pay back the loan, and pay employees. He promised 300 jobs – this would capsize his business model."

To Osiecki, IRG was no sham, as some critics suggest, but it was sold to Erie on shaky promises. Instead of 300 jobs, Osiecki thinks IRG could employ 60-70 full-timers. As for the "life-cycle analysis" Hecht, and his supporters at Penn State-Behrend, cited to prove IRG's sustainability – it was not peer-reviewed by outside experts in the field, raising questions about its credibility. Then there was IRG's wastewater plan. Recyclers shred waste plastic and then wash away toxic chemicals to create pelletized, recycled plastics. This process creates immense amounts of micro-plastic pollution and contaminated wastewater. Osiecki understood this. He had recently engineered a filtration system in a Stockholm seaport that kept toxins from pouring into the Baltic Sea. But at IRG, he told me, "All of this was going into a retaining pond and then flushed straight into Lake Erie. No treatment. No filtration."

To Osiecki, IRG's "Clean Red" was just as problematic as the wastewater. IRG planned to recycle plastic types #1 and #2. But it also proposed turning types #3-#7 into "Clean Red," which when mixed with coal would fuel a Gary, Indiana steel mill. The science on burning plastic is clear, the procedure releases the most toxic human-made substance, dioxins, into the atmosphere, among other hazardous air pollutants. IRG officials claimed the 3,000-degree steel furnace would vaporize dioxins. Osiecki admits that "vaporization" is "theoretically true." But he also explained, "In a lab, blast furnace heat can deconstruct and keep carcinogenic dioxins deconstructed. But steel mills lose control of emissions all the time. There is no intervention if you find bad emissions." In theory, Clean Red offers the hope that plastic waste can fuel steel production without dioxins. But Osiecki thinks reality has shown that this would not be the case.

Erie native and environmental activist John Vanco watched the IRG drama from afar. He told me, "My attitude was if they want to squander private money – that's their thing. But once they got a federal loan guarantee, I said no." When officials announced in March that the federal loan had collapsed, Vanco was scarcely surprised by IRG's demise. He sees it as just one more boondoggle in a long line of sketchy development schemes. From the Koehler Brewery Project to the tires-to-energy plant, Vanco sees "a litany of these projects" where outsiders use hope to make big promises and walk away.

Jeff Bloodworth is a professor of American political history at Gannon University. You can follow him on Twitter/X @jhueybloodworth or reach him at bloodwor003@gannon.edu