Inside Indiana’s ‘Advanced’ Plastics Recycling Plant: Dangerous Vapors, Oil Spills and Life-Threatening Fires
James Bruggers | June 16, 2023 | Inside Climate News
Two years ago on a Friday evening in May, Kory Kistler was getting ready to leave work at a recycling plant marketed by its owners as being on the front line in a global war against plastic waste.
Then all hell broke loose. Flammable, 700-degree vapors began spewing from a valve on a pump at the plant.
“All of a sudden my operators on the ground started screaming over the radio,” recalled Kistler, a former Marine and a resident of Fort Wayne, 35 miles to the south. “It was hard to understand anything they were saying. So I was like, ‘I’ll go down, check it out and see what’s going on.’ And as soon as I walk outside, I see clouds of vapor in the sky.”
Then, he recalls, the vapors ignited, setting off an uncontrolled fire that was also fed by a type of oil made from plastic waste in a heated, pressurized chamber. As a black cloud of smoke billowed into the sky, local firefighters raced to the plant, set among farm fields and grain silos in Steuben County along Interstate Highway 69 in northeast Indiana, just west of Ashley, population 1,000.
The plant’s owner is San Francisco-based Brightmark, a company that also works with dairy farmers to capture methane from manure. The plan here, though, is to store, shred and chop plastic waste and extrude it into pellets inside a cavernous building. Those pellets are then fed into pressurized “pyrolysis” chambers—the plant has six of them—that use extreme heat to produce a synthetic gas and a dirty “pyrolysis oil,” in what the chemical industry markets as a type of “advanced recycling.”
The plastics industry champions the process as something that makes plastics sustainable, even green, by turning old plastic containers, packaging and the like into new plastic products without the need to extract more fossil fuels to create new plastic feedstocks. But many scientists and environmentalists say pyrolysis is anything but sustainable, describing it as energy-intensive manufacturing with a large carbon footprint that incinerates much of the plastic waste and mostly just makes new fossil fuels.
“I got down onto the unit and walked over to it,” Kistler recalled, as he described the night of the fire. “There’s just basically a jet fire coming out, so I run as fast as I can screaming for my operator up in the control room to shut the pump off, open everything to the (emergency) flare so we can release dangerous vapor safely and prevent the build-up of pressure.”
But for a while, Kistler said, the pressure kept building and “we started losing all control of the unit along with our safety protocols.”
Eventually, firefighters helped extinguish the flames, and plant operators wrested back control of the plant, according to accounts by Kistler, the Ashley fire department chief and another former Brightmark employee, who was Kistler’s supervisor.
Kistler said he and other plant workers who were in the area when the fire broke out are lucky to still be alive.
“If I had been another foot and a half closer, I probably would not be here talking to you today,” he said on a recent balmy evening sitting outside at a Fort Wayne restaurant. “We were in survival mode.”
For its part, Brightmark calls its proprietary process “plastics renewal,” and its Ashley plant a “circularity center,” using buzzwords that are intended to give it an air of environmental responsibility and sustainability. The company markets itself with children using plastic toys and touts a partnership to remove some plastic waste from the ocean.
But reporting by Inside Climate News reveals the May 2021 fire is just one of several environmental health or safety challenges the company has faced since it began testing its plant in 2020 while struggling to fulfill its promise of operating “the world’s largest plastics renewal facility” on a commercial scale.
