| | | | |  | | By Jordan Wolman | Presented by JBS USA | | | | | 
Dave Andrew sees chemical recycling as key to a circular economy. | Courtesy of ExxonMobil | ExxonMobil is going all in on plastics. Dave Andrew, the company's vice president of new market development, sees chemical recycling — the practice of breaking down plastic for reuse — as key to solving the pollution crisis. The oil giant is expanding its chemical recycling capacity and pushing for policy changes to promote use of the technology, even as environmental activists — backed by Michael Bloomberg — have criticized it as a distraction from other efforts to address the plastic problem and a license for the petrochemical industry to pump out more new plastic. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
| | | | A message from JBS USA: What food producers bring to the table should sustain families—and our planet—for generations. That's why, at JBS, we are investing heavily in achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. By prioritizing sustainable food production today, we're able to help ensure a thriving food system for all. Learn More | | | What is the opportunity you see in chemical recycling? Our customers — a lot of the major consumer brands and the people that make packaging for them — their consumers are all demanding more recycled content. So the demand for recycled materials is increasing quite quickly in the near term. So that's creating a demand for advanced recycling and new technologies to transform what we've traditionally thought of as difficult-to-recycle materials into useful, new materials. We've processed in the last 12 months 15 million pounds of plastic waste that would have otherwise gone to landfills through our advanced recycling facility in Baytown. We're on track to scale that facility up to about 60 million pounds per year. And we're not stopping there. Over the next five years, by the end of 2026, we want to have invested in a capacity that is close to 1 billion pounds of advanced recycling capacity around the world. Tell me more about the expansion of your Texas facility. We've been running a smaller facility for about 12 months now to demonstrate the technology. And quite frankly, one of the reasons we started small was because we couldn't get access to enough plastic waste in the Houston area to run it, so we had to start small. The feed availability was low. In early December, we'll be online with the larger-scale facility. We're taking preprocessed plastic that gets shredded. We're taking that preprocessed plastic waste onto our site, we're putting it into one of our large units, and we're converting it, breaking it down to the chemical structure and the basic building blocks, and making the raw materials that are used for a number of different products. Is this a proven solution to the plastics issue? We know the chemistry of the process, we know the feedstocks that we need to run it, and we know how to operate and deploy the projects. This is not a matter of a technology that's unproven. This is a technology that we know very well, that the industry knows very well. And what we're trying to do is accelerate deployment of it at a large scale. I don't hear you saying that increased recycling of plastics will result in a reduced need for new production of new plastics. Why not? The demand for plastic materials around the world continues to grow. These are critical materials in health and medical applications. They have [greenhouse gas] benefits compared to alternative materials. These are critical materials. The demand for plastic materials in automotive applications, in health applications, in new technologies to enable the energy transition, protecting food and stopping food waste — these are all things that modern society needs. Our objective is to meet that demand and enable those benefits. But we certainly want more of our feedstock coming from recycled sources. One of the limitations on that is our ability to get access to plastic waste that we can put into advanced recycling. It's limited based on the collection systems that we have today and residential and community access to proper recycling programs.
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| Why are you pushing hard for chemical recycling to be labeled as manufacturing rather than waste management? What are the downsides of it being regulated as waste? One of the benefits that we want to capture here is we want to co-locate advanced recycling with our existing petrochemical facilities. That's the best way to get the scale advantage, drive down the costs and make this go quickly. Those facilities operate as manufacturing facilities. If we permitted those facilities as waste management facilities, not only is it infeasible, it just doesn't reflect what the process is actually doing. We're using chemistry in this process to turn raw materials into new products, which is much closer related to the processes that those existing facilities are doing. It's the same type of process, it uses the same type of equipment, it uses the same operators, it uses the same personnel. We should be using the same permitting and legislative processes to oversee those processes.
| | | | A message from JBS USA:   | | | Do you have additional plans for expansion of chemical recycling? We're working on a lot of sites across the U.S. Gulf Coast, Canada, a project in France looking to start in 2024, the Netherlands, Singapore, a collaboration in Malaysia. It really is a global approach. In the U.S., we're looking at a site in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a couple of other facilities that are in the early stages of developing project plans in Beaumont, Texas. Some critics are calling chemical recycling the fossil fuel industry's "Plan B" as renewables grow. Do you see it that way? Advanced recycling is important to meeting our customers' needs, and it's important to addressing the plastic waste challenge. And that's what we're focused on. It's safe, it's demonstrated. Now I'll give you, we need to scale it, we need to prove the scale, and that's what we're working on. And we think we can make money on it. We certainly won't apologize for that. We think we have competitive advantages here. And that's one of the reasons we're going quickly. We're going as quickly as we can because we see this as a profitable growth business that delivers benefits to society.
| | | | A message from JBS USA: As a food company committed to feeding larger needs, at JBS we believe in sustainable food production. There's nothing more important than ensuring that our planet can continue to feed us all long into the future.
Because of that, we're leading the industry in change, targeting 2040 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and investing over $1B to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, our emissions.
In doing so, we're setting a new standard for food production—one that allows sustainable practices, quality products, and affordable prices to go hand in hand. It's our way of bringing more to the table. Learn More | | | | | | GAME ON — Welcome to the Long Game, where we tell you about the latest on efforts to shape our future. We deliver data-driven storytelling, compelling interviews with industry and political leaders, and news Tuesday through Friday to keep you in the loop on sustainability. Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott , deputy editor Debra Kahn and reporters Jordan Wolman and Allison Prang . Reach us all at gmott@politico.com , dkahn@politico.com , jwolman@politico.com and aprang@politico.com . Want more? Don't we all. Sign up for the Long Game . Four days a week and still free!
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