[00:00] Bryan Hyde: Welcome to the Powering America Podcast. I'm Brian Hyde, and today I'm joined by Neil Brown, Managing Director of the Progressive Policy Institute. Neil, it's great to have you on the program. Let's first of all get a little bit of background on who you are and what you do. [00:15] Neel Brown: Great, thanks, Brian. Appreciate you having me on to talk about this. Yeah, Neil Brown, Managing Director of the Progressive Policy Institute. We're a center-left think tank here in Washington, D.C. Focus on a number of areas, policy areas from energy to education, defense. We kind of span the, the policy spectrum, really looking at pragmatic solutions to policy issues. We are, you know, not an ideological think tank. We really look for solutions to problems, which kind of sets us apart from some of our, the other organizations here in D.C. My background, I worked on Capitol Hill in my much younger days and had a consulting firm here in D.C. for 15 years before I joined PPI and doing a lot of communications work and consulting work with firms and energy issues and other, and other areas. So. [01:16] Bryan Hyde: Well, today we have you here to discuss the topic of advanced recycling, and I'll admit I don't put as much thought into recycling as I probably should, but when it comes— when I hear the term, the first thing that comes to mind is, all right, got to separate the plastics and papers. And so plastic is kind of the first place that I go. First of all, let me have you set the stage for us. When we're talking advanced recycling, what all does that encompass? [01:40] Neel Brown: Yeah, so it's fascinating. So traditional recycling, as we think about for plastics, is what they call mechanical recycling. They take the plastic drinking bottle that you put in your recycling bin, and that bottle is ground up and then melted, and they make pellets from it and use those pellets to manufacture recycled— other recycled products. And that's the traditional mechanical recycling that we all know. This process that is now known as advanced recycling is a bit different from that. The limitations for mechanical recycling is that if the plastic is contaminated, has oils in it or some food residue, things like that, that can often lead them to throw out quite a bit of plastic and that goes straight to the landfill. What advanced recycling does, they take all these plastics and even the ones that can't be mechanically recycled, and they heat them up to a very high level. So they're broken down into kind of the molecular components of the plastic. Those are then mixed in and go right back into the process for making plastics. And so the end result is those plastics that are hard to recycle from a mechanical perspective, are used, are recycled with this, and they can be— go into making like new, like new plastics. So there are a lot of products that you can't produce from the results of mechanical recycling— medical plastics, things like that— that you need this kind of virgin plastic. The Advanced recycling allows these manufacturers to use basically recycled material to make new products that wouldn't be able to be made with mechanical recycling. So it's not a replacement for mechanical recycling. It's a process that can recycle materials that mechanical can't do and a lot more materials. That are, you know, either contaminated or different stuff that make, you know, like the plastic bags, potato chip bags and things like that, that mechanical recycling can't handle very well. [04:12] Bryan Hyde: And you were mentioning earlier that the stuff that can't be recycled through mechanical recycling ends up in landfills. And, you know, I understand, you know, that's a concern because landfills fill up quickly. I just, I look at the amount of trash we generate. See, we go to visit the family cabin, you know, on a weekend and the number of trash bags that we fill up fill up. It's, it's astonishing. [04:36] Neel Brown: The numbers are a little mind-blowing. In the U.S., every year we create 35.7 million tons of plastic waste as a total. That, that's a huge amount. Um, of that, 75.6% ends up in landfills. Um, so, you know, it's 27 million tons of plastic every year going to landfills unrecycled. We have very low recycling rates in the US. I think on average around 9%, some states much higher, some states much lower. But generally, we recycle about 9% of the plastic we use. And that's, that's very low from kind of global standards. And we'd like to see that much higher. We'd like to see those plastics not end up in landfills. [05:26] Bryan Hyde: So when it comes to the advanced recycling and breaking it down to the molecular level so that it can be renewed or reused like, like you had described. Um, how, how expensive or how difficult of a process is that? [05:41] Neel Brown: So it's fascinating. I got the— so when I started digging into this issue, I got, uh, invited to go actually see one of these facilities. Uh, went down to Baytown, Texas, uh, onto— and this facility is located in the middle of a refinery. Uh, so in this massive complex of pipes and, you know, machinery that is on the scale of a city, um, there's a little tower, um, little in the— in relative terms to what's around it, um, that they take the truckloads of plastic, little pellets or, you know, kind of shredded up plastic, and pump it into this machine. So, um, right now they're kind of building more and more of these. It is an expensive, but I think a great investment that these refineries are making. There are some standalone facilities that people are investing in and, and standing up. So it— right now it looks like it is economically viable to justify those investments that these companies are making in this.. But a lot of that also depends on policymakers and the positions that they take about advanced recycling. It is, it is not without controversy. A lot of folks are just opposed to plastics, period. And so viewing any, you know, technology that uses a refinery or that is not just one-to-one, you know, taking, doing mechanical recycling, that doesn't count. So a lot of this is on policymakers to look at this and, and recognize that we have choices to make policy-wise to either allow these hard-to-recycle materials just to end up in landfills, or do we create policies that have new— allow new technologies to thrive and be profitable for these companies to divert those plastics from landfills? [07:51] Bryan Hyde: Neil, I don't I don't think it's been any secret that for some time fossil fuels, and I'm going to throw the refineries in here, you know, the places where they're created, they've kind of been on the bad side of, you know, people who are concerned about the climate and concerned about pollution. But it sounds like this is an opportunity to introduce, I don't know how to put it, a greener side, or at least a greener initiative to how those refineries could be used. [08:21] Neel Brown: One unpopular opinion that I have is that, you know, some of the people that work at some of these companies, these oil and gas companies, are some of the smartest people I've ever met. They literally know where every molecule goes in a barrel of oil. You know, we all use these products. There's not a person listening to this podcast that doesn't— can't reach out with their hand right now and touch something plastic. It's just, we, we use these things, we create a demand for them, and these companies are responding to that demand. What we can do is create the incentives for them to find ways to make profit in doing things like, you know, diverting this plastic from landfills, uh, to find ways that we can incentivize these companies to make products that we want to buy that are ecologically more sound. And with those profit motives, there are no companies in the world that do this better than these companies. So I think getting them on board with doing, you know, creating technologies like this is of the utmost importance. They're brilliant people. They know how to make a lot of money. They know the science of all of this better than anybody. So I think having them on our team, and team get rid of wasteful plastic in our landfills is a good thing. A lot of people push back that anything an oil and gas company does is wrong. [09:56] Bryan Hyde: Right. [09:57] Neel Brown: I just don't know that that's a productive and practical way to look at the world. [10:02] Bryan Hyde: And speaking of practical, let's talk about the practical effect of diverting plastic waste away from landfills. Now, you'd mentioned mechanical, uh, mechanically recycled plastic. You know, there, there's a lot of it that can end up in the landfill. Um, what's the benefit to municipalities or, or areas that, that don't want to put that kind of waste into, into their landfills? What, what will they see happen? [10:28] Neel Brown: Yeah, so there's a thing called tipping fees, uh, with landfills, and I believe that comes from, uh, when they take the truck and they tip the, the waste into the landfill. So municipalities have to pay for the tonnage that goes into a landfill. And as we all know, you live in areas like mine around Washington, D.C., you see these mountains of, you know, that are built out of trash, unsightly and expensive, in a very expensive real estate area here. So these millions of tons that we create every year, when we divert that from going into landfills, we create new products out of them, that saves municipalities money. We looked at two different municipalities, two different counties. We looked at Los Angeles, LA County, and Harris County, Texas, which is Houston area. And the amount of money that they can save is, is pretty astounding. I think we look nationwide, it's possible on the outside $328 million annually that municipalities can save from just on these tipping fees. And that doesn't count for, you know, not having to have a new landfill because you filled one up with plastic. Harris County, Texas, $21.6 million per year is what we calculated. And Los Angeles County, $2.9 to $5.6 million a year. Now, in places, you know, cities and counties that are cash-strapped, don't want to raise taxes, I mean, this is serious money you're looking at here. And we found that investments of some of this money into pushing for better recycling rates, whether that means incentivizing people to recycle more by having a deposit or refund of some sort that some municipalities do, or just PR campaigns that let people know how to recycle, can increase recycling rates. So it's something that can actually build upon itself. If you take that money that's saved from the tipping fees, and then again, try to increase those recycling rates, I think we could see that even expand more. [12:48] Bryan Hyde: It sounds like the advanced recycling represents quite an opportunity for someone who is willing to, you know, to go after it, invest the capital and start doing this, you know, at large scale. Talk to me a little bit about the regulatory framework that they they would have to navigate in order to do that? [13:08] Neel Brown: Yeah, so right now, federally, around the country, there's, uh, you know, one of the problems is there's not a definition for recycling that is universal. Every state kind of has their own way of defining what counts as recycling, what doesn't count as recycling. Some states don't count advanced recycling as recycling. So There is a federal law that's been proposed. It's been introduced in the House of Representatives on a bipartisan bill that sets to define that nationally so that recycling in Georgia is the same as recycling in Maine is the same as recycling in California. And so these companies can, you know, invest with that knowledge that, you know, what they're investing in is actually going to be considered recycling. You know, it defines that advanced recycling is actually recycling and that the products produced from those— from that process can be labeled as recycled products. So that helps companies that use these packages. This is packaging and other things can count those towards their goals of recycled material. So, you know, I think that's an important piece of the policy area that needs to be resolved. So everybody's kind of working from the same playbook and the same definitions. [14:37] Bryan Hyde: So it sounds like there, there needs to be education on the part of the policymakers in terms of, you know, creating the, the regulatory infrastructure to collect and sort and transport that plastic waste. But we got to get the public on board here, too. And is this part of what you were referring to earlier about, you know, education campaigns about here's the benefit of, you know, taking the time to, to recycle this plastic. [15:02] Neel Brown: Yeah, it's a huge part of it. You see, um, you know, different states, you look at their recycling rates and kind of what they've done to increase, or, you know, um, their, their rates. What's fascinating is some of the states that have the lowest recycling rates happen to be states where there are a lot of oil refineries, uh, already located. So the potential— that those states have, particularly look at like Louisiana, which has one of the lowest rates, I think at 5%, and they have a lot of oil refineries there. Putting one of these advanced recycling or several of these advanced recycling processes there in those facilities could increase the recycling rates to like 55%, you know, because this process allows people to put in kind of any kind of plastic. So you don't have that in areas where people aren't used to recycling. You can just put all your plastics in one place, and those will all go and be sorted. And, you know, they can recycle all of those plastics, the contaminated ones or not. You think of like shampoo bottles or the plastic bottles that motor oil comes in for your car. They can't be mechanically recycled because the oil's in there, you know, but they're perfect for advanced recycling. And so you can imagine kind of a plastic drop-off or one big container at your curb that you just put all of your plastics in— plastic bags, your potato chip bags, your shampoo bottles— knowing that all of that would get recycled. Because advanced recycling does it. So huge potential on that front to increase recycling rates just because of the ease of the process and because of the, you know, not having to worry about contamination of the plastics to be recycled. [17:00] Bryan Hyde: Something you said earlier too comes back to me in that we, we're like fish in water. We're not aware of the water. We just— the amount of plastic that is around us on a day-to-day basis, is something we tend to take for granted. And I don't know, you know, how you raise awareness, but it sure seems like if people really understood just how much of their lives, I mean, the groceries we buy, you know, squeeze bottles for mayonnaise and so forth, it all comes back to these plastics. [17:30] Neel Brown: Yeah, and I think there's an economic side to this that doesn't get talked about a lot. In the hopes of getting rid of plastics, the alternatives are oftentimes more expensive and they're oftentimes more energy intensive to produce. Now, if we're making everything out of recycled material, that's one thing, but you look, if you wanna have that ketchup bottle made out of glass, there are trade-offs there and there are cost trade-offs. And so telling families that are struggling right now with high grocery prices prices already, that they have to pay for more expensive packaging because we don't like the recycling process that might, you know, make that a little less expensive but prolong the use of plastics in some minds. I think it's presumptive in a really unhelpful way to working-class Americans.. And I think, you know, that's part of this equation that we have to think about. Who's pushing for no plastics that doesn't mind having, you know, cloth diapers and glass, you know, ketchup bottles, you know, no matter what the cost, when most Americans, you know, are happy enough to use that. And it would be wonderful if there's a way they can use that and recycle it. And, you know, I think Again, this is where we look for that practical policy response. I don't think realistically we're getting rid of plastics. Like you said, they're just in everything we think about, our everything, everyday use. I think of the, you know, one of the things that I didn't think about before visiting this was, you know, some of the medical uses of plastics, the IV bags, the transportation of all of these materials. There's not a good replacement there.. And these are not easy to recycle materials, and they can't be made of, you know, ordinarily recycled byproducts. So, you know, we've got— there are great uses for plastic. It's an amazing product in the sense of it saves on transportation costs because it's lighter than a lot of these alternatives. So again, from an emissions perspective, can sometimes be better. So a lot of, a lot of different pieces to look at add on this that I think a lot of folks don't— they just think plastic's bad, and that's the— as far as they kind of think about the process. So I'd love for us to find a way to make good policy that, you know, reduces the plastic waste, which is the real problem. Like, if we could have plastics that do all these great things for us, um, and those plastics are recycled, um, and there's a circular economy for them that we're not wasting these things and filling up landfills. That seems like the best of both worlds if we could figure out how to do that. [20:32] Bryan Hyde: Again, we are talking with Neil Brown. He is a managing director at the Progressive Policy Institute. Neil, thank you so much for joining us today on the Powering America podcast. [20:41] Neel Brown: Brian, thank you so much for having me on.