Dive Brief:
- Braven Environmental plans to open a chemical recycling facility in Texarkana, Texas, under a new tax abatement program from the state.
- Gov. Greg Abbott announced Feb. 14 that the chemical recycling plant will be built under the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation program. The program offers property tax incentives for certain manufacturing or tech companies in exchange for job creation and investment agreements.
- Braven Environmental says the project will create more than $145 million in “capital investment.” The company uses pyrolysis to process what it describes as “hard-to-recycle plastics” into PyChem, which it markets as an alternative fuel and a feedstock to create new plastic products.
Dive Insight:
Braven Environmental joins several other chemical recycling operations that see Texas as an ideal state for operations, in part due to business incentives and nearby petrochemical operations.
ExxonMobil, which operates some of the largest chemical recycling facilities in North America, has plans to expand its chemical recycling operations at its locations in Baytown and Beaumont, Texas. Meanwhile, Cyclyx International, a joint venture with Agilyx and LyondellBasell, plans to open two “circularity centers” in Houston and Fort Worth to source, collect and pre-process plastic waste for use in chemical and mechanical recycling applications.
“Texas is where today’s products are made using tomorrow’s technologies,” said Gov. Abbot in an announcement about the Braven agreement, adding that economic incentive tools like the JETI program help the state attract new businesses and “good-paying jobs.”
Under the new JETI program rules, Braven would be able to receive a 10-year reduction in its property taxes of at least 50% in exchange for promising to create at least 10 new jobs in Bowie County, Texas, and invest a minimum of $20 million in the region.
“The support of state and local governments plays a critical role in our decision-making process” when evaluating locations for its next sites, said Braven CEO Jim Simon in a statement.
Michael Moreno, the company’s co-founder, told the Texarkana Gazette in October that the proposed site at the TexAmericas Center, a rural industrial business park, would be an ideal location because it offers "pretty good access to the Gulf Coast," where many of its customers, including petrochemical companies, are located.
Braven announced in October that it had entered into a pyrolysis oil offtake agreement with Chevron Phillips Chemical, which supplies polyethylene.
Chemical recycling, also known as molecular or advanced recycling, is a category of processing technologies that have seen both major investments and controversy in recent years. Some plastics and packaging companies say the technologies can help recycle more kinds of hard-to-recycle plastics, such as flexible packaging, and possibly offer business opportunities for MRFs and other recyclers.
Yet critics say the scale and potential benefits of chemical recycling are overblown and that these projects create pollution without recycling a meaningful amount of plastic. Beyond Plastics previously criticized Braven and similar chemical recycling companies for marketing their materials as a sustainable feedstock for new plastics without transparency about how much of material was used for that purpose.
Braven currently operates one pyrolysis facility in Zebulon, North Carolina. It previously agreed to invest $31.7 million to build another manufacturing operation in Cumberland County, Virginia. That project, announced in 2020, fell through two years later.
This story first appeared in the Waste Dive: Recycling newsletter. Sign up for the weekly emails here.
