Activism works (sometimes): How Macon, Georgia defeated a polluter

July 27, 2022 9:40 AM

Your problem will rarely be only local, so you are not alone in your battle. When this fight began I had no clue that the problem faced by Macon had national resonance. It turns out that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has classified pyrolysis as incineration under the Clean Air Act since the 1990s, even as industry tries to reclassify it as manufacturing and recycling. National players, such as Graham Hamilton, U.S. Policy Officer for Break Free From Plastic, joined our cause and helped build a grassroots national campaign to use the term “plastic incineration” instead of the industry spin of “recycling.” I was astonished to find that my friend Rebecca Altman, a writer and sociologist who lives in Rhode Island, knew about our Macon battle. The fight against pyrolysis for plastic waste was “a global fight,” she explained. Journalist Jill Neimark explains in Open Mind how she helped stop a plastics incinerator from opening in Macon, Georgia.

From Neimark's June 16, 2022 article comes annotated advice on fighting an industry giant:
1) Listen closely to those who believe you’ll fail—or who want you to fail. They have critical information that will shape your battle.
2) As Mister Rogers would say, “Look for the helpers.”
3) Find your place in the firmament. Your problem will rarely be only local, so you are not alone in your battle.
4) Make like a tourist: Explore and research everything.
5) Get legal help. If you can engage legal help from organizations like the Sierra Club, the ACLU, or the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), do so.
6) Reach out to the broader community.
7) Follow the money. You can bet that if a big, polluting industry is coming to your town, there is a money trail.
8) Cultivate reporters.

posted by Bella Donna (5 comments total)

Mixed thoughts on this because some plastic... really can only be burned. Not recycled. There's probably a place for plastics incinerators being used in, for instance, cement manufacturing because those kilns burn hot enough to destroy most of the more toxic parts of plastic.

Of course it would be better to produce less plastic to begin with, especially less non-recyclable plastic. Thin plastics contaminated with food waste are mostly not recyclable.
posted by subdee at 9:50 AM on July 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I can believe that some plastics can only be burned. The problem is that the company was pretending to be all about recycling. It was a polluter. It was also asking, and getting, for huge amounts of government funding. So this fight was not against burning plastic. It was against this particular company planning to use a particular technology in a location filled with many other existing polluters.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:50 AM on July 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

But... burning plastic is bad, for exactly the same reasons burning coal or petrol or natural gas is bad... it would in fact be better to bury it pending engineering bacteria that might produce carbonate out of it.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:44 PM on July 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

So this is basically a charcoal oven for plastics? And their one other, smaller plant had a fire that took multiple fire departments to put out and was cited for dumping into the water? Yeah I wouldn't want that near me either.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 4:51 AM on July 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Seems like a helpful and practical list.
posted by blue shadows at 11:05 PM on July 28, 2022 [1 favorite]