The facility, slated to be built in a former Hammermill Paper Property less than a mile from Lake Erie, would have collected 160,000 tons of mixed plastic waste from a 750-mile radius and ground it into smaller pieces of plastic to be either burned in steel mills in Northwestern Indiana or sold for other uses.
Proponents of the plant hoped it would create local jobs and help reduce plastic waste, while opponents called it a “false solution” that would turn plastic waste into climate-warming and health-harming air pollution.
“Trucking plastics across the country to burn in blast furnaces under the guise of ‘recycling’ was and will always be a complete false solution and greenwashing attempt,” Susan Thomas, director of policy and press at Just Transition Northwest Indiana, said in a press statement.
Erie, Pennsylvania and Northwest Indiana are both home to superfund sites and industrial facilities like steel mills, oil refineries, and chemical plants. These facilities emit toxic pollutants like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead compounds, and particulate matter, which are linked to health effects like cancer, respiratory and heart disease, and mental illness. Advocates worried the IRG plant would add to the pollution burden and health problems in both communities.
“This project would have exacerbated toxic emissions in Northwest Indiana, harming regional health and the environment and furthering the ‘sacrifice zone’ status,” Thomas said.
Anne McCarthy, a coordinator Benedictines for Peace, an Erie-based Catholic advocacy group, said in a statement that her organization “believes this is a win for Lake Erie. We hope Erie will join the fast-growing labor force for truly renewable energy and create even more jobs than those promised by IRG.”
The project was also controversial because it received a $182.6 million loan under the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) during the Biden administration. Last summer, more than 100 environmental groups wrote a letter to former U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm urging her to cancel the loan because “IRA money is supposed to be used to improve the environment, not worsen it.”
Those IRA funds are now on hold, according to an IRG press release, as the Trump administration works to claw back climate-related funding at the federal level. The IRG press release also cited Trump’s recently announced tariffs, which would result in higher costs for the project than anticipated, and difficulty securing buyers for recycled materials as companies backtrack on their sustainability goals.
“I am personally devastated after 18 years of working to bring this vision to a reality that we have failed to overcome these challenges,” Mitch Hecht, IRG’s founder and chief executive officer, said in the statement.
Only 5-6% of all plastic used in the U.S. is recycled due to high costs for the process and the lack of a market for recycled plastics. Numerous recycling facilities that have promised to help create a “circular economy” for plastics, like IRG’s proposed Erie plant, have been canceled or shuttered in recent years, including proposed chemical recycling plants in Youngstown, Ohio and Point Township, Pennsylvania. An Indiana-based plastics recycling company also recently filed for bankruptcy. In October 2023 the advocacy groups Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) reported that there were 11 constructed U.S. chemical recycling facilities, only five of which are operating today, according to a spokesperson for the organization.
“Taxpayer dollars should be used for real solutions to environmental issues, not a polluting project masquerading as a quick fix to the plastic waste crisis,” Jess Conard, Beyond Plastics’ Appalachia director, said in a statement. “Providing more plastic to be burned as fuel for steelmaking is not a climate or waste solution — it only creates more pollution.”
