With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considering easing air pollution standards for high-heat plastic-waste processing facilities, state Rep. Michelle E. McGaw is pressing her General Assembly colleagues to pass legislation that would ban such facilities in Rhode Island outright.
McGaw, D-Portsmouth, has been filing versions of the bill since 2022, but she said this year’s federal action has added new urgency. In March, the EPA issued a required solicitation for public comment on a proposal to reclassify pyrolysis — a high-heat process for breaking down plastic waste — as manufacturing rather than waste management. The change, long sought by the American Chemistry Council, would significantly lower the air pollution standards those facilities must meet.
McGaw’s bill, 2026-H 7620, would prohibit the construction or operation of any new plastic-waste conversion facility in Rhode Island.
“The federal government appears poised to give the plastics industry the lower air pollution standards it wants, so our state needs to move now to protect Rhode Islanders and our environment from the toxins that these plastic waste systems spews into the atmosphere,” McGaw said.
The plastics industry markets pyrolysis as “advanced recycling,” and has been lobbying statehouses across the country to embrace it. But McGaw and environmental groups argue the label is misleading. Few such facilities operate in the United States, and those that do don’t turn plastic back into plastic — they produce synthetic fuel that is later burned, along with waste byproducts. Environmental advocates say the process releases toxins and generates roughly the same carbon pollution as conventional incineration, both from the fuel needed to sustain the high temperatures and from burning the resulting synthetic fuel.
Just Zero, a Massachusetts-based environmental group, and other advocates warn that emissions and waste products from these facilities can include lead, mercury, chromium, benzene, toluene, arsenic and dioxins.
McGaw noted that Rhode Island has already taken a stand against pyrolysis in another context. In 2021, facing a proposal on the West Warwick-East Greenwich border to process regional medical waste, the General Assembly passed legislation prohibiting new high-heat medical waste facilities near homes, schools, nursing facilities and sensitive environmental areas.
“Rhode Islanders and the General Assembly spoke loudly and clearly in 2021 when we said we didn’t want pyrolysis of medical waste in our state,” McGaw said. “Advanced recycling is just pyrolysis for plastic waste. It’s not manufacturing — it’s solid waste management, and we need to treat it as such.”
She added that any such facility would also make it harder for Rhode Island to hit its carbon reduction targets under the Act on Climate.
“The plastics industry has created the myth of advanced recycling in an insidious, self-serving effort to change the narrative about plastic pollution so we won’t reduce our reliance on its products,” McGaw said. “We must not be duped.”
McGaw represents District 71, which covers Portsmouth, Tiverton and Little Compton.
