House subcommittee hears push to regulate advanced recycling as manufacturing

Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Environment Charles Palmer convened a hearing that focused in part on whether “advanced” or “chemical” recycling should be treated as manufacturing under federal law or regulated as solid waste.

The question matters for permitting and investor certainty. Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers at the American Chemistry Council, urged the committee to clear regulatory hurdles for advanced recycling and to “regulate advanced recycling properly.” He illustrated the technology this way: “Imagine you could take a cake and you could you could take that cake back down to its elements, the eggs, the flour, the the milk, the sugar, the butter, and then you can make it into a cake again. That is…