This story is a partnership between Inside Climate News and CBS News. Watch the CBS Reports documentary, “Advanced Recycling: Does Big Plastic’s Idea Work?” 

About 48 million tons of plastic waste are generated each year in the U.S., and very little of it is ever recycled. The city of Houston says it has an innovative new program that can recycle any type of plastic, calling it a model for the nation, but environmental groups say the results leave much to be desired.

Brandy Deason, a climate justice coordinator for Air Alliance Houston, has been adding tracking devices when she bags up her plastics for recycling. She was skeptical of Houston’s program and its claims that it could recycle any type of plastic.The tracker showed her bags ended up at a storage site — not a recycling center.

Deason said she doesn’t think the average person in Houston is aware that this is where their recycling ends up.

“I think that they’ve gotten the idea that it’s being taken care of and being recycled,” she said.

The city says it has collected 250 tons of plastic since the end of 2022, but almost none of it has been recycled yet. The plastic is supposed to come to a Houston warehouse where a long-delayed sorting facility has yet to be built.

“We need a huge supply of plastics to get ready for startup here, and we want to start that now in order to get ahead of it,” said Ryan Tebbets, a vice president at Cyclyx International, one of the companies involved in the recycling program. Tebbets insisted the plastic would eventually be recycled.

Plastic is made from oil and gas, and it comes in thousands of chemically distinct varieties that can’t be mixed together. That’s why less than 10% gets recycled. But Cyclyx says it figured out a way to sort and process any kind of plastic into pellets that can then be recycled.

Tebbets admits the company has never done the process at scale, noting the Houston facility is its first. Cyclyx is partly funded by ExxonMobil, one of the biggest plastic makers on the planet. The company is trying to prove that something it calls “advanced recycling” can help solve the planet’s crisis of plastic waste, and the company hopes the Houston program could prove to be a solution nationwide.

Ray Mastroleo, Exxon’s global market development manager for advanced recycling, said the process “ultimately allows us to take a wide range of plastic waste that doesn’t have a home today and repurpose them. Advanced recycling is real. It’s happening. We’re doing it.”

The process uses heat to break down plastic to its molecular level. A small amount is turned into new plastic, but much of it becomes fuel that is burned, creating planet-warming emissions. Exxon says it has processed 60 million pounds of plastic waste so far, but the industry has touted advanced recycling for decades and never made it work at a large scale.

Plastic makers are now waging a new recycling ad campaign — just as Shell Oil shelved its advanced recycling plans, calling them “unfeasible.” Meanwhile, California’s attorney general is investigating Exxon, accusing the industry of “a half century of deception” about recycling.

When asked if a plastic maker could be trusted by the public when it says it’s found a solution to the problem of plastic waste, Mastroleo told CBS News, “That’s challenging the integrity of who we are. But this is just the starting point and we are in it for the long haul.”

In the meantime, all that plastic is still piling up in Houston.

Ben Tracy

Ben Tracy is CBS News’ senior national and environmental correspondent based in Los Angeles. He reports for all CBS News platforms, including the “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell,” “CBS Mornings” and “CBS Sunday Morning.”