News
EPA Spurns Trump-Era Effort to Drop Clean-Air Protections For Plastic Waste Recycling
Affirming long-standing incineration regulations, the Biden administration has withdrawn a plan to help ease the way for unchecked pyrolysis and gasification of plastic.
By James Bruggers
Reversing its own Trump-era proposal, the Environmental Protection Agency has spurned a lobbying effort by the chemical industry to relax clean-air regulations on two types of chemical or “advanced” recycling of plastics.
Related Knowledge Center: Methane
State of Play
As the production of natural gas from shale fields has expanded, so have methane emissions. U.S. methane emissions grew 27 percent from 1990 to 2009, according to the Energy Information Administration. Methane contributes about 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.