A national battle over chemical recycling lands in the Bay Area

A few weeks ago, Devan Lane and her husband were considering purchasing a newly built home in the Willowglen development in Rohnert Park, a city of 45,000 just south of Santa Rosa. Lane liked the idea of raising her 11-month-old daughter Charlotte in a neighborhood full of other kids, and the development was across the street from Somo Village, a mixed-use community centered around an ethos of sustainability, where her husband commutes to a co-working space. 

But now Lane has rolled back her enthusiasm for a move because of one of Somo Village’s tenants: a chemical recycling start-up called Resynergi. 

On July 18, parents of students enrolled at Credo High School, a public Waldorf school located adjacent to Resynergi’s facility, and all residents and businesses within 1,000 feet received a notice from the Bay Area Air District that the agency was preparing to approve the company’s permit to begin chemical recycling operations. 

If approved, the facility will be the first chemical recycling site in California.

Environmentalists and residents say Resynergi is greenwashing its operations, exposing residents and school children to harmful toxins and damaging property values — pitting the neighborhood against a company that brands itself as a climate-friendly solution to the global plastic waste problem.  

“We loved what Somo Village promised to be,” Lane said. “But this is definitely throwing a wrench in that.” 

The world is producing twice as much plastic as it did at the start of the 21st century — only 9% of global plastic is successfully recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, is incinerated, or ends up degrading and leaking into our environment through everyday use, everything from tire wear and tear to washing our clothes. 

Instead of reducing plastic production, petrochemical companies have found an alternative to give plastics a second life: chemical recycling.

Chemical recycling is a blanket term for several processes that use heat or chemicals like solvents to break down plastics. Unlike traditional mechanical recycling, in which plastics are cleaned and formed into pellets, chemical recycling reduces plastics into a synthetic crude oil or polymers that can be later turned into gasoline, other fuels or new plastic products.

Organizations representing petrochemical companies like ExxonMobil and Shell have heavily endorsed the technology. At the start of 2025, there were only eight chemical recycling facilities in the United States. Lobbyists advocate for building 150 more.

A study from the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that the creation of new plastics via pyrolysis, the most common method of chemical recycling, had economic and environmental costs 10 to 100 times higher than virgin plastic production. Plastic processed at pyrolysis facilities is also less likely to become new plastic. Instead, the oil produced is often used and burned as fuels, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Resynergi’s pyrolysis model is a little different. Instead of using coal or propane, the plastic is heated using microwave technology that the company says can break down plastics 100 times faster than other methods of pyrolysis.

The company’s CEO, Brian Bauer, told SFGATE that 70% of the plastics the facility processes are turned into fuel. Any leftover solids are sequestered in concrete. The remaining waste gas is then incinerated to clean the air of pollutants before it is released. Bauer says in future models, the gas will be used to power the technology, further reducing waste.

Yet the air district’s notice caught neighbors in Somo Village — which includes dozens of homes, a high school and several businesses — by surprise, and left families concerned about the potential health implications of emissions and fire risks at the facility.

“We didn’t share information enough in advance, we’re pretty darn sure of that,” Bauer said. “We’re going to work real hard to work closely with the neighborhood and keep people as comfortable and informed as possible.”

The notice sent to impacted community members on July 18 said the facility is expected to comply with relevant air district, state and federal air quality standards. But residents were jarred by Resynergi’s permit application to the air district, which lists arsenic, lead and mercury among the emissions released by the facility. The level of arsenic predicted is high enough to trigger the need for an additional assessment for health risks. 

The air district estimates the cancer risk for people exposed during the work week to the project is 6.9 in a million — an additional risk of 0.00069% of developing cancer during one’s lifetime. The agency’s threshold for compliance is 10 in a million. 

Jessica Umphress, the director of operations at Credo High School, located just feet from Resynergi, said the school will defer to the air district’s safety judgments. 

“We cannot be the experts, but we can … rely on the chain of command,” she said. “We can’t just be the new expert in the subject du jour of whatever is coming at us.”

Many parents remain unsettled. A petition demanding a halt to the permitting of the facility has garnered more than 3,000 signatures. Others have demanded an extension for the permit application public comment period, which is scheduled to close on Aug. 18. 

“I don’t want their profit motive to overshadow the real safety concerns about this school,” said Robert Bunce, whose daughter is a sophomore at Credo. “If they do this, we’ll pull our child from the school.”

To ease concerns, Resynergi hosted an open house on Wednesday night, offering tours of the facility and keeping staff members on site to answer questions from the public. Bauer called the event a success, but the community response was mixed.

“Why does it have to be so close to where people are living?” said Mildred Hampton, the parent of an incoming Credo senior and a resident of the Willowglen development, after the tour. “Just go to an industrial zone area where none of this would be talked about.”

Resynergi was founded in 2015, and has already logged 10,000 hours of test operations at the Somo Village location. If the company’s permits are approved, it plans to begin regular operations at the site, which is designed to operate as a demonstration facility — helping sell Resynergi’s pyrolysis machinery to other waste management sites. 

The Somo Village facility will release fewer CO2 emissions than a semitruck while operating, according to the company, and its microwave pyrolysis system is able to process plastics with recycling codes 4 and 5 — which are less commonly recycled — as well as materials with “high contamination.” 

The startup’s profits will come from the sale to petrochemical companies of the oil produced, and other facilities purchasing the microwave pyrolysis machinery, Bauer said. 

Some environmentalists reject chemical recycling entirely because of the potential for toxic emissions and because the process encourages manufacturers to keep churning out petroleum-based plastics. Others have criticized the uses of the oil produced in the pyrolysis process — one Chevron refinery in Mississippi planned to use a fuel generated by chemical recycling to create a jet fuel so toxic that the production of it generated emissions that could cause one in four people exposed over their lifetime to get cancer. 

According to Brooks Abel, an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley who studies solutions to the plastic waste problem, chemical recycling is far from a perfect fix. 

“I would call it a better-than-nothing solution,” he said. “Because they’re going to take those petroleum products that they turn the plastic into and probably use it for fuel.”

That means instead of an infinite recycling loop, where plastics can be returned to an oil, then made into new plastics, the resulting substances are rather burned as fuels that release emissions and cannot be reused. Abel is studying biodegradable plastics as an alternative solution.

“The dream would be to obsolete this technology,” Abel said. “… But it is a good today solution, not 20 years from now. Maybe we won’t be using these types of plastics anymore.”

Until renewable energy accounts for more energy production and consumers reduce demand for single-use plastics, Abel says chemical recycling can give plastics another life, even if it’s as a fuel.

“The fuels will still produce carbon dioxide after being burned, but at least the fuels are coming from plastic waste, and kind of addressing the plastic waste problem,” he said. 

The air district issued a preliminary recommendation to approve Resynergi’s permit to begin operation and will make its final determination after public comment concludes on Aug. 18. 

After that, the startup must clear a small final hurdle: an administrative zoning permit from the city. Rohnert Park’s mayor, Gerard Guidice, said he was caught off guard by the July 18 notice sent out by the air district, but that air standards are the agency’s jurisdiction.

“It’s not within the purview of the city of Rohnert Park to determine whether or not this is the next greatest thing since sliced bread, or if it’s or if it’s not safe,” he said. 

Until the final permit is issued, California’s first chemical recycling facility will have to wait, as the surrounding community anxiously waits with it.

“I love recycling. I would love to remove all the plastic in the world. That would be spectacular,” Lane said. “But in a residential neighborhood that’s only getting more residential, next to a high school?”