Plastics are foundational to modern life and to sectors critical to national priorities, including healthcare, defense, clean energy, food safety, and transportation. At the same time, plastic waste is a legitimate environmental problem, and governments across the country and around the world are responding in various ways. Sound policy in this area requires balancing waste reduction with the economic and supply chain functions that plastics serve, and it requires policymakers to treat the industries producing these essential materials as partners in finding solutions, not as adversaries to be regulated out of existence.
Advanced recycling is one of the most important tools available today for striking that balance, but the United States is at risk of falling behind in deploying it, largely due to a lack of regulatory clarity. In recent weeks, the EPA has taken action to clear a key regulatory impediment: the misclassification of pyrolysis as incineration under the Other Solid Waste Incineration (OSWI) rule. This clarification is long overdue, consistent with sound regulatory principles, and essential to unlocking the economic and environmental potential of advanced recycling in the United States.
Mechanical recycling, the kind most Americans are familiar with, works well for certain plastics, such as single-material rigid items like water bottles. But it cannot handle the more complicated plastics that make up most of the waste stream: plastic wrap, carpet, multilayer food packaging, potato chip bags, etc. As a result, the overall U.S. plastic recycling rate is just 8.7%, according to the EPA, with the rest going to landfills or incineration after a single use.
Advanced recycling closes that gap. Processes like pyrolysis use heat in a zero-oxygen environment to break plastic apart at the molecular level, converting hard-to-recycle waste into high-quality chemical feedstocks. The resulting pyrolysis oil is nearly identical to oil refined from crude – meaning post-use plastic can be remade into virgin-quality plastic, over and over again. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recently described the technology as a way to “unmake” plastic and return it to the raw materials from which it was originally made.
Advanced recycling also broadens the range of products that can use recycled content. Mechanically recycled plastics are typically excluded from food-grade and medical applications because of contamination concerns. Pyrolysis-based feedstocks are not, because the chemical process purifies the inputs as it converts them. That opens recycled content to higher-value applications where contamination standards are strict. The applications extend beyond plastics packaging entirely. For example, a 2024 Department of Energy assessment identified pyrolysis as one of the most promising recycling pathways for next-generation wind turbine blades, a waste stream that is sent overwhelmingly to landfills.
Industry is ready to embrace these innovations. As Administrator Zeldin pointed out, nearly “90 potential advanced recycling facilities are ready to be built across the U.S.,” but the regulatory uncertainty is holding them back. Meanwhile, Europe already has twice as many of these facilities and is projected to have 65 by 2030, and Asia is moving fast as well. This is a technology American manufacturers are positioned to lead, but the current policy environment is pushing investment overseas.
The single largest reason is a federal regulation that classifies pyrolysis units into the definition of “municipal waste combustion unit” under the Other Solid Waste Incineration (OSWI) rule. That classification appropriately reflected the technological landscape at the time, relating to facilities that burn plastic waste as a means of disposal. Modern advanced recycling pyrolysis is the opposite: it is a manufacturing process that produces a marketable feedstock. Treating it as incineration exposes new projects to permitting challenges designed for a completely different class of industrial activity, inviting years of litigation and delay. The result is that legitimate manufacturing investment is deterred, not because the facilities pose any unresolved environmental risk, but because of regulatory ambiguity that opponents of the industry are happy to exploit.
EPA has now proposed to fix this misclassification by removing “pyrolysis/combustion units” from the OSWI definition. The reclassification is fully consistent with how Congress and EPA already treat other recycling industries. The Clean Air Act explicitly exempts material recovery operations like aluminum and steel recycling from the solid waste incineration framework because turning a material into a usable product is not the same as burning it for disposal. The change is also consistent with state-level practices. Twenty-five states have already classified advanced recycling as manufacturing rather than waste disposal. And it does not create a regulatory vacuum: advanced recycling facilities would remain subject to the same Clean Air Act requirements that apply to manufacturing operations, including emissions standards under sections 111 and 112. This is a course correction, not a deregulation.
America can be the global leader in the technology that turns plastic waste back into valuable raw materials – supporting domestic manufacturing, reducing landfill volume, and building a genuine circular economy for plastics – or it can keep an outdated regulatory definition in place and watch the investment flow to Europe and Asia. EPA’s proposed revision is a welcome step toward greater regulatory clarity, and the agency should use the public comments submitted in this docket to inform comprehensive rulemaking that provides durable, nationwide certainty for the sector.