Brightmark scraps plans for Georgia plant

San Fransisco-based Brightmark and Georgia’s Macon-Bibb County and the Macon-Bibb Industrial Authority have terminated their plans to build a $680 million plastics recycling facility.

"Macon-Bibb County, the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority and Brightmark have mutually agreed to end discussions around building a plastic recycling plant in Macon. We have no further comment at this time,” a spokesperson for the company tells Recycling Today. 

The mayor’s office and the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority have not responded to Recycling Today’s request for comments.

In June of last year, Brightmark announced its plans to build a 5.3 million-square-foot site that would use the company’s proprietary plastics renewal process, a form of chemical recycling using pyrolysis, to recycle Nos. 1-7 plastics, including flexible packing and plastic film, expanded polystyrene, plastic beverage cups, car seats and children’s toys, that have reached the end of their useful lives. Brightmark planned to convert this material into fuels, wax and the building blocks for new plastics using technology developed by RES Polyflow, formerly of Chagrin, Ohio. Brightmark acquired in RES Polyflow and its chemical recycling technology for mixed plastics in late 2018.

Brightmark has a plant in Ashley, Indiana, that it says will divert 100,000 tons of plastic from landfills, waterways and incinerators annually, converting it into 18 million gallons of ultra-low sulfur renewable diesel fuel and naphtha blend stocks and 6 million gallons of wax. The company invested $260 million in the Ashley facility, which it broke ground on in 2019 and is still not fully operational.

Reuters reports that Brightmark missed a deadline to deliver "end product" to customers from its Ashley plant, which was a condition of its contract with the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority.

According to The Macon Newsroom, which says it acquired the termination contract through an open records request, “In late December, Brightmark admitted to the authority it failed to meet the deadline to prove its facility in the upper Midwest was able to deliver the recycled end-product to another user, which was a condition of the sale.”

Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority had considered issuing $500 million in revenue bonds for Brightmark to start this project in 2023. 

However, The Macon Newsroom reports that environmental groups began lobbying against the plant last fall, with some representatives who attended the virtual bond hearing in November raising concerns about potential detrimental impacts of the plant.

Earlier this year, Lester Miller, mayor of the Macon-Bibb County consolidated government, withdrew his support for the project. According to a report from WMAZ-TV, Macon, Georgia, Miller wrote a letter to the chairman of the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority Jan. 7 saying he “cannot ignore the long-term safety concerns of this unproven process that have been raised in the last several weeks.”