https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/26/worlds-largest-plastics-plant-rings-alarm-bells-on-texas-coast
Donald Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia in May will perhaps be best remembered by his participation in an all-male sword dance where he awkwardly waved a ceremonial blade in step with his cabinet and their Saudi counterparts.
But a little-noted deal signed prior to the ceremony is set to worsen a vast problem the world has yet to fully confront – plastic pollution.
In front of a seated Trump and King Salman, Saudi officials posed for photos shaking hands with secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Darren Woods, Tillerson’s successor as chief executive of the oil and gas giant ExxonMobil.
Woods was there to seal a $10bn agreement with the state-owned Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (Sabic) to build the world’s largest plastics facility on the Texas coast, the spearhead of a US boom that will create an enormous new glut of bottles, food packaging, polyester clothing and other products that are already, once discarded, choking the world’s oceans and food chains.
Lavished with more than $1bn in tax breaks by local authorities in Texas to locate the plant on farmland just north of Corpus Christi, Exxon and its Saudi partner have promised the ethane steam “cracker” facility will create thousands of new jobs. Trump called the deal a “true American success story” in a White House statement that included paragraphs copied directly from an Exxon corporate press release.
The Exxon-Sabic project, which will annually produce 1.8m tonnes of ethylene, a key building block of plastics, is just one of 11 chemical, refining, lubricant and gas projects Exxon is building along the US Gulf coast. The region is being divvied up in a multi-billion dollar push by fossil fuel companies that will fuel an anticipated 40% rise in global plastic production over the next decade.
The new plants are likely to have consequences for the climate and the air breathed in by people living on the US Gulf coast. An analysis of 184 planned chemical plants, many of them strung along the coast of Texas and Louisiana, showed they would collectively emit around 216m tons of greenhouse gases a year once complete.
A hastily-assembled group of concerned citizens discovered this was, in fact, the Exxon-Sabic venture, and used public meetings to protest the location of the proposed plant, which is within two miles of a middle school. Both the county and school district voted to offer the tax breaks to successfully lure Exxon to the area.
“We caused a ruckus,” said Errol Summerlin, a retired legal aid lawyer who became a visible sign of protest at public meetings by wearing a red #No Exxon T-shirt. “Exxon bullied their way in here and are tearing the community apart. All our local officials said they wanted it on a different site but Exxon wouldn’t budge.”
Opponents of the sprawling plant warn that it will produce trillions of small polyethylene pellets that will inevitably find their way into the bay and surrounding landscape, where they would be gobbled by fish or endangered species such as the whooping crane and piping plover.
The facility will also release millions of gallons of piping hot effluent into the bay, a prospect that has spooked fishers, and suck up 20m gallons of water a day in part of the US that has been parched by drought.
The consortium, known as Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, is now awaiting permits from state authorities, which could be granted within a few months, allowing construction to begin by 2019.
“Some people have moved away from here because they see it as inevitable,” said Summerlin, who has lived in the area since 1984.
“We are not naive, we understand who we are up against. If you put Exxon’s money together with the Saudi royal family’s, then lord have mercy, that’s an enormous ring of wealth. But some of us think ‘to heck with this, if you want it you will at least have to fight for it.’ Are we to be completely surrounded by industry here?”
