Howard County residents raise concerns about chemical company’s plans for pilot plastics recycling plant

When winter leaves the trees barren behind René Maldonado’s Howard County home, he can see the W.R. Grace & Co. headquarters 190 yards away.

That close proximity concerns Maldonado and many of his neighbors, who worry the chemical company’s plans for a pilot plastics recycling plant at the Columbia facility could harm local air quality and pose other environmental and health-related risks. The closest residents are 80 yards away.

Maldonado, who retired from a 30-year career as a chemist after developing multiple sclerosis, now lives in Cedar Creek, the neighborhood directly west of the Grace headquarters. He worries emissions could further harm his health.

“One reason I moved here is because of the environment,” he said. “I like it here. It’s nice. But I didn’t expect to have a chemical plant next door like this.”

Residents in neighborhoods around the facility have formed a group called “Stop the Grace Plastic Burning Project” in an effort to halt the company’s plans. Earlier this month, the group protested outside of the company’s headquarters.

W.R. Grace maintains that residents misunderstand their plans, which the company emphasizes do not involve the burning of plastics.

“Let us be clear: we are not burning plastic, we are not manufacturing microplastics or producing PFAS or ‘forever chemicals,’” W.R. Grace officials said in a statement to Baltimore Fishbowl. “Moreover, Grace does not manufacture plastics at all. Assertions that we are doing any of these things are false and misinformed.”

Instead, Grace says it will be researching ways to reduce plastic waste by converting “well-controlled plastic samples sourced from manufacturers and established recycling facilities” into new products.

“Grace scientists have developed a new plastic recycling solution that has the potential to reduce emissions, save energy and lower costs compared to other options,” the company explained in its statement.

But neighbors are not convinced.

Maldonado said the climate-conscious messaging that Grace espouses is just “greenwashing,” and he said the company’s plans could actually harm the environment and local residents.

“They try to find some environmental excuse to do it, but at the end of the day they cause more harm to the environment in the process,” he said. “They are creating chemicals that are going to be bad for the environment, hydrocarbons that will be burned as fuel.”

The plant’s processes and communities’ concerns

Grace’s permit application describes the catalytic cracking process in which the pilot plant will recycle 1 kilogram of plastics per hour.

“Plastic feedstock and catalyst will be fed to a Reaction System,” the application outlines. “The reactor will vent product vapor to a Product Recovery System, where condensable vapor will be removed and sent to storage as the liquid product. Liquid product will be stored temporarily in drum before sending to a 3rd party environmental facility for treatment. Non-condensable vapor from the product recovery system will go to an electric flameless thermal oxidizer. The thermal oxidizer has a stack that vents to the atmosphere.”

The application continues, “Spent catalyst [catalyst with coke on it] will be transferred with catalyst circulation to the Regeneration System, where excess hot air [1350 degrees Fahrenheit] will completely oxidize the coke. Regenerated catalyst will be circulated back into the Reaction System. The Regeneration System has a stack that vents to atmosphere.” (Editor’s note: “Coke” refers to a carbon-rich deposit that is a byproduct of the catalytic cracking process.)

In a news release, Stop the Grace Plastic Burning Project argues that Grace’s application for an air permit from the Maryland Department of the Environment “fails to disclose the full range of potential emissions and what to expect when the polymer feedstock or the process conditions are changed.”

The company disputes this.

“The gas product will go through a Flameless Thermal Oxidizer, a highly efficient emission control device that is designed to reduce emissions by over 99.9999%,” Grace officials said.

They added, “We have carefully followed the proper permitting process with MDE, disclosed the worst case potential emissions levels and everything required by law, participated in a public hearing and answered questions from MDE during extended public comment periods.”

Neighborhoods around the Grace facility house many families with children, older adults, and people with health complications, who would be more vulnerable to pollutants, said Lisa Krausz, co-chair of the Stop the Grace Plastic Burning Project and a resident of River Hill Village, which sits to the west of Cedar Creek. Krausz facilitates the advocacy group with co-chair Lily Weiss-Lora, a 20-year resident of River Hill.

Krausz said Grace’s plans for the pilot plant run counter to the surrounding communities’ values.

“People come to Howard County because of the excellent school systems,” she said, noting the many young children who live in these neighborhoods.

She added, “Columbia is known for its open green spaces, for wanting to promote the growth of its residents. This is a contradiction to what Howard County and Columbia stand for.”

Still, Grace officials said many of their own employees live in the neighborhoods around the Columbia facility, and that the company has a vested interest in maintaining safety standards.

“Grace is committed to being a responsible business, a good neighbor and a safe workplace for our 600 on-site employees – 400 of whom are Howard County residents and many of whom live in the neighborhoods adjacent to our headquarters,” officials said.

They added, “We appreciate the work MDE is doing to evaluate the air permit application on its scientific merits, as this solution has the potential to help solve an important problem. Like our neighbors in Howard County, Grace leaders and our thousands of employees share a sincere desire to live and work in safe and healthy environments.”

The pilot plant would measure 24 feet high, 32 feet long, and 12 feet wide–approximately the size of a one-car garage​–and would be housed inside an existing building at the company’s Columbia campus, located at 7500 Grace Drive, company officials said.

The plant will operate 16 hours per day, five days a week, 50 weeks out of the year, according to the permit application.

Grace was unable to say at this time when the plant would be constructed, when it would begin operation, and how long the pilot period would run.

“MDE is still evaluating the permit,” company officials said.

That undefined pilot period is concerning, Krausz said.

“There’s been no stamp put on when it would end or if it could become a bigger project,” she said.

Grace’s record

Members of the Stop the Grace Burning Project are concerned that Grace’s record does not bode well for the possibility of contamination and chemical spills. They also worry that conditions at the plant, including the storage of liquid products in drums on site until they are sent to a 3rd party, could increase risks for fires and explosions.

The group points to previous controversies centering Grace: for example, the company faced thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits that led to Grace’s 2001 bankruptcy, including asbestos contamination in Montana. The company no longer makes asbestos-related products.

In the 1980s, Grace was the defendant in groundwater contamination lawsuits in Massachusetts. Those lawsuits inspired the 1995 book “A Civil Action,” and the 1998 movie of the same name starring John Travolta.

Most recently, in May 2023, a vacuum truck leaked 50-75 gallons of nitric acid at Grace’s facility in Hawkins Point, a largely industrial part of Baltimore. No injuries and no off-site impact occurred in that incident.

Columbia neighbors worry that if something similar to the 2023 incident were to happen near their residential neighborhoods, the outcome could be far worse.

“Imagine that accident happening here,” said Maldonado, the Cedar Creek resident. “It’s a different story because we are just 70 meters away from this unit.”

He added, “You have children playing around. You’re going to have adults walking their dogs…. They’re not doing this in an industrial park where there’s no neighbors. They’re doing this next to our houses.”

Jake Burdett is the co-chair of Our Revolution Howard County, a local chapter of the progressive group Our Revolution Maryland, which has been working with the Stop the Grace Burning Project group.

Although Burdett lives in Dorsey’s Search, about seven miles away from the Grace headquarters, he said he is concerned about the pilot plant’s impact on communities closer to the facility.

“Even if things go as planned, these risks exist…. I can’t blame the community at Cedar Creek and River Hill for not wanting to be the guinea pigs, especially considering W.R. Grace’s track record,” he said.

Grace officials stand firm that they are following all safety requirements for the pilot plant in Columbia.

“This is baseless and stated without evidence,” company officials told Baltimore Fishbowl regarding the protest group’s concerns. “We follow industry and regulatory requirements for safety and work closely with the Howard County Fire Department as a responsible business practice.”

They added, “This project has safety interlocks built in and cannot be compared to accidents that occurred at manufacturing plants that are 300,000x bigger.”

‘Community was scrambling’

Residents are also frustrated because they feel they were not given enough notice about the project.

On Sept. 21, 2023, W.R. Grace submitted their permit application for the project. A public hearing was held April 29, 2024.

But members of the Stop the Grace Burning Project group say most neighbors did not hear about the project until after the public hearing, and many still were not aware of it until weeks or even days before the most recent public comment period ended Aug. 29, 2024.

“There were no attempts to notify residents in these communities…. The community was scrambling to get organized and to notify people,” said Krausz, the River Hill resident.

Burdett said W.R. Grace and the Maryland Department of the Environment “followed the bare minimum legal requirements” to give notice to residents, including publicizing the project online and in a local newspaper and informing local elected officials. But he argues individual households should have also been notified via mail or fliers posted to doors of residences.

“In my opinion, the community members got very lucky in that the right people happened to hear about it,” Burdett said, and that those community members spread the word.

If residents were more widely aware of the project, Burdett said, they might have doubled the number of public comments.

“While it’s great that we were able to mobilize over 200 public comments before that Aug. 29 deadline, had notice been given in a more adequate way and transparent way, that number could easily have been 400 public comments,” he said.

“If we were to have a public hearing today, I’ll have 20 or 30 more questions to ask, because I learned a lot about what they’re after. But at the time, we were in the dark,” Maldonado said.

Stop the Grace Burning Project members said they requested for the Maryland Department of the Environment to extend the public comment period beyond Aug. 29, but that MDE denied their request because it had already been extended two times.

While members of the group contend the public comment period was extended only once, MDE spokesperson Jay Apperson told Baltimore Fishbowl that it had in fact been extended twice.

“Statute requires 30 days from the publication date of the first notice or 5 days after the hearing whichever is later,” Apperson said. “However, we gave the public even more time – 30 days from the hearing date (April 29) to May 29, but we immediately received a request for a one time 60 day extension as allowed by statute and extended it to July 29. We then received a request for another 30 days extension which we granted (above and beyond statute) to August 29.”

Although the final extended public comment deadline has passed, community members plan to continue to speak out against the project. They also hope an investigation by the Howard County Department of Planning and Zoning could uncover zoning violations for the project.

Maldonado wants Grace to look elsewhere to establish their pilot plant.

“I don’t understand why Grace would take such a risk,” he said. “They have plants everywhere. Why would they choose this environment, knowing the reality of accidents?”

Krausz, too, hopes the company will reconsider.

“What makes them feel so confident that there aren’t going to be problems here?” she said. “They really don’t know that…. Why would you do that in a facility like this, right next to communities?”