In South Carolina, a plastics manufacturing plant called Alpek Polyester Columbia dumped about 30,000 pounds of a chemical, 1,4-dioxane, into the Congaree River last year, with no limits on the pollutant – a likely carcinogen – in the plant’s discharge permit.  

The Alpek plant was the largest discharger of 1,4-dioxane among plastics plants in the U.S. last year, releasing a pollutant that EPA last week concluded “poses an unreasonable risk of injury to human health” including in drinking water.  

But despite this risk, EPA has set no national standards for plastics manufacturing plants to control 1,4-dioxane or several other harmful pollutants, including dioxins (a known carcinogen), and phosphorus (which feeds algae blooms and low-oxygen “dead zones,”) according to a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) called “Plastic’s Toxic River.”

Lacking any federal standards, states like South Carolina have also often failed to set permit limits for these pollutants for most of the 70 petrochemical plants in the U.S. examined by EIP that use natural gas and petroleum to make the main ingredients in plastics.  

“We are incredibly concerned that the Alpek Columbia facility is discharging thousands of pounds of dangerous chemicals into the Congaree River just upstream from Congaree National Park,” said Bill Stangler, the Congaree Riverkeeper in South Carolina. “The EPA and the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services must establish limits on 1,4-dioxane to protect our rivers and the communities that depend on them.”

EIP’s report recommends that to ensure protection for all waterways, EPA needs to set national standards for these harmful water pollutants across the plastics industry.  The 1972 federal Clean Water Act requires that that EPA regularly update pollution control guidelines for industry – called “effluent limitation guidelines” – to keep pace with advances in pollution control technology. But EPA has not done this in more than 30 years for the plastics and petrochemical industry.

The plastics facilities analyzed in EIP’s report dump almost a half billion gallons of wastewater per day into U.S. waterways. But EPA’s failure of oversight means that most plants have no limits on the amounts of total nitrogen, phosphorus, 1,4-dioxane, dioxins, and other harmful pollutants they are allowed to release.  Plastic manufacturers do have permit limits for some pollutants, but there are gaps and no limits for other contaminants highlighted in the report.

“It is inexcusable that EPA is not following the Clean Water Act and is failing to require the multi-billion-dollar plastics industry to install modern pollution control systems,” said Jen Duggan, Executive Director of the Environmental Integrity Project. “Plastics plants are littering our planet and contaminating our bodies – and EPA needs to do its job and protect our waterways and public health.”

EIP examined the permits and records of U.S. facilities that make plastics or the main chemical ingredients in plastics and found they discharged almost 12 million pounds last year of total nitrogen and phosphorus.  Sixty-nine of the 70 plants examined had no limits in their permits for discharging these pollutants into waterways. More than 70 percent of this pollution was discharged into communities of color, mostly in Louisiana and Texas, but also in Alabama, South Carolina, Illinois and other states.

The report also found that eight plastics plants released an estimated 74,285 pounds of 1,4-dioxane to waterways in 2022. Just two of these facilities have limits for this pollutant in their permits that were set by the states.

Beyond the problem of a lack of pollution limits is a failure of the states or EPA to enforce the permit limits that do exist, according to the “Plastic’s Toxic River” report.

More than 80 percent of facilities examined by EIP exceeded pollution limits in their state-issued Clean Water Act permits at least once from 2021 to 2023, but few faced financial penalties. Lack of enforcement provides little incentive for polluting companies to clean up their wastewater.  

Another problem highlighted in the report are tiny plastic pellets called “nurdles” that are molded into consumer plastic goods and are also a growing health and environmental concern caused by plastics production. Because of a lack of adequate filtration systems at manufacturing plants, as well as accidental spills, nurdles are often released into waterways and can be found on shores and beaches around the world. In Texas alone, volunteers collected 96,000 nurdles from beaches in July 2024.

“This problem is so overwhelming – volunteers just can't pick all these up,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “What we need is for these factories to stop discharging these pellets into our waterways, stop spilling them into our waterways, and clean up their mess.”

One of the concerns about nurdles is that many bird and fish species eat the plastic pellets. Ingestion of nurdles can lead to injury and death, as well as changes in reproduction, metabolism, and behavior. Pellet consumption can lead to starvation because animals with digestive tracts full of nurdles eat less food.

One barrier to accountability among plastics manufacturing plants, according to EIP’s report, is a backlog of water pollution control permit renewal applications. Often understaffed state environmental agencies allow companies to continue to discharge pollution using outdated permits, which under the Clean Water Act are supposed to be updated every five years.

The report calls on EPA to not only update and strengthen its national pollution standards (effluent limitation guidelines) for the plastics and petrochemical industries, but also to work with state agencies to increase enforcement and penalties associated with Clean Water Act permit violations and address resource shortfalls that may be hindering permit writers from issuing new permits in a timely manner.

The report provides several local examples around the country of plastics manufacturing plants releasing dangerous pollutants with few or no limits.

For example, in Louisiana, the Westlake Eagle US 2 Lake Charles plastics chemical plant releases dioxins into the Calcasieu River, with no limits on how much of this carcinogen it is permitted to dump.  People often fish from the Calcasieu River, and some of them are not aware that some of the fish are contaminated with dioxins, according to EIP’s report.

In Texas, the Dow Freeport plastics plant, located about an hour south of Houston near the Gulf of Mexico, released about four million pounds of phosphorus and total nitrogen into the Brazos River in 2023 – the most of any plastics plant studied – with no limits in its permit for either of these pollutants.

In West Virginia, the tiny town of Apple Grove, pollution pours from the outfall of a plastics manufacturing plant into the Ohio River, the drinking water source for some five million people downstream. The factory, owned by a company called APG Polytech, produces polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which can be used to make plastic soda bottles, fast-food containers, synthetic fibers, and other products.  

According to public records examined for EIP’s report, APG released about 22,000 pounds of 1,4-dioxane into the Ohio River last year – second most among the plastics plants studied, behind only the South Carolina-based Alpek Polyester plant on the Congaree River.

Because of a lack of federal standards, only two of plastic manufacturing plants examined by EIP had 1,4-dioxane limits in their state-issued pollution control permits. One of them was the APG facility in West Virginia, which recently established limits after years of company pushback on any 1,4-dioxane regulation.

Obtaining these limits was a public health victory for West Virginians and those relying on the Ohio River for drinking water. But it was a long and arduous process for local advocates to win those limits, through a legal battle.

Across the U.S., many small towns and water providers can’t afford these kinds of expensive legal battles, and – lacking any EPA action – so their residents may be exposed to harmful pollutants, including 1,4-dioxane from plastics plants.  

“By failing to exercise its legally required oversight, EPA is allowing this dangerous industry to increase the already unfair pollution and health burdens we experience in Houston and on the Texas coast,” said Kristen Schlemmer, the Houston-based Bayou City Waterkeeper

Lead photo: The Alpek Polyester site in Columbia, South Carolina. Photo Bill Stangler/Congaree Riverkeeper.