The U.S. plastics industry has expanded rapidly in recent decades, fueled by record levels of natural gas production and billions of dollars in government subsidies. Despite the plastic industry’s staggering growth, reliable and comprehensive information on plastics plants is difficult to find.

To help fill this information gap, the Environmental Integrity Project and Material Research developed an inventory of production capacities for plastics plants across the U.S. The data reflect a rapid increase in facilities that produce ingredients used to manufacture plastics.

According to this most recent update, there are 124 plastics plants operating across the country that manufacture the most common types of plastics—polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and polystyrene—and their key ingredients. Looking to the future, the industry is planning large expansions at 20 of these plants, along with nine new plastics plants proposed, mainly along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana.

Production of ethane—a crucial ingredient for plastics manufacturing—more than doubled between 2014 and 2023, and exports of ethane and ethane-based petrochemicals, such as polyethylene (commonly used in single-use plastics), surged by 135 percent over the same period.

Over the last decade, three massive new ethane “cracker” plants have been built, two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, and an idled ethylene plant in Westlake, Louisiana, was expanded and brought back online in 2018. In addition to those four plants – which increased ethylene capacity by over 4.7 million metric tons per year and plastic resin manufacturing capacity by 4 million metric tons per year – at least 56 expansion projects at existing plastics plants have been completed over the past 12 years, according to public records and company announcements in the Oil & Gas Watch database.

Our inventory, which is updated quarterly, also provides information on company ownership and cross linkages to key government datasets, like EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database, which provides more information on how facilities comply with environmental laws.

View the plastic plant inventory on this web page on the Environmental Integrity Project’s main website.