This story is a partnership between Inside Climate News and CBS News. Watch the CBS Reports documentary, “Advanced Recycling: Does Big Plastic’s Idea Work?” in the video player above.
HOUSTON, Tex.—When the news crew showed up outside a waste-handling business that’s failed three fire safety inspections and has yet to gain state approval to store plastic, workers quickly closed a gate displaying a “no trespassing” sign.
Behind the gate, deliveries of hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic waste from residents’ homes have piled up over the last year and a half next to strewn cardboard and tall stacks of wooden pallets.
The expanding open-air pile at Wright Waste Management, 20 miles northwest of downtown Houston, awaits what the city of Houston and corporate partners including ExxonMobil call a new frontier in recycling — and critics describe as a sham.
The Houston Recycling Collaboration was formed as a response to low recycling ratesin the city, a global problem. Hardly any of the plastic …