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Waste-to-energy company opens plant in Fayetteville
- Details
- Tuesday, 25 February 2025
- Written by Evey Weisblat, CityView Today
The Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation announced that Waste Energy Corp, a company that converts plastic waste into diesel fuel, is planning to open its first facility in Fayetteville.
The company signed a binding letter of intent to purchase 26,000 square feet of heavy industrial space in the City of Fayetteville for the site. According to Fayetteville’s zoning ordinances, an energy recovery plant requires a special use permit, even in a heavy industrial district, so the Fayetteville City Council will need to approve the development before it begins operating.
To create energy, Waste Energy Corp uses a technology called pyrolysis, which involves heating plastics or rubber in an oxygen-free environment. This is different from burning plastic for energy. Instead of combustion, pyrolysis relies on thermal decomposition, a chemical reaction that causes the molecules in the plastic to break down into a mixture of gas, oil and char. The mixture is then refined into usable fossil fuels, primarily diesel fuel.
Environmental advocates have pushed back against such facilities in other communities, raising concerns about air pollution and a continued focus on fossil fuel production at a time when scientists say continued carbon emissions will cause irreversible climate change resulting in catastrophic heat waves, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes and floods.
Though Waste Energy Corp is still securing the proper permits, its facility will likely be located in existing warehouse buildings within an industrial site about a mile south of downtown Fayetteville, accessible from the intersection of Cool Spring Street and Sam Cameron Avenue, its CEO Scott Gallagher told CityView. He said the company has secured a deal on the 18,000-square-foot building there and is hoping to purchase another 8,000-square-foot building as well.
The Fayetteville location will be Waste Energy Corp’s first waste-to-energy facility, Gallagher said. According to its SEC filings, Waste Energy Corp is a publicly traded company based in California and incorporated in Nevada. The company rebranded from MetaWorks Platforms to Waste Energy Corp in November 2024, shifting its focus from technology platform development to waste-to-energy production.
According to Waste Energy Corp, the Fayetteville facility could open as soon as April and will be able to convert up to 30 tons of plastic waste per day. The company’s goal is to address the plastic pollution crisis while turning a profit, its CEO said. About 5% of plastic waste is recycled each year.
“We’re not doing this to make more plastic,” Gallager told CityView. “Every piece of plastic we touch ends with us. So we divert it from the landfills, convert it to diesel, and then sell the diesel product and some of the other things. There are a lot of companies doing this type of a project to convert it to more feedstock to make more plastic. And we’re not about any of that.”
The feasibility and effectiveness of large-scale waste-to-energy facilities have been under scrutiny as companies have closed plants or scaled them down in recent years. Shell announced last summer that it would scale down its pledge to process 1 million tons of plastic into fuel by 2025. A waste-to-energy plant in Youngstown, Ohio, was scrapped amid opposition from locals concerned about toxic air pollution.
Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story.
Local economic impact
Gallagher said the company worked closely with the Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation to find locations in Fayetteville and has been working with Cumberland County for the past six to seven months on the permitting process. He said the company did not receive any local or state incentives to come to Fayetteville but was drawn to the city’s location as a midpoint across the East Coast. The energy-to-waste site will be located about two miles from Interstate 95 — the main north-south highway on the East Coast — and will have access to a short rail line that connects to CSX’s main line up and down the coast. This would make it easy to source plastic waste from anywhere along the Atlantic Coast, as well as sell the fuel the facility produces.
“As we went through all these locations, Fayetteville being almost smack dab in the center of New York, Jersey, Philly and Florida, it really kind of opens up the map for us in a bunch of different ways, on both the feedstock side and the distribution side,” Gallagher said.
Feedstock refers to the plastic or rubber that is used to make the fuel, which in pyrolysis typically includes difficult-to-recycle items like tires and single-use plastics.
Gallagher estimated the initial facility will employ between five and 10 people, but if the company expands as it hopes to, the goal is to create about 75 local jobs. The majority of the jobs would have salaries between $60,000 and $80,000, he said.
Gallagher said the company is looking to first sell fuel to local businesses that have an appetite for it.
“It’s a very industrial area, so even though we can sell up and down the Eastern Seaboard, we’d love to source it locally to the companies [here],” Gallagher said. “There’s definitely a need for it. There’s a good market for diesel fuel obviously in the town, so that would be our first target.”
Environmental impact
Waste Energy Corp says it uses “advanced pyrolysis technology and AI” to convert plastic and rubber into pyrolysis oil, a type of fossil fuel. The company repeatedly describes the fuel it produces as “clean energy,” but it still produces petroleum-based fuel that when burned releases atmospheric-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental advocates have criticized this type of pyrolysis, noting that it continues the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and plastics.
Gallagher said Waste Energy Corp’s operations would not cause environmental harm. He said the pyrolysis reactor used to heat the plastics is highly energy efficient, requiring minimal power to start and then running primarily on gas it generates for about eight hours.
“There’s no damage to the environment at all,” Gallagher told CityView. “Again, our whole underlying reason to do this is we’re trying to play a small part in eliminating plastic and in a way that we can run it as a business and still make money and do something good.”
According to records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the plastics-to-fuel process could release harmful air pollutants, including ones that carry a high cancer risk. Pyrolysis is still considered incineration by the Environmental Protection Agency and regulated as such under the Clean Air Act. But the Trump administration has recently expressed interest in removing pyrolysis from the designation, as it attempted to do during Donald Trump’s first presidency. The plastics industry has lobbied strongly for pyrolysis to be de-regulated.
The first planned Fayetteville plant is located in a low-income, majority Black census tract. Gallagher said Waste Energy Corp‘s pyrolysis process can produce an unpleasant smell when processing tires, but he said rubber will not be used in the first plant, which will only process plastic. He said the company’s pyrolysis technology meets stringent European air emission standards, which are higher than U.S. standards.
“With plastic, there’s virtually no smell,” Gallagher said. “There’s a little steam generated.”
What’s next
The Fayetteville location is a “pilot project” and Waste Energy Corp will evaluate its outputs after a couple of months to determine expansion plans. If the first operation goes well in Fayetteville, the company would like to expand its operations here first, Galllagher said.
“Depending on how it goes — we like Fayetteville — that’s going to be our first area that we expand before we go anywhere,” he told CityView.
The company currently has corporate offices in California, but Gallagher is “probably looking to headquarter it in Fayetteville.”
The announcement of the waste-to-energy plant comes as Fayetteville officials and FCEDC have doubled down on efforts to boost the city’s industry and attract new technology, innovation and defense business. After offering tax and infrastructure incentives, a titanium company last year chose to build a recycling plant in Fayetteville worth more than three quarters of a billion dollars.
