Thank you, everyone.

So we're going to go right into the discussion items first, and then we'll do the unscheduled public appearances after.

So tonight's discussion item is a presentation that discussed them in a proposed advanced recycling facility in the Eloy, operated by Free Point Ecosystems.

Free point ecosystems, the floor is yours.

Please just state your name stuff for the record.

I'm the chief development officer for Free Point Ecosystems.

So we've been working on this project for a long time.

And I thank you once again for having us here and allowing us to talk about our business and what we do.

The first is just an overview of Free Point ecosystems, high level what we do.

What we are is we're in the plastic recycling space.

So we take waste plastic and we turn it back into what it was originally before it was plastic, which is an oil and gas product.

And for us, that's a recycled oil and gas product.

But that's essentially what we're turning this waste plastic into.

What we do with that recycled oil and gas product is we sell it back to the petrochemical companies.

So those are our customers, companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon Chemical, Shell, those are our customers.

They buy our recycled oil and gas that we've made from waste plastic.

Recycle plastic through their petrochemical processes and through their plants.

So this entire ecosystem to use a phrase is certified by a nonprofit entity out of Europe called ISCC.

So this facility in Eloy will be an ISEC certified facility.

And everything that happens to our products downstream also gets certified by that same entity.

So if Dow wants to turn our uh recycled oil into a recycled resin, ISCC also certifies that process and traces the material on a mass balance basis all the way through to the final container that ends up on the store shelf.

So that's the business that we're in.

This is just a little sort of schematic to try to describe what it is we do.

So in the life cycle uh of a piece of plastic, it really starts out as oil and gas that is drilled for, just like fuel that goes into your car.

It gets drilled for, and that oil and gas finds its way into the petrochemical complex.

Those petrochemical companies like Dow turn that uh plastic into a what we call as a prime resin, but it's looks like a little BB, but it's a little piece of plastic.

They sell those granules to companies like our neighbors, Auto Industries that makes trash cans out of them.

They sell them to other packagers that make packagers.

Some people uh take those and put them into uh thermoformers that make bottles, some people blow them into films, but all that plastic ends up uh you know in some sort of consumer product and back into our waste system or into our recycling system.

What traditional plastic recyclers do is they collect those plastics like your coke bottles or like your milk jugs, they wash them, they clean them, they shred them, and they re-extrude them into a new plastic resin.

That's what's described here as the mechanical recyclers.

That extruded product that they make can go directly into a package into a new product.

Now, some of it happens easily, like coke bottles, coke bottles or a Coke bottle, a Pepsi bottle, a uh Dr.

Pepper bottle, they all look the same.

They all turn into that resin.

Some of them are more difficult.

So what I have here is actually an example of a mechanically recycled resin.

When you combine different colors and different kinds of plastics, what you get is this gray granule.

I'll actually hand this around.

And a lot of plastics don't really get recycled.

So you probably all see the stat.

You know, only 20% of plastics out there are eligible for recycling, maybe only half of those get recycled.

So what advanced recyclers do is we source the balance of the plastics, the other plastics that other people aren't recycling, except we take it further back in the chain.

Because we turn it back into an oil and gas, our product doesn't go to the packagers, it goes back to the petrochemical makers.

And that's sort of the difference between what we're doing in advanced recycling versus what a mechanical recycler does.

Mechanical recycler makes a resin like that that goes into a new product, but sometimes it's limited by colors and forms.

Whereas we make an oil and gas that goes back to the petrochemical companies.

So, and the reason the petrochemical companies like what we do is because they can take our product and make any kind of plastic out of it.

So if we take a plastic bag and turn it back into recycled oil, they can turn it into a shampoo bottle.

They can turn it into a bucket, they can turn our product into any kind of plastic.

That's why the petrochemical companies like our product so much.

That's why they're customers of ours.

So we do have one of these facilities in operation.

It's in Ohio.

It's about 30 minutes east of Columbus, Ohio, in a little town called Hebron, Ohio.

So this is an actual picture of our facility.

You can see the sort of the paralysis unit is on the outside, and we have a large 500,000 square foot warehouse that sits adjacent to it.

So the refinery looking or the petrochemical, the paralysis plant on the outside, that sits on about four acres.

So it's a relatively small footprint.

But within this facility, we can process up to 175 million pounds of waste plastic every year.

Within the inside of the warehouse is where we prepare the waste and get it into a form that's suitable for the reactor.

And I have a couple of examples of that.

So those once we've sorted through the material inside the warehouse, we turn it into like this cube or a pellet.

That material gets conveyed outside, and that's what we actually feed into the reactor.

So this is our facility in Ohio.

It's been in operation a little more than a year.

So why are we in Eloy?

The reason we're an Eloy is because we look at these projects kind of on a regional basis.

What we have planned for three-point ecosystems is maybe half a dozen different facilities scattered throughout the United States.

Our facility in Columbus, Ohio, is really our Midwest hub.

And that's really to cover all of our recycling operations in the Midwest.

We chose Eloy to be our Southwest hub.

That's to cover all of our recycling operations in the entire Southeast.

So in Eloy, we want to recycle material from California, from New Mexico, from Las Vegas, maybe even all the way up from Denver.

We'll collect plastic regionally and bring it here to Eloy to recycle into our finished product in Eloy.

The reason we like Eloy is because it's it's regionally well centered, and Eloy has a great location, sort of situated between Phoenix and Tucson.

We liked the industrial park, like sitting next to I-10, and with that rail UP rail access, because all of our finished product needs to go back to our customers on rail.

That rail access was critical for us, and that's that's really why we chose to come here.

And I'll say, if anyone has any questions, please stop me and ask them.

You don't have to just listen to me.

That's sortation.

This is critical because we can't just put any waste into our paralysis reactor, and frankly, we can't just put any plastic into our paralysis reactor.

It's only specific kinds of plastic, and we need to get rid of all the different contaminants out of that.

So we spend almost a third of our capital, which is significant on building sortation.

This is a mechanical process, but it's an automated process of sorting through all the material to get to the specific feedstock to make that finished product that we can put into our reactor.

The next step it goes into the paralysis reactor.

This is a rotary kiln that spins very slowly.

It's a very large rotary kiln.

It heats up the plastic in the absence of any oxygen because it's critical.

We don't want combustion.

We just want to depolymerize the plastic back into its original monomer state, which is an oil and gas product.

What comes out of those kilns in a continuous process are two things.

About 95% of everything we put into the reactor should come out as a mixed hydrocarbon vapor.

That's a very hot vapor, and it's a mixed hydrocarbon stream.

And about 5% comes out as what we call a char product, which kind of looks like a carbon black.

So when we sort of crack this plastic, we get a small percentage of char product that comes out.

The vast majority of the product that comes out is a mixed hydrocarbon, hot vapor.

The next step is condensation.

So that hydrocarbon stream is a mix of all kinds of hydrocarbons.

There's light gases like propane, like in your propane tank, all the way from gasoline, diesel to heavy oils.

What we do is we want to condense all of the condensible hydrocarbons so that we can ship those to our customers.

Some of the hydrocarbons we can't condense into a tank.

Things like methane and ethane are too light.

Those hydrocarbons, we actually recycle them and use them to heat the kilns.

So you can think of it for 100 units of plastic we put into the kiln.

Ultimately, 10 units of it or about 10% of it comes back as a light hydrocarbon stream that we actually use to heat the process.

So it's a sustaining process, but we do lose some of the plastic in the process when we were using it at that as heat.

So condensation is most of the facility that you visually see where we condense the liquids, we do a little bit of cleanup and prep before we load them into the tank cars.

And then we ship out this certified product to our customers.

And almost all of our customers, all of the petro, the majority of the petrochemical complex is in the Gulf Coast, Texas, Louisiana.

That's really where all of our product and all of our customers reside.

That's where we're shipping it out to.

Sorry, where?

Yes, those two.

Oh, auto, yeah.

This is the auto industries.

They make trash cans.

So they actually use like an HDPE resin.

And then shift steel is to the east of us.

San Juan pools is to the north of us.

And then what are they called?

To Rome.

Yeah.

It's just like animal feed?

Animal feed.

You guys know better than I do.

We do try to know all our neighbors.

We've talked to all of them.

So our two permits, two major permits, obviously there'll be lots of permits related to this project, the two major permits, site plan approval we received back in December.

Site plan approval we received back in December.

We worked very closely with planning and zoning with fire department on reviewing all of our plans, getting all of our plans uh approved.

The air permit we actually originally filed in 2021.

We've actually, based on our learnings from the Ohio project, we've made a modification to our permit.

We've added additional recovery to try to recover more of the hydrocarbons for product for our customers.

And we submitted that modified plan to Penal County in November of this year.

So we're going through that process now as we speak.

All of our all of the regulated emissions from us, both carbon monoxide, knox, sox, haps, everything basically falls under a minor source air permit.

So that's what we've submitted to uh Penell County.

Um in Hebron and here as well in Eloy, community engagement is important for us.

Um we actually did training for the local fire department um to get additional training for facilities of this nature.

Um we're members of different organizations throughout Hebron.

We'll find, you know, we want to be good neighbors here, find what's most impactful to the community here.

Maybe it won't be the same as in Ohio, but we will be an engaged community participant here.

Um these are some of the impacts.

Um we're gonna have well over in Ohio, which our Ohio facility is half the size that we're proposing here.

In Ohio, we have over a hundred employees.

Um so we're gonna have well over a hundred um here in Eloy, as well as the temporary construction jobs, uh, the tax base and all the economics.

And I will say, like, two of the things that I think are important.

We are we're increasing um building new roads uh through the industrial park that should help for additional tenants in the future.

As well, UP is requiring us to make upgrades to the mainline system.

Um, and that will also help any additional uh future tenants within the industrial park that need rail access.

Um so we're putting in real infrastructure that should help with additional um industry in the industrial park as well.

So the big takeaways, I guess um, you know, we are pulling plastic that was otherwise bound for a landfill, turning it into a product that should keep oil in the ground.

That is the big picture.

There's a lot of that goes on within the petrochemical industry, but we are taking waste plastic and giving them an oil product that allows them to drill for less oil and gas.

Um we do recycle uh not every plastic, but a large majority of the plastics, so any kind of polystyrens, any kind of polypropylenes, any kind of polyethylenes, almost doesn't matter the form, the color, the melt flow index, any of the properties, all of those are acceptable on our process, and they can be commingled in different percentages.

So it is a recycling operation that is really designed to be done at scale, and it's something that we want to do at scale, because that's the only way we're gonna have a big impact on plastic waste.

Um we do make, I guess what we would consider a prime product.

It it may be a little more intensive, um, but by turning it back into a hydrocarbon unit, you can basically recycle a solo cup into a grocery food bag, right?

When we turn it back into oil, the petrochemical complex can turn it into any plastic then.

So, unlike trying to pick all the coke bottles and turning coke bottles back into coke bottles, we can really recycle any plastic into any other kind of plastic, and that's useful for the industry.

And I mean, this is a relatively novel industry, it's new and up and coming, and really we want this facility in Eloy to be the center of our southeast operations.

Um we want it to be something that that Elian Arizona is proud of.

So the final slide is some myths versus facts.

Um I know you probably hear lots of things.

We and so we want to try to clear up some of these.

Paralysis is not incineration.

It's not combustion.

If we combust the plastic or incinerate the plastic in our reactor, we have nothing to sell.

It basically all goes up in smoke.

So like the very definition of paralysis is no oxygen, so that we don't get combustion.

If we get any combustion, we've destroyed the plastic.

So paralysis is not incineration, by definition.

Paralysis is required to be regulated as an incinerator or a waste combustor.

Well, if you've been to a like a mass burn incinerator that I've been to, or even an RDF incinerator, what we are doing is fundamentally different than incineration by definition.

We don't want to incinerate.

And the Picanal County Air Quality Division has governed that we do not need to be regulated as a waste combustor.

In fact, the Arizona DEQ came to the same conclusion due to our recyclability.

So if we're recycling at the yields that we should be recycling at, we do we are not a waste combustor and do not have to be regulated as such.

Ohio EPA came to the same conclusion.

Post-consumer waste plastic is unsuitable for paralysis.

Well, I would call this maybe more of a misconception.

Unsorted waste, untreated waste is unsuitable for paralysis.

Unsorted plastic, any plastic in our reactor is unsuitable for our reactor.

You have to have the sortation in front of it.

We are targeting very specific plastics.

Polyethylenes, polypropylenes, polystyrens.

Any plastic that's carbon and hydrogen.

Other plastics, polyesters, PVCs, hydrogenated plastics, flame retardant plastics, those are like restricted, cannot enter our reactor.

So no, unsorted consumer waste cannot go into our paralysis reactor, but sorted plastic waste can as long as we sort out the undesirables.

Oxygen into the paralysis reactor is risky.

That is true.

We do not want oxygen in our reactor.

So that is something we specifically engineer for.

We cannot have free oxygen molecules in our reactor.

So we have hazard studies, design engineer it, multiple safety locks to make sure that no oxygen enters our reactor.

So that is true.

Oxygen is bad.

Paralysis only creates fuel.

Well, again, I call this maybe somewhat of a misconception.

If you take a propane molecule, propane can be used as fuel on your barbecue.

When I grill hamburgers, I grill them with propane.

Propane can also be used to make a yogurt cup.

A yogurt cup is made from polypropylene.

Probably comes from propane, which is comes from propane.

So it can be used as a fuel, or it can be used to make a yogurt cup.

We sell an ISCC certified product, recycled product to our petrochemical customers.

They want to take that ISCC certified propane and turn it into yogurt cups, not to use it as fuel because its highest and best use is as a recycled product.

Nonetheless, we're taking waste plastic that was going to go into a landfill, which is a petrochemical waste, and we sell a recycled petrochemical product back to our customers.

Those two things happen.

For every pound of plastic we pull out of the landfill and recycle, it's a pound of oil that doesn't need to get drilled.

That fact pattern is incontrovertible.

Finally, advanced recycling, new, unproven, unprofitable.

Nothing we're doing is actually novel or unique.

Our paralysis kiln reactors, they don't have patents.

Paralysis has been used for many, many years.

Doing it on a large commercial scale, like we're doing it, there aren't a lot of facilities around that are proposed like we're doing at Eloy.

There's a few.

I mean, there's no doubts.

And there have been some failures in our industry.

Um, but it's not unproven, and we're only coming to Eloy because of the success of our Ohio facility.

You're gonna get lessons learned from Ohio.

We're going to hopefully build an even better, more profitable facility here in Eloy, but we're doing this because we believe in it.

So I think that's all I have.

There must be a question.

First off, you the claim is that you know I plastic water bottles, plastic Coke bottles, yes, they are destroying our planet, they create waste, they're not recycled.

But when I met with your colleagues, I got the sense that that's not the type of plastic that you're using for this particular plant.

That this plant comes, that this plant will be used for like other companies who use who make plastic products, and then the excess will be will then be shipped to Eloy so that uh they can go through this recycling process, which is which is good too, because again, that's product that they're not going to use that they're not going into the landfill.

But the idea, but you keep bringing up the idea about recycling plastic water bottles, and I didn't get the sense that that's recycled water bottles.

No.

Okay.

So a plastic like a Coke bottle is actually something called PET, but it's a polyester.

It's actually the same plastic that's in your fleece jackets.

Um, and we don't recycle that.

Um the plastic water bottles, those PET bottles, are actually relatively suitable for mechanical recycling.

And if you put a water plastic water bottle into your blue bin, I will tell you, even though I argue with people all the time, more than likely it's getting recycled.

So when you put a Coke bottle into the blue bin, that makes its way to a material recovery facility.

They recover those Coke bottles, and then those Coke bottles go to PET mechanical recyclers that make new PET granules and sell them back to Coke and Pepsi.

So PET is something we don't recycle.

We don't recycle it for chemical reasons because it's an oxygenated plastic, and we avoid oxygenated plastics.

Um the things we recycle are polyethylene, which is like you would find in shampoo bottles, yogurt cups, um, HDPE buckets, any kind of flexible film you find is almost always some sort of polyethylene.

Um polypropylenes we recycle, polystyrenees.

So and we tend to recycle, so some of those plastics are mechanically recycled.

Many and most of them are not, due to a variety of reasons.

We tend to focus on the plastics that aren't really mechanically recycled, mostly for economics, because those are being thrown away and people basically give them to you for free.

Um so there's a wide variety of plastics that we that we do target, but we typically don't compete with mechanical recyclers.

So like a good example is like uh milk jug.

A milk jug is a polyethylene, a natural polyethylene container.

We can recycle polyethylene in our process, but we don't buy those because they're really those are being bought by mechanical recyclers, um, and we don't really want to compete with mechanical recyclers, whereas like the grocery store plastic bags, almost nobody recycles those.

They get recycled very few people.

There's a few examples like Treks where they try to turn it into lumber, but for the most part, all that plastic film doesn't get recycled at all.

That's like one of our number one things that we buy is flexible film.

Um, because it's so hard to recycle for anyone else.

Nobody wants it.

We get it virtually for free.

Um so it is unfortunately the plastic market is so confusing.

There's so many different kinds of plastic, nylons are plastic, polycarbonates are plastic, and a lot of those, like those are two examples that we don't recycle.

The vast majority of plastic that's in the market is a polyethylene, a polypropylene, and a polystyrene, and PET, those coke bottles.

That's and then some PVC.

That's kind of what you see in the market.

But yeah, so we recycle a lot of what's out there, but very specific things we don't.

Coke bottles, we do not recycle.

So my understanding when I met with your colleagues was that you target specifically with this plant, you're going to be targeting industries that make plastic products to use their excess.

So are you saying that you also are going to be purchasing recycled items such as stuff that we discard in our recycled bins as well?

Yes, both.

So like the a good example would be if you look at your Coke bottle, it's wrapped with a plastic label.

When they recycle the Coke bottle, the plastic label gets thrown away.

But we take that label and recycle it.

So that comes out of the recycling system.

That came out of your blue bin.

The cap on the top of your Coke bottle is polypropylene.

It's not PET.

That often gets thrown away as well.

So that's something that comes out of the recycling system that we purchase and we recycle.

But we also sometimes buy manufacturing waste.

That's directly from a packager where they have scrap waste, or sadly, they mislabel something and the label's a little crooked, and then for them it's trash.

So we do buy manufacturing scrap, but we also buy post consumer material.

But we buy we buy from all kinds of people.

Like when you forget to pick up your pills at Walgreens, eventually, after so many days, actually, I just got notice I have four days to pick up my prescription, and now I'm in Arizona.

But if you don't pick up those pills on time, they throw out the medicine.

I don't know what they do with the medicine, but the pill bottles and the instructions and everything goes to a document destroyer who has to destroy it for HIPAA regulations.

That document destroyer then landfills all those plastic bottles.

We're buying those now in Ohio, right?

Because that's a polypropylen bottle, basically.

And all we have to do is try to remove some of the paper from it, and then we have polypropylene bottles.

So that's a consumer product that's waste.

Um and every single Walgreens is producing this stuff.

Every single CVS, every single pharmacy in America, and nobody knows what you know, it all gets thrown away.

So there's just there's a lot, it's you start getting into the waste market, and it's like down a terrible rabbit hole.

But there's all kinds of different waste streams, but we do buy stuff that you put in your blue bin does end up like people put a lot of plastic film in their blue bin, even though the city of Phoenix says, please don't put film in your blue bin.

People still put all their bottles in a plastic bag and then throw that in their blue bin, those bags end up at our site because those bags are just trash for the recyclers.

And there's some material that people put into like solo cups.

Nobody recycles solo cups.

Um, those might end up from your blue bin to our facility.

Um, so it varies, but we do buy manufacturing waste, we we buy all kinds of material streams.

Thank you.

Um I used to be on the pharmacy board, so afterwards I'll tell you what they in Arizona what they do with the body.

I don't know what they do with the pills.

But no, I'll tell you what they do.

I'm sure there's a process, very regulated process for the pills.

Yeah.

Um you talked about the contamination removal.

Where do you where is that contamination removal placed?

That goes to landfill.

So some of the contamination that we find.

If we find a Coke bottle, we don't do this in Ohio because we didn't design the facility to do this, but here in Arizona, we're gonna design our facility within the warehouse to recover other materials.

So we will recover Coke bottles, PET bottles, we'll recover aluminum cans, and we'll recover cardboard, and we'll recover metals, other ferris metals, anything that's magnetic.

All of that material will sell to other recyclers.

If somebody puts a tennis shoe, if we end up, I mean, we get bowling ball, um, tennis shoes, t shirt, we get a lot of even PVC, that we actually um bail up, and that that goes to landfill.

So we do some of our materials, some of that we can't, there are some contaminants we can't do anything with.

Um, and those materials then go back to where they were going already, which is going to landfill.

Um I did have another question about the hundred jobs you said that this uh plant would bring to our community.

What would be the skill level for those jobs?

It varies.

I we debate about what the skill levels.

So we we have a whole variety of skill levels.

Everybody working in the paralysis plant or in the the oil and gas side of it, those are all skilled, skilled workers, skilled mechanics, skilled operators.

Um I would say probably half or maybe a third of the operators in the warehouse are skilled um operators that are operating the machinery.

We then like have another third of our uh employees that are equipment operators, so they're operating skid steers, bucket loaders, forklifts.

I don't know how you qualify how skilled those are, and then probably the lowest skilled, which is maybe 15% of the total, um, are probably people that work on QC that are doing quality control in the line, hand sorters.

So that's our lowest skill level, probably.

So it it's a mix.

I'd say the majority of ours are between sort of semi-skilled and high skilled.

It's it's probably you know three quarters of our workforce.

And then we have obviously the salaried people at the top that are managing everything.

Yeah.

So you'd be willing to work with CAC to show them like what are the skill levels you needed so they could make those type of trainings and certifications available?

We're relying on your help to help us find skilled workers here.

Yeah, and another thing that you're probably promised.

My last question that you're probably gonna rely on this too.

And I've talked to the city manager about is one of the things that I've noticed, and we only have one plant right now that's that's operating, you know, with loading and unloading from the railroad, and we have a two-track railroad that goes through our system, but when they're loading and unloading, I I've seen them come to a standstill all the way to Toltec Road and stuff.

We will one of the things we need, I think we need to work with, and maybe you have in your other plant worked with is how do you you avoid that congestion?

How do you that stand still?

Because you know, either way is kind of built between, I mean, we have uh economic uh benefits on both sides of the tracks, and a lot of times in our emergency crews too, you know, we I mean, yeah, we have one on one side and one on the other side, but when that railroad track is just shut down, you have cars and cars and cars with no other way but get back on the freeway, go to the overpass and Pikachu and come back in, you know.

Yeah, I I mean that's something we could probably talk about.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I we could probably talk in more granularity about the rail, but with UP, we designed a three-track system where we're gonna have a fully loaded um train for pickup so that they can pull in.

I mean, you put this was by our design.

UP can pull in, drop the cars, pick up the next set, and go.

So our loading operator, like our loading track is on a separate track, and we'll do all of the loading and then stack the trains, the cars up for removal.

So there shouldn't be the the pickup and drop-off should be an expedited process, meaning we're not pulling the full train in and then loading cars one at a time.

The cars are all preloaded in our rail design.

So it should speed up the process for UP to be able to drop and pick up.

And that was a requirement they wanted for us, it made sense.

Like we can't you know, be filling a tank car while roads are blocked.

They need to drop, drop a set of cars, pick up a set of cars, and go.

Um, and they're also doing upgrades on the main line as well to help with their switching.

So I I again I'm not the rail expert.

Um, but I think UP and ourselves and our rail consultants have worked a lot on the design to ensure that the switching can occur quickly.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, good.

A couple questions on the process.

You said the raw material coming in comes from recyclers now.

What shape will that come in?

Uh came in on open trucks will come in and bales of some sort, or what kind of uh typically bales.

I mean, uh I'd the vast majority of our material comes bailed and it comes in 53 foot trailers, enclosed trailers.

Okay, so we're uh garbage flying around, you know, as a result of uh loose loose trucks or something loose.

Correct.

Okay.

And we'll sometimes it comes in Gaylords, sometimes it comes in super sacks, but the trucks pull up to the door, the material gets offloaded into the warehouse, the doors come down as soon as they offload.

All of our residue gets bailed as well.

So we'll have bailed residue, and it'll be the same operation in reverse.

So everything coming in and out of the warehouse should be 53 foot trailer to a to a dock door.

Okay.

So there's no operations occurring outside.

When you get up and running uh full full scene, how many trucks a day do you think you would get?

What did we say today?

30 or yeah.

Yeah, 30 inbound, and then there's the outbound, depending on the outbound, yeah.

So 30 inbound trucks.

And what do you have?

The route to those trucks will take yet, uh supercoming off of 10.

I mean, oh yeah.

Yes, go ahead.

10 in the length of that.

Okay, off of 10, down tall tech to batag you and across.

Is that what you play?

Okay.

And temperature of the uh kiln.

So the internal temperature where the reaction occurs is around anywhere from five to six hundred Celsius.

Okay.

And I assume uh if there's a shutdown for some reason that has to cool down, you've got a lot of material inside, you gotta scrap out.

If we yeah, we definitely want to avoid that.

Yeah, but it doesn't.

Yes.

If you have, yeah, if you have if you have to go into the kiln for whatever reason, yeah, it's a multi-day process.

I mean, it takes a long time.

So these kilns are designed to really run continuously.

We never want to turn them off.

Okay.

And we certainly never want to.

You you can have a shutdown where you still remain hot.

In a cold shutdown, you basically want to ensure that everything gets paralyzed before you do a cold shutdown.

Because yes, you don't want hardened plastic anywhere.

Hard plastic is we know through experience is not fun to deal with.

We have some experience in the steel industry, so I know it's up to the I mean in a yeah, uh ideally you never have that situation where you have to do a cold shutdown and then somehow figure out how to get you know harden plastic out of things.

Um but yeah, we've we've had to bring in steam trucks to do things.

There's a seem the efficiency and the real uh I guess uh key to your process is that sorting process at the beginning.

I mean, we definitely yes, we want to be very careful about what we put in there.

So we have very strict specifications.

We have, I mean, we actually have analyzers on the belt that are measuring the material as it goes across the belts that we know what the quality of the material is.

We'll have a sampling program where we sample material as it's stored in the warehouse before it goes into the kiln.

But yes, it's it's important to know exactly what we're putting in there.

Okay.

Thank you, sir.

All right.

Yeah, from the unscheduled public appearances, there are three names, Ralph at Chew, Kevin Green, and Rita O'Connell, and you guys have agreed to bundle this up to one person, and you're gonna get 10 minutes with a warning at eight.

Okay.

We're good.

Okay.

Madam Clerk, can uh you let me know and uh throw an eight-minute warning up.

Please start state the name.

There you go.

Uh and uh I know I you're gonna be hearing from the people in Green Valley about 30 trucks a day going past our subdivision, which is another issue.

Um I wonder if you remember the movie Aaron Drakovich.

It told the story of Hinckley, California's bail with Pacific Gas and Electric after they contaminated the drinking water.

Seems like it was a lifetime of going if those battles are still being fought across America today.

In 2023 alone, there were chemical plant serious chemical plan issues in Irvine and Oceanside, California, Tucson, Arizona, Montgomery, Texas, Catusa, Oklahoma, Birmingham, Alabama, in Michigan, New Hampshire, Florida, and two more in Pennsylvania.

Now, of course, modern industry and our basic way of life depends on heavily, it depends heavily on chemical production.

But city governments have a responsibility for the safety and well-being of the residents.

Governments should err on the side of caution when it comes to potential serious health issues stemming from businesses within city limits.

Freepoint will be a chemical plant.

It's hardly recycling and it is definitely not manufacturing.

I urge you to do all you can to protect the residents of Eloy, the surrounding communities, and Pennell County.

Do not allow short-sighted need for increased tax revenue lead to a mistake that gets our growing city on the list of preventable disasters.

I'd also like to request the copy of the presentation that Free Point gave to them.

Thank you.

I yield to Kevin Green.

Mayor Sutton and members of the City Council, my name is Kevin Green.

And I want to thank you for this opportunity to speak with you about the proposed Free Point Ecosystems Plastic Paralysis Facility.

I represent a group called Stop.

Excuse me, could you please uh state where you're from?

Uh Tucson.

I represent a group called Stop Waste Tucson.

It's an environmental organization working on waste reduction and recycling issues in the region.

In 2022, I began researching plastic pyrolysis technologies when Tucson's environmental services department started evaluating proposals for plastic pyrolysis and waste gasification at the city landfill.

Tucson is likely to be among the communities sending plastic waste to the Eloy facility once operations begin.

Tonight I want to raise serious concerns based on Free Point's operating record at its existing facility in Hebron, Ohio, as well as well-documented problems across the plastic paralysis and so-called advanced recycling industry.

Over the past year, Free Point's Hebron facility has accumulated a troubling record of air permit violations.

These include visible emissions, excess particulate matter, and operation of unsanctioned equipment.

Many of these issues were first flagged by community members, which the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency later verified through compliance inspections.

Ohio EPA have sent at least three notices of violation to FreePo, including one for venting volatile chemicals through an open flare rather than required vapor combustors.

This wasn't a minor event.

Between February and June 2025, Freeport bypassed their vapor combustors 79 separate times with incidence raising ranging from 30 minutes to nearly 59 hours.

This pattern raises real concerns about Free Point's ability to operate safely and protect public health.

And unfortunately, these problems are not unique to just one facility.

Across the country, plastic paralysis projects have struggled with technical and financial instability.

Many facilities cannot maintain continuous operations due to equipment malfunctions and unstable chemical processes.

These systems are especially challenged by real-world plastic waste, the stuff that's generated in our communities, which often contains food residue labels, additives, and chlorine.

As a result, some facilities rely on clean or industrial plastics instead of community waste.

Even then the product produces typically a synthetic oil that is inconsistent or contaminated and often must be heavily diluted with petroleum-based naphtha before it can be used to make new plastic resin.

This means these facilities do not truly recycle plastic.

Instead, the majority of the paralysis oil is usually burned or sold as fuel or blended into fuel streams because it's too contaminated or highly variable for plastic production.

These challenges have led to a clear pattern of shutdowns across the country.

Over the past decade, multiple plastic pyrolysis facilities in the U.S.

and Europe have closed after failing to overcome technical and economic hurdles.

This includes facilities in Oregon, Utah, Texas, and Nevada.

Given three points documented compliance issues in Ohio and the broader history of failure in this industry, I urge the City Council to proceed with great caution.

You know what?

Before moving forward, I respectfully recommend a thorough independent review of this project project with meaningful input from environmental experts and the community.

I have an information packet uh that I'd like to pass out that provides details, including the notices of violations for the compliance uh problems in Ohio, and it also outlines the wider difficulties faced by the plastic pyrolysis industry.

Thank you for your time.

How much time do I have, Mr.

Mayor?

City Manager.

Uh you have about four minutes.

Okay, great.

My name is Rita O'Connell.

I am your neighbor from New Mexico, Libent House.

I am the national organizer with Beyond Plastics.

We work nationwide on the absolutely pernicious and troubling problem of plastic pollution.

I briefly just want to address some of the things that you heard this afternoon.

Um at Beyond Plastics, along with many other groups nationwide, we have been tracking chemical or advanced recycling facilities around the country.

And I think it is important to reiterate what Kevin just said.

Of the 11 facilities that were recently operational, currently only nine are, and of those nine, many continue to have production issues, pollution issues, hazardous waste generation issues.

This is not a thriving industry.

And if it were, we would all be hearing a lot more about it because as we have we I think we can all agree this plastic pollution problem is real.

Um however, most of the U.S.

chemical recycling facilities as well as most global facilities have failed to deliver on their promises, um, and they are running far below capacity.

And even if all 11 facilities were fully operational and running to their proposed permit allowable output, we'd be dealing with about two percent of America's plastic waste problems.

So this is a false solution, and the greenwashing in the field is quite extraordinary.

The ISCC certification that you've heard a little bit about has been plagued with issues.

Uh, there are open investigations in the European Union and the United Kingdom.

Um large-scale fraud cases have been uncovered involving ISCC documentation.

NGOs and whistleblowers have repeatedly argued that the ISCC has failed to prevent or sanction abuses, and that that program is deeply industry aligned.

I also want to address um this question of plastic to plastic recycling.

That ISCC certification allows the industry to use something called mass balance accounting, which means that this recycled product that's coming out of a lot of these facilities is added to virgin plastic feedstock, and most of the time it's a fractional amount.

They can use 5% recycled product and add it to 95% virgin feedstock and call the resulting plastic products recycled.

This is a real problem that we have nationally, and it's something we should be looking at quite clear-eyed.

It's um something that communities like Hebron are now facing head-on.

Um, I encourage you to look closely, as Kevin said at the Hebron facility between December 10th, uh December 2nd and December 15th alone, there were 10 separate malfunctioned events, every one of them involved visible output.

Um still working out the Kingston Hebron, I think um is is a uh a gentle way of putting it, uh, to the point they were even using an unpermitted hydrochloride scrubber in that facility.

So I think uh by and large, um the there was a 2023 Department of Energy study that found that um only up to about six percent of the waste entering a pyrolysis facility ends up as recycled plastic that could actually re-enter the consumer chain.

Eloy, as I don't need to tell you, is already in the 94th percentile nationally in the environmental justice index for ozone.

This facility is written would be permitted to allow 100 tons of volatile organic compounds annually.

VOCs are a precursor to ozone.

In a community that is already suffering disproportionately from both asthma and heart disease, any ozone increase will only exacerbate those issues to which children are particularly susceptible.

I would strongly encourage this council and this community to reconsider their support for this facility and to look closely at the claims the chemical or advanced recycling is in any way what it says that it is.

Thank you.

Well, thank you guys.

And on both sides of this uh issue, thank you.

You've given this council plenty to think about and plenty to research.

And I would like to thank everybody for their time today.

At this time, I want to close this meeting and give us uh 10 minute break here.

All right.

So we will see you at 6-11.

Thank you.