Eloy City Council Presentation and Public Hearing on Free Point Ecosystems Advanced Recycling Facility – February 9, 2026
Eloy City Council Presentation and Public Hearing on Free Point Ecosystems Advanced Recycling Facility – February 9, 2026
On February 9, 2026, the Eloy City Council held a meeting featuring a presentation from Free Point Ecosystems regarding a proposed advanced recycling facility in Eloy, followed by unscheduled public appearances. The presentation detailed the company's plastic pyrolysis technology, its operations, permits, and community benefits. Three members of the public spoke in opposition, raising concerns about environmental and health impacts, compliance issues at the company's existing plant, and the industry's track record.
Discussion Items
- Free Point Ecosystems Presentation: The Chief Development Officer for Free Point Ecosystems presented an overview of their proposed facility. The company takes waste plastic (polyethylenes, polypropylenes, polystyrenes) and uses pyrolysis (heating in the absence of oxygen) to convert it into a recycled oil and gas product, which is sold to petrochemical companies like Dow, DuPont, Exxon Chemical, and Shell. The process is certified by ISCC, a nonprofit entity, and yields about 95% hydrocarbon vapor and 5% char. Approximately 10% of the hydrocarbon stream is used to heat the kilns. The facility in Eloy would be the company's Southwest hub, processing up to 175 million pounds of waste plastic annually, with over 100 employees and 30 inbound trucks per day. The company already operates a similar facility in Hebron, Ohio. Site plan approval was received in December 2025; an air permit modification was submitted to Pinal County in November 2025, and all regulated emissions fall under a minor source air permit. The presentation included a discussion of sorting, contamination removal, and rail access improvements. Council members asked about plastic types, job skill levels, truck routes, rail congestion, and process safety.
Public Comments & Testimony
- Ralph DeChew (from Green Valley): Expressed opposition, drawing parallels to the Hinkley, California water contamination case. Urged the council to prioritize resident safety over tax revenue and requested a copy of the presentation.
- Kevin Green (from Tucson, representing Stop Waste Tucson): Raised serious concerns based on Free Point's Hebron facility record, citing at least three notices of violation from Ohio EPA for visible emissions, excess particulate matter, and venting volatile chemicals through an open flare (79 bypass events between February and June 2025, ranging from 30 minutes to 59 hours). He noted a pattern of technical and financial failures in the plastic pyrolysis industry, with facilities in Oregon, Utah, Texas, and Nevada having closed. He recommended an independent review before moving forward and provided an information packet.
- Rita O'Connell (from New Mexico, National Organizer for Beyond Plastics): Argued that chemical recycling is a false solution, noting that only 9 of 11 operational facilities are running, often below capacity, and that even if fully operational they would handle only 2% of U.S. plastic waste. She questioned ISCC certification, citing fraud investigations in the EU and UK, and criticized mass balance accounting (allowing 5% recycled content to be called recycled). She referenced a 2023 Department of Energy study finding that only up to 6% of waste entering a pyrolysis facility becomes recycled plastic. She highlighted that Eloy is already in the 94th percentile nationally for ozone in the environmental justice index, and the facility would permit 100 tons of volatile organic compounds annually, exacerbating asthma and heart disease.
Key Outcomes
- No votes were taken during this portion of the meeting. The mayor thanked both presenters and public speakers, closed the discussion, and announced a 10-minute break before the next agenda item. No directives or referrals were made.
Meeting Transcript
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.
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