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New federal safety regulations could push PET plastic-makers out of the country for good.
There are an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 chemicals used commercially today worldwide, and the vast majority of them haven’t been tested for human safety. Many that have been tested are linked to serious human health risks like cancer and reproductive harm. And yet, they continue to pollute our air, water, food, and consumer products.
Among these is 1,4-dioxane, a chemical solvent that’s been linked to liver cancer in lab rodents and classified as a probable human carcinogen. It’s a multipurpose petrochemical, issuing from the brownfields of defunct industrial sites, chemical plants, and factories that use it in solvents, paint strippers, and degreasers. It shows up as an unintentional contaminant in consumer personal care products, detergents, and cleaning products and then goes down the drain into sewer systems.
It is also an unavoidable byproduct from the production of polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly known as PET, one of the most ubiquitous materials in the world. PET is the clear, odorless, food-safe plastic bottle you drink water out of. It’s also the basis of the world’s most popular fabric, used in everything from yoga leggings to baby onesies and area rugs; more than half of all fabric manufactured worldwide today is polyester. “You can't make PET polyester without creating this toxic byproduct 1,4-dioxane,” Mike Belliveau, co-founder of the advocacy organization Defend Our Health, told me. “It’s uniquely tied to the chemistry of the polymer.”
To be clear, there is no 1,4-dioxane in polyester products themselves. But like so-called “forever chemicals,” 1,4-dioxane dissolves quickly and completely into water, making it almost impossible to remove once it gets into a river or reservoir.
In 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency included 1,4-dioxane in the third iteration of what’s called the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, a list the agency puts out every five years of chemicals it considers suspicious and wants states to start testing for. The EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory data shows that in 2019, the top four industrial producers of 1,4-dioxane in the U.S. were PET plastic or polyester factories; in 2022, it was five out of the top 10. That same year, a polyester manufacturer lost its permit to dispose of its waste at a treatment plant in New Jersey after state authorities discovered 1,4-dioxane in the drinking water and traced it back to the company.
Now, nearly 12 years later, not only has 1,4-dioxane proved to be shockingly prevalent, it has also been shown to be shockingly dangerous. The EPA may be on the verge of declaring, effectively, that almost any exposure to 1,4-dioxane constitutes an unreasonable risk to human health. Doing so would rock the American chemical and plastics manufacturing industry. But the alternative is being okay with rising cancer rates – an inconvenient fact the chemical industry would rather you not think about when you’re at the store.
North Carolina offers one representative case study. In 2013, a team from NC State University began testing for and finding 1,4-dioxane throughout the Cape Fear watershed, a network of rivers that starts in the mountains above Greensboro and flows southeast through Fayetteville and Wilmington before emptying into the ocean. At first, it was unclear exactly who the culprit of this widespread carcinogenic contamination could be. But by 2015, researchers had pinpointed a handful of sources: the wastewater treatment plants of Asheboro, Greensboro, and Reidsville.
Greensboro processed wastewater from an industrial waste transporter and chemical plant, Asheboro from a plastics plant, and Reidsville from Dystar, a dye and chemical manufacturer, and Unifi, a polyester manufacturer. DAK (now known as Alpek), another plastic manufacturer in Fayetteville, was also releasing 1,4-dioxane into the Lower Cape Fear River near Wilmington at a high enough level to consistently violate its permit. It is impossible at the moment to distinguish 1,4-dioxane’s impact on the health of people in the Cape Fear watershed from the impact of the more infamous class of carcinogenic forever chemicals that also lurk there: PFAS. But as with many pollutants, in the U.S., 1,4-dioxane’s is disproportionately found in Black and Brown communities.
Wherever PET or polyester is made, from the Gulf Coast to the Nakdonggang watershed in Korea, 1,4-dioxane is a problem. Typical water treatment technology can’t remove it, so when polyester manufacturers or other industries discharge contaminated wastewater to municipal treatment plants, the carcinogen flows right through and ends up in the groundwater or watershed.
In North Carolina, the state, the cities, and manufacturers began arguing about what could, and should, be done about it. “My biggest concern in drinking water in North Carolina right now, it’s 1-4 dioxane,” Tom Reeder, Assistant Secretary for the Environment at the state Department of Environmental Quality, said in 2016.
Dystar and Unifi submitted remediation plans to Reidsville, and Dystar told the NC Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources that it was distilling the 1,4-dioxane out of its wastewater and storing it on-site. Dystar didn’t answer Heatmap’s questions, and Unifi said the spokesperson qualified to speak on the topic wasn’t available. The NC DEQ referred Heatmap to Reidsville, which didn’t respond to calls and emails. The lead 1,4-dioxane researcher at NC State also did not respond to requests for information or an interview.
Perhaps this is because of how contentious this issue has been for all involved parties. In 2022, the NC Environmental Management Commission attempted to make a rule limiting 1,4-dioxane in factory wastewater to .35 parts per billion. Unifi and Dystar wrote letters protesting the rule and Asheboro filed a lawsuit against the limits, with Reidsville attempting to join. The rule was eventually nullified because it didn’t fully consider the financial burden it would impose on these cities.
But the way the science is going, these decisions may be taken out of North Carolina’s hands.
In 2016, Congress passed an amendment to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA, or “toss kuh”) instructing the EPA to fast-track risk analyses of chemicals of concern. Under the new law, if the EPA finds that a chemical poses an “unreasonable risk” to human health, it is required to regulate it down to reasonable levels — regardless of the economic impact. One of the first 10 chemicals on the docket was 1,4-dioxane.
Then, of course, came 2017 and the arrival of the Trump administration, which interfered to weaken EPA’s published toxicity findings to make them cheaper for industry to comply with. For example, the 1,4-dioxane analysis excluded the risk of exposure via drinking water, even though more than 7 million people in the U.S. have drinking water with detectable levels of 1,4-dioxane. Many of the findings were repeatedly challenged in court.
When the Biden administration reanalyzed 1,4-dioxane, the draft findings published in 2023 said that 1,4-dioxane poses an “unreasonable risk” to the health of PET and polyester plant workers and people with contaminated drinking water. “As high as 2.3 in 100 exposed workers would be at risk of cancer over a lifetime of exposure,” Jon Kalmuss-Katz, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, which has submitted comments to the EPA, told me. “The EPA considers the range of unreasonable risk to be one in 10,000 to one in a million.” That’s a 100- to 10,000-fold difference.
Some advocates saw a death knell for any remaining environmental arguments for polyester. “The federal government basically concluded that polyester PET poses an unreasonable risk to human health,” Belliveau told me.
The risk evaluation has already gone through a comment period and a peer-review process, and the EPA expects to finalize its evaluation this year. When asked for comment, an EPA representative said, “Actual conditions and releases are highly variable and subject to site-by-site process conditions. The draft supplement to the risk evaluation should not be interpreted to suggest all sites that manufacture PET or polyester present unreasonable risk.”
Despite letters from the American Chemistry Council, the Cleaning Institute, the Plastics Industry Association, and the PET manufacturer Alpek (formerly DAK) attempting to poke holes in the science, the advocates I spoke to were confident the “unreasonable risk” determination will stay.
At that point, the EPA has several tools it can use. “EPA can regulate manufacturing, can ban the chemical, can ban uses of the chemical, can restrict releases of the chemical to the environment,” says Kalmuss-Katz. “But the underlying mandate is always the same. EPA has to ensure that the chemical no longer presents an unreasonable risk.”
According to Thomas Mohr, a hydrogeologist who wrote the book on the investigation and remediation of 1,4-dioxane, polyester plants could simply require employees to wear respirators, and there are commercially available technologies available to filter out the chemical from wastewater — things like vacuum stripping and incineration, collecting it on a resin, or blasting it with ultraviolet light. But these processes are specialized and come with added costs.
That latter consideration is important for an industry that is already struggling to compete with low-cost polyester from China and other developing countries. Of the 115 American polyester manufacturing companies in the 1970s, only 12 remain in business today, according to a history book by Unifi, the polyester manufacturer in Reidsville.
Unifi barely survived the great textile offshoring of the late 1990s and early 2000s, mostly by shrinking and laying off large swaths of its workforce, buying and setting up plants in China and South America, and specializing in premium recycled polyester in its North Carolina plant. At the beginning of February, Unifi announced it would cut costs to shore up its finances. Adding a high-price treatment unit might be too much for it to bear. (Unifi said its spokesperson on this topic was not available for comment.)
Belliveau of Defend Our Health said he would be happy to see PET and polyester go away. But that’s a far-off vision for such a popular material. “EPA is not known for its radical vision, so I doubt they’re going to call for the shut-down of PET polyester in the U.S.,” he told me. “They might say that we need to adopt a drinking water standard or put better control in plants for workers.”
“Often there is a multi-year phase-out period,” Kalmuss-Katz said. “There is time to respond to innovate and to develop safer alternatives and to get those out into use.” Some of those alternatives could be polyester recycling technologies. France-based Carbios and California-based Ambercycle, both startups working on textile-to-textile polyester recycling, say their processes don’t produce 1,4-dioxane. A representative for Circ, a Virginia-based textile recycling startup, would only say that it, “is adhering to all local and federal regulations to ensure its process is in line with the highest regulatory standards for safe chemistry… this is something the team will be following closely as data becomes more available.”
Polyester has become a core part of almost everyone’s wardrobe, used for its high performance, versatility, and affordability. More importantly for the Carolinas, it provides some of the few remaining jobs in a formerly vibrant textile center. To that, Kalmuss-Katz said, “Congress made pretty clear that the price of producing polyester cannot be fenceline communities are left with disproportionate and unreasonable cancer burdens.”
Still, even if the EPA’s decision is the final nail in the coffin of the PET and polyester industry in the U.S., it doesn’t really solve the problem, or rather, not for everyone. Like other industries before it — leather tanning, rayon manufacturing, dye houses and dye manufacturing — it will continue to exist in its dirtiest form in other, less regulated countries. If the United States’ past history of offshoring turns out to be prologue, most consumers probably won’t notice the difference, except perhaps in slightly cheaper prices. Fashion companies will certainly notice, but are incentivized to look the other way.
For a few people paying attention, polyester will simply join a long list of products — chocolate, electronics, cheap meat — that come with a niggling feeling in the back of our minds: this has probably harmed someone on its way to me.
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The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.