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Environment Texas | Feb. 5. 2025Plastic pollution is hurting the Texas coast by littering our beaches, injuring wildlife, endangering the seafood industry, and even risking our health. Plastic pellets (also called nurdles), powders and flakes are a growing source of this plastic pollution, and they are the raw material that is used to make familiar plastic products like water bottles, grocery bags and polystyrene foam. They are small, cheap and easily contaminated. They are so small in fact, they are often discharged by plastics manufacturers or spilled during transport – generally with no consequences for the companies responsible. |
Plastics Recycling Update | Antoinette Smith | Feb. 6, 2025Amid uncertainty surrounding projects funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, the CEO of Tennessee-headquartered Eastman expressed confidence in the future of its second U.S. chemical recycling plant, which was greenlit upon a $375 million award from the Department of Energy. |
E&E News | Carlos Anchonda | Feb. 6, 2025The new administration will decide which jurisdictions get a green light to permit CO2 wells. President Donald Trump signed multiple executive orders to help boost U.S. fossil fuels, but they don’t mention one industry that aims to grow alongside oil, gas and electricity: carbon capture and storage. |
Plastics News | Curt Nagl | Feb. 6, 2025Tariffs left unchecked could fuel inflation and cause cracks in a supply chain that has been stretched to its limits over the past five years, according to a leading economist and supply chain experts. |
Plastics News | Beatriz Santos | Feb. 6, 2025MacroCycle, a spin-out of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), has raised $6.5 million in seed funding. The startup uses an untypical technology to recycle PET waste: ring-opening polymerisation (ROP). Usually, ROP is a polymerisation process that synthesises polymers from cyclic monomers. It typically involves opening the ring structure of a monomer and linking the resulting open-chain units into a polymer. However, PET’s monomers, terephthalic acid (TPA) and ethylene glycol (EG), are linear molecules. |
Houston Chronicle | Erica Grieder | Feb. 6, 2025Syzygy Plasmonics, a darling of the Houston startup community, said it would slash more than half of its staff by the end of March in what may be the first dramatic blow to the local clean tech industry connected to Trump administration policies aimed at focusing American energy development on fossil fuels, advanced nuclear, geothermal and hydropower. |
Houston Chronicle | Claire Hao | Feb. 6, 2025Everyday residents and small businesses could end up paying for much of the $30 billion-plus in new and upgraded long-distance power lines needed largely to support more data centers, oil and gas electrification and cryptocurrency miners. |
Bloomberg | Ari Natter | Feb. 5, 2025The Trump administration is exploring legal options to cancel loans issued under a $400 billion program to finance clean-energy technology as it considers overhauling the initiative, according to a person familiar with the matter. |
BNA Environment & Energy Report | Stephen Lee | Feb. 6, 2025The Department of Justice is rolling back Biden-era environmental justice enforcement policies, according to a Wednesday memo reviewed by Bloomberg Law. The memo gives US Attorneys’ offices until Friday to rescind any memoranda, guidance, and other directives connected to a 2022 letter on environmental justice by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland. The Garland memo laid the groundwork for a comprehensive environmental justice strategy and established DOJ’s first-ever environmental justice section. |
Houston Chronicle | Benjamin Wermund | Feb. 3, 2025Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday he wants state lawmakers to slash property taxes by $10 billion, launch a massive water project to keep the state from going dry and restrict bail for a slew of crimes. |
Clinton Herald | Matt Smith | Feb. 5, 2025The Johnson County Commissioners Court plan to request a resolution calling upon Gov. Greg Abbott to declare an emergency in Johnson County during a Feb. 11 called meeting. More specifically, commissioners hope Abbott will declare an emergency in relation to the application of Biosolids containing PFAS chemicals within Johnson County. |
Fast Company (Originally published in Grist) | Joseph Winters and Tik Root | Feb. 6, 2025Diane Wilson had heard rumors for months that Exxon might be coming to Point Comfort, Texas, which sits on the Gulf Coast south of Galveston. She recalls whispers about the global behemoth hiring local electricians and negotiating railroad access. Two days before Christmas, the first confirmation quietly arrived: an application for tax subsidies to build an $8.6 billion plastics manufacturing plant. |
Wall Street Journal | Scott Patterson, Shalini Ramachandran, Lindsay Ellis | Feb. 7, 2025The Trump administration is expected to place more than 100 workers in the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental-justice and civil-rights office on administrative leave, according to people familiar with the matter. |
Houston Chronicle | Claire Hao | Feb. 4, 2025The Texas A&M University System has selected four companies to explore developing advanced nuclear reactors on its Rellis research campus in Bryan, university officials announced Tuesday morning. |
The Texas Tribune | Alejandra Martinez | Feb. 4, 2025In arid West Texas, water seeps and bubbles from old wells, sometimes carrying oil, brackish water or other pollutants to the surface. But the real danger lies underground — where oil, salt, and toxic minerals could migrate into the aquifers that supply water to cities, farms and ranches. |
The Texas Tribune Carlos Nogueras Ramos and Alejandra Martinez | Feb. 6, 2025Texas oil companies and regulators have waited years for federal permits that would allow those companies to suck carbon dioxide — the largest contributor to climate change — from the atmosphere and inject it underground. |
KETK Tyler | Hannah Walker | Feb. 6, 2025State Rep. Cody Harris (R-Palestine) has introduced the legislation, HB 1400 which would create a groundwater science, research and innovation fund administered by the Texas Water Development Board. |
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal | Mateo Rosiles | Feb. 4, 2025Just before Gov. Greg Abbott laid out his vision agenda for the state in a Sunday evening address, newly elected House Speaker Dustin Burrows discussed his priorities for the ongoing Legislative session and hopes for how he can use his influence to support not only his West Texas district, but the entire state. |
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