A New Sonoma Facility Wants to Recycle Plastics. Residents Are Pushing Back

Business leaders of a new facility in Rohnert Park who have promised to divert plastic waste from landfills have found themselves at the center of a controversy, with residents concerned the operation will cause environmental harm, pose safety hazards and impact property values.

Neighbors opposed to the project have garnered thousands of signatures on an online petition to halt the permitting of the facility, which they plan to deliver to the government and officials with the Bay Area Air District.

The Resynergi facility sits in the heart of SOMO Village, a new construction, sustainability-focused mixed-use development for businesses, homes and a high school. The recycler is currently awaiting permit approval from the Air District in order to begin operating.

But in an effort to stall that approval, residents have packed city council and school board meetings, speaking out with their concerns.

“Rohnert Park will suddenly have the reputation of being the garbage dump of Sonoma County,” resident James Griffin said during a recent city council meeting.

Parents of students who attend Credo High School, which is located near the facility, said at the same meeting that they are worried about their kids’ health and safety.

“Many of us will take our kids out of that very fabulous school and very fabulous environment due to the unnecessary risk that’s there if it opens,” parent Wowlvenn Seward-Katzmiller said.

In response to the pushback, Resynergi officials have been hosting open houses for the community to tour the facility and learn more about the recycling process.

“We’ve been working really hard to educate people that we don’t do smoke stacks,” Resynergi co-founder and CEO Brian Bauer said. “We’re actually a very clean process because we follow real closely the air district and the city fire department and all the different groups that regulate this type of thing.”

The process Resynergi uses to recycle plastic is called pyrolysis, which involves heating plastic without the use of oxygen. Bauer said there are byproducts of that process, including volatile organic compounds, which can cause cancer, but that they are minimal.

“Those VOCs coming out of our system are about the equivalent to one passenger car driving down the road,” he said.

Bauer also said the chance for an explosion at the facility is extremely low.

“At any one time, we have very little gases in our system,” he said. “It would be equivalent to camping stove propane. That’s your potential of ignition.”

Meanwhile, local and state regulators are investigating three sites where Resynergi conducted business in the last several years — including the SOMO Village facility. Air district regulators alleged the company did not have proper permits at these locations, according to a report in The Press Democrat.

Lynda Hopkins, chair of the Air District’s board, told KQED the agency issued a violation against the company for moving forward “with construction of the unit without actually having a construction permit in hand. [The facility] is being closely tracked by a variety of different government agencies in Sonoma County and beyond.”

The environmental group California Communities Against Toxics has also filed an intent to sue Resynergi over permit issues, claiming the company’s recycling operations violated the Clean Air Act.

But Bauer denied that claim and said they have not started operating at that location yet, and there is no basis for the lawsuit.

Earlier this month, the Air District delayed its approval of Resynergi’s permit in order to give the public more time to submit comments. The deadline is now Oct. 3.

“I’ve had a lot of folks coming to me trying to get me to essentially put a stop to the permitting process,” Hopkins said. “As long as a project is in compliance with our rules, it will move forward through the permitting process.”