In Propublica

I was at a United Nations treaty negotiation in Ottawa, Ontario, and an industry group had set up a nearby showcase. On display was a case of Heinz baked beans, packaged in “39% recycled plastic*.” (The asterisk took me down an online rabbit hole about certification and circularity. Heinz didn’t respond to my questions.)

This, too, was part of an old trial. The beans were expired.

Pyrolysis is a “fairy tale,” I heard from Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the environmental justice network Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. He said he’s been hearing pyrolysis claims since the ’90s but has yet to see proof it works as promised.

“If anyone has cracked the code for a large-scale, efficient and profitable way to turn plastic into plastic,” he said, “every reporter in the world” would get a tour.

If I did get a tour, I wondered, would I even see all of that stubborn, dirty plastic they were supposedly recycling?

The industry’s marketing implied we could soon toss sandwich bags and string cheese wrappers into curbside recycling bins, where they would be diverted to pyrolysis plants. But I grew skeptical as I watched a webinar for ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology, the kind used to make the fruit cup. The company showed photos of plastic packaging and oil field equipment as examples of its starting material but then mentioned something that made me sit up straight: It was using pre-consumer plastic to “give consistency” to the waste stream.

Chemical plants need consistency, so it’s easier to use plastic that hasn’t been gunked up by consumer use, Jenkins explained.

But plastic waste that had never been touched by consumers, such as industrial scrap found at the edges of factory molds, could easily be recycled the old-fashioned way. Didn’t that negate the need for this more polluting, less efficient process?

WTF? I don't get it.

Three federal lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop any initiatives involving cryptocurrency and the blockchain, saying the scantly regulated technologies should be kept far away from the agency’s work overseeing the nation’s housing sector.

[…]

The letter is a response to reporting by ProPublica that the housing agency recently discussed taking steps toward using cryptocurrency. The article described meetings in February in which officials discussed incorporating the blockchain — and possibly a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin — into the agency’s work. The discussion at one meeting centered on a pilot project involving one HUD grant, but a HUD finance official in attendance indicated the idea could be applied much more expansively across the agency.

“We are looking at this for the entire enterprise,” he said in that meeting, a recording of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We just wanted to start in CPD,” he added, referring to HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development. The office administers billions of dollars in grants to support low- and moderate-income people, including funding for affordable housing, homeless shelters and disaster recovery, raising the prospect that these forms of aid might one day be paid in an unstable currency.

[…]

The HUD official pushing the idea internally was Irving Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, a staffer said at one of the meetings. Dennis denied to ProPublica that HUD was considering any such experiment. He published a book in 2021 in which he wrote that HUD should use the blockchain.

The blockchain is a digital ledger most commonly used to record cryptocurrency transactions. Boosters of the technology depict it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks out of financial transactions and to make those transactions more transparent and secure. One such evangelist is Robert Judson, an executive at the consulting firm EY, who is listed in a document obtained by ProPublica as an attendee of one of the HUD meetings. Judson has written glowingly about the potential of blockchain to prevent aid money from being misused. (Dennis was previously a partner at EY.)

On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”