Worlds largest plastics plant rings alarm bells on Texas coast

Donald Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia in May will perhaps be best remembered by his participation in an all-male sword dance where he awkwardly waved a ceremonial blade in step with his cabinet and their Saudi counterparts.

But a little-noted deal signed prior to the ceremony is set to worsen a vast problem the world has yet to fully confront – plastic pollution.

In front of a seated Trump and King Salman, Saudi officials posed for photos shaking hands with secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Darren Woods, Tillerson’s successor as chief executive of the oil and gas giant ExxonMobil.

Woods was there to seal a $10bn agreement with the state-owned Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (Sabic) to build the world’s largest plastics facility on the Texas coast, the spearhead of a US boom that will create an enormous new glut of bottles, food packaging, polyester clothing and other products that are already, once discarded, choking the world’s oceans and food chains.

Lavished with more than $1bn in tax breaks by local authorities in Texas to locate the plant on farmland just north of Corpus Christi, Exxon and its Saudi partner have promised the ethane steam “cracker” facility will create thousands of new jobs. Trump called the deal a “true American success story” in a White House statement that included paragraphs copied directly from an Exxon corporate press release.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/26/worlds-largest-plastics-plant-rings-alarm-bells-on-texas-coast


For the deplorable's that come to this site, notice that this firm got a 1BILLION dollar "TAX BREAK", and all of the texas smucks are going to pay for this, with abatement of land rights, and infrastructure cost, never mind about education for example, and the pollution that your going to get, and the planet is going to get, after all, your governor, got a law passed that said you have "no right to know" what this plant is storing on site and it pollution create around the surrounding homes and such ,and then you wonder why your state gets slammed with hurricanes, and people get sick, because the water is poisoned ............................