By Morgan King, West Virginia Watch
You may have heard of the “garbage wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s and think of them as the past. Private companies proposed massive landfills filled with out-of-state waste transported by West Virginia coal trains returning empty from East Coast cities. Our state would export coal to power big cities, and, in exchange, we would take their trash for mega-dumps, many proposed to contain more trash than our entire state produced.
West Virginia would power the country and serve as the dumping ground for urban waste — an unfair exchange for our communities and a continuation of the extractive tradition of our state’s “resource curse.” Thankfully, environmental organizations and impacted community members refused to accept that fate and organized to demand action at the West Virginia Legislature. The result was the passage of the West Virginia Comprehensive Solid Waste Act in 1991 making it too costly for trains to transport and dump garbage on our land. Another positive outcome of this environmental organizing and advocacy was the creation of the West Virginia Division — now Department — of Environmental Protection, also in 1991.
The 2020s bring a new era of “garbage wars” across our country in the form of so-called “advanced, or chemical, recycling.” This time, the garbage we face is plastic, and the industry claims it will clean up the land and waters of plastic pollution. In reality, advanced recycling will bring plastic waste from out of state to West Virginia for incineration into a fuel that requires significant refining to be useful in industry. Using a lot of energy and producing significant toxic waste, advanced recycling is greenwashing at the expense of West Virginia’s health and economy.
In 2023, Clean-Seas West Virginia, a subsidiary of Clean Vision Corporation, signed an agreement with the state of West Virginia to build an advanced recycling facility near Belle in eastern Kanawha County. The company received $1.75 million in forgivable loans as part of $12 million in state incentives from the Economic Development Authority under Gov. Jim Justice’s administration. The next year, the company received a $15 million five-year bridge loan from the state. Despite these state handouts from our taxpayer dollars, Clean-Seas experiences mounting debt and likely brings false economic promises to the taxpayers footing their bill.
Clean Vision Corporation is a publicly traded company. This means anyone can view its and Clean-Seas West Virginia’s financial information through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database via annual and quarterly reports. Clean Vision Corporation’s recent filings indicate weak economic viability, significant total debt at over $28 million, and negative shareholder equity. If I were responsible for attracting new business to our state, I would be extremely hesitant to hand out taxpayer dollars and benefits to a company with these financial statistics.
Clean Vision Corporation has a history of delayed business in the United States. It proposed an advanced recycling facility in Templeton, Massachusetts, which was present in the company’s 2023 filings, but not in 2025. At the end of 2024, residents of Templeton voted overwhelmingly to pass a one-year moratorium on new plastic incineration facilities for officials to study the potential impacts — this effectively halted the project. In 2022 Clean Vision engaged and co-located with MacVallee, LLC to secure mixed plastic feedstock from material recovery facilities and industrial suppliers, which was originally meant to work with the, now failed, Massachusetts site. In the 2025 third quarter report, Clean Vision indicates that MacVallee will provide the plastic feedstock from Massachusetts for incineration at the proposed West Virginia plant. Questions remain around how the material will travel to our state.
Even more, the SEC filings demonstrate a lack of transparency to the public. Clean Vision’s commitments regarding operation start dates and the amount of plastic the facility will “process” continue to shift. Since the facility’s announcement and press events with the governor’s office in June 2023, Clean Vision promised the public that the plant was expected to operate by the first quarter of 2024. By the 2023 annual filings filed late in April 2024, the operation date shifted to the second quarter of 2024. The next month in May 2024, the report indicated that the operation date was pushed back to the second quarter of 2025.
By the 2025 third quarter report, Clean Vision claimed that operations were expected to begin by the end of 2025, which never happened. The company’s application for an air construction permit, required before the facility lawfully operates, has not even been opened for public comment. Once it is, there will be at least 30 days before that comment period can close. In the earlier filings in late 2023, Clean Vision claimed it will convert 100 tons per day of plastic feedstock to begin with plans to expand to greater than 500 tons per day over the next three years, i.e. by 2027. Over time, and in official SEC filings, this claim shifted to only 50 tons per day.
The lack of transparency and follow-through on promises made in the SEC filings and press releases to the public makes me leery that the company can be trusted at its word. Twice already, in October and December 2025, Clean-Seas West Virginia’s application for an air permit has been deemed incomplete by the state Department of Environmental Protection in email correspondence. West Virginians deserve better than this.
Community organizing protected our mountains and waters from the impacts of mega-dumps over three decades ago, and it can do it again in the face of advanced recycling. Kanawha County residents have an opportunity to push back against this boondoggle and demand alternatives that will make our communities thrive.