Chloe Brunson, outside the PureCycle Technologies facility in her East Winter Garden neighborhood, on Monday, July 11, 2022. She's the leader of One Winter Garden, which is leading opposition to the recycling facility. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel)
Winter Garden made a national name for itself nurturing its bleak downtown into a picture of quaint nostalgia that attracts a million visitors annually.
The city government now wants to apply that transformational know-how to revitalizing the east Winter Garden area, a compact, historically Black community of a few thousand residents.
But a clash is brewing over what many take as a potentially ruinous threat to that quest. Leaders from city hall and the community are girding to fight PureCycle Technologies Inc. of Orlando as well as Orange County government for consenting to the company recycling plastic waste immediately next door to east Winter Garden homes.
The controversy has struck some as a contemporary reminder of the history of grimy industries winding up in the underserved sides of town, including the noxious chemical plant in west Orlando that through the 1900s converted coal into a gaseous fuel.
“We can’t win,” said Chloe Johnson-Brunson, born, raised and now raising her family in east Winter Garden.
A semitrailer at the PureCycle Technologies facility in east Winter Garden, on Monday, July 11, 2022. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel)
One Winter Garden, which advocates for community improvement, will engage churches, hold protests, watchdog government actions and do whatever it takes to stop PureCycle, said Jamie Holley, an east Winter Garden resident and the group’s president
“It’s not wanted or needed here,” Holley said. “The noise, the traffic, the foul smells, the trucks 24 hours a day.”
PureCycle officials have countered that impacts from their facility on East Maple Street would be minimal, amounting to sorting, bundling and shipping waste plastics from within enclosed space.
Plastic pollution is widely feared as one of the planet’s villains, clogging oceans, killing marine life, infiltrating food supplies and threatening human health. Awareness is growing, including on Wednesday, when Greenpeace flew its hot air ship over PepsiCo New York headquarters in a “Ditch Plastic” protest.
To that end, PureCycle is touting a Procter & Gamble Co. chemical process at another plant site that will convert discarded plastics into a clean material for reuse, which PureCycle is marketing as a step toward tackling the world crisis.
PureCycle's plant in east Winter Garden. (Kevin Spear)
PureCycle officials said in statement they were disappointed at Winter Garden’s move to fight the plant.
“We have a solid record when it comes to protecting the local environment in which we have been operating,” PureCycle stated.
When asked if PureCycle has supporters in Winter Garden, the company responded that “we hear regularly from residents stopping by the facility interested in jobs, so we have reason to believe when provided with the facts about our company, residents will be supportive and eager to join our team.”
PureCycle added: “This site is the ideal setting to bring 21st century tech jobs to Winter Garden. In fact, we expect to create 30-40 well-paid, skilled jobs and hire residents in East Winter Garden to fill them.”
The company’s endeavors, however, have been perceived by city leaders as leading to a bad outcome.
A city commissioner, Ron Mueller, said “this is one of the greatest existential threats to the community. We are talking about Winter Garden becoming the plastic dumping ground.”
City officials said they have not gotten many of the facts they’ve sought about the company’s plans, nor has PureCycle held community meetings to disseminate facts as requested routinely by city government for development proposals.
Jamie Holley, an east Winter Garden resident and president of One Winter Garden, said her group will campaign to stop PureCycle. (Kevin Spear)
Mayor John Rees said east Winter Garden residents should be treated no differently than any other resident in any part of the city.
One Winter Garden’s vice president is Chloe Johnson-Brunson. She and her husband are raising four children in their home less than a quarter-mile from PureCycle’s site, around the corner from her mother’s home and down the street from the home she was raised in.
Her follow-on to the mayor is that nobody in the city – white, Hispanic, Black or other – would want to live next to a plastics recycling plant.
“Who would want trash brought from across the state to their neighborhood?” she said.
The site chosen by PureCycle may appear ripe for industrial occupation. It is a complex of warehousing formerly used for many years by makers of metal and paper-metal cans for fruit juice.
Just to the west on another tract is a largely defunct plant resembling a refinery of sorts that processed citrus into juice, beginning the late 1940s.
Through a lot of the 1900s, citrus ruled west Orange. The economy, employment base, culture and even key streets of Winter Garden, made especially wide for fruit trucks, were shaped by the almighty orange – in groves, harvesting, trucking, processing, canning, packing and shipping.
But with freezes, unconquerable pests and foreign producers, Florida’s citrus industry has taken a staggering blow.
The vacant complex along the south side of east Winter Garden, say city officials, is an illusory relic that today – in a Winter Garden reinventing from king citrus days – is unsuitable for heavy or dirty industry, such as processing recycled waste. That sort of business belongs near a landfill or in manufacturing zone where people don’t live, city officials contend.
The company contacted Winter Garden officials a year ago, seeking information about the city’s water and wastewater capacities, according to a batch of public documents obtained from the city by the Orlando Sentinel.
Then, in October, PureCycle announced it would open a plant in Winter Garden to sort and process polypropylene, or No. 5 plastic, used in food and beverage containers, toys, automotive parts and many other applications.
“Polypropylene plastic is one of the most commonly used plastics in the world and can be a challenge to recycle,” PureCycle announced.
The would-be plant is not actually in Winter Garden. It’s within an 18-acre tract of unincorporated Orange County, an island surrounded by east Winter Garden and other city limits.
Initially, according to Winter Garden officials, PureCycle sought annexation of the parcel but withdrew in the face of the city’s inquiries.
“Separately, and without the city’s knowledge, PureCycle asked Orange County to approve PureCycle’s proposed plastic waste recovery use,” according to the city.
Jennifer Moreau, manager of county planning and zoning, announced on Sept. 16 that the particular industrial designation for the 18-acre tract conforms to PureCycle’s plans.
In May, Winter Garden appealed Moreau’s determination based on “data, information, and documentation” not previously provided.
The county did not respond to the appeal, leading to the city commission’s meeting and vote to challenge the county through negotiation or lawsuit.
Winter Garden's city commission voted in July to oppose PureCycle by urging Orange County to determine zoning at the plant's site is not appropriate.
“Obviously, we disagree with the county’s determination,” said Jon Williams, city manager, speaking at that commission meeting. “Our original concerns with the environmental impacts that PureCycle would have to our water supply, public-access reuse, Lake Apopka and most importantly to our residents of east Winter Garden remain.”
Originally, PureCycle said it would “sort and grind” No. 5 plastic at its Winter Garden plant. That triggered worry among city officials about the amount of the city’s potable water PureCycle would consume and the amount of its wastewater that potentially would be ladened with hazardous microplastics and spread citywide.
Much of the city’s wastewater is cleaned and distributed to homeowners for lawn irrigation, with leftover volumes discharged to the ailing, but recovering Lake Apopka.
The county does not provide water or sewer service to the PureCycle site.
Eventually, PureCycle said it would not grind plastic into flakes and would only sort and ship waste plastic. That appeared to solve concerns about water and sewage, though city officials have suspected the process would be brought back.
Of the remaining, leading concern, Winter Garden brings heavy credibility.
To revitalize underserved areas, many local governments employ a state-sanctioned financing vehicle called a Community Redevelopment Agency.
A CRA works by siphoning off some of the growth in property tax revenues, investing that money in a variety of improvements.
In Central Florida, Winter Garden all but wrote the book on CRAs, setting one up in 1992, when much of the desolate core of the city had the nickname of Winter Garbage.
Today, the city’s downtown, with its share of the West Orange Trail and array of small-town charms, is often cited for showing what it takes to envision and utilize a CRA successfully.
The iconic clock in Downtown Winter Garden, on Wednesday, March 30, 2022. Winter Garden hopes to revitalize its east side as it did its downtown, now regarded among Central Florida’s most vibrant. City leaders also hope to finance the transformation of east Winter Garden, a predominantly low-income, Black neighborhood, using the same special fund which helped make over the downtown. (High-dynamic-range composite image by Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel) (Orlando Sentinel)
Earlier this year, Winter Garden redirected and bet much of its CRA bank on east Winter Garden, focusing revenues for years to come on strategies to nurture a “clean, safe place to raise a family,” the mayor said.
That leaves matters contested, pitting east Winter Garden’s defenders against the tandem of Orange County’s bureaucracy and PureCycle’s savvy.
PureCycle’s team includes: communications director Anna Alexopoulos Farrar, former deputy chief financial officer for Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis; chief of staff Adrianna Sekula, former government relations manager at Walt Disney World; and Cecelia Bonifay, a veteran development lawyer who chairs the land-use practice of the Akerman law firm.
More recently, PureCycle hired Betsy VanderLey, a former Orange County commissioner from west Orange.
“I was hoping to get on your calendar for a cup of coffee early next week,” VanderLey said in an email to the city manager, Williams, in late April. “PureCycle has asked me for some assistance and I’m trying to understand the full picture before I get too far down the road.”
Coming from a family of west Orange stalwarts, VanderLey’s involvement in consulting on behalf of PureCycle has stirred some disappointment.
In an exchange of emails with the Sentinel, VanderLey said her role was to “liaison with the city to understand their concerns and seek resolutions.” She had several meetings on behalf of the company, with the last in late June.
VanderLey parted ways with PureCycle, she said, because she did not have enough time to devote to company needs.
VanderLey was defeated two years ago in her bid for re-election by newcomer Nicole Wilson.
Last October, when PureCycle announced its plant in Winter Garden, the company included a quote from Wilson that suggested an endorsement.
It was an endorsement, said Wilson, for boosting recycling rates. She is a frequent advocate for environment protections.
On Monday, she notified senior county government staff.
“I support the City of Winter Garden’s efforts to protect the people in east Winter Garden and their actions are substantiated by the record,” Wilson said.
“Please let me know if there will be any opportunity to reverse the course of action taken by the Zoning Manager.”