Press release

Europe’s biggest plastics lawsuit launches as frontline US and Belgian communities unite

6th November 2025

NGOs and community groups launch new suit against INEOS’s plastics facility ‘Project One’, under construction in Antwerp

- US communities speak out on fracking health struggles

- New estimates suggest plant could cause triple the emissions stated by INEOS

- Projected early deaths from plant pollution exceed estimated number of permanent jobs

Lawyers, community members and financial experts are heading to court to stop Europe’s biggest plastics facility, as experts release new and alarming estimations of the scale of its projected harms.

It’s the fifth case against the controversial €4 billion development, in Belgium, which would use fracked fossil gas to make the raw materials for plastic – and has been granted permit after permit by local authorities. The project was subject to an injunction in 2020, and its permit was overturned in court in 2023. Several iterations later, the case launched today is against the project’s fifth permit.

The lawsuit launches just after on-the-ground communities from fracking hotspots in the United States visited Antwerp to connect with local residents, and inform local politicians about the implications this project has for people like them.

A ruling in the NGOs’ favour in the case could, depending on timing, remove the legal basis for the construction, or operation, of the facility.

Climate and health understatements

A new suite of reports, commissioned as evidence for the legal case, suggest that the potential global climate and health impacts of the plant have both been gravely underestimated – as lawyers have long argued. [1]

European law requires a substantial assessment to be undertaken of a development’s real impacts, before a plant can be approved and a permit granted. ClientEarth and partners have argued since the start that these assessments have been scant, overly localized, and therefore unlawful – particularly when it comes to climate-changing emissions.

INEOS’s assessments put projected direct annual carbon emissions at 655,000 tCO2e (roughly the same as Eritrea’s) – and fail to calculate full lifecycle emissions. But conservative estimates from an emissions study by Data Desk estimates that the full supply chain emissions footprint of Project One could reach 3.8 million tCOe each year – the same as the annual emissions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and around five times higher than detailed in the Environmental Impact Assessment.

Meanwhile, new health reports estimate the overall regional air pollution impact of Project One, once operational, at 410 deaths attributable to emissions of toxic particles. INEOS expects Project One to create 300 permanent, on-site jobs.

Other projected impacts include over 100 new cases of asthma in children, and hospitalisations for respiratory and cardiovascular complaints.

Legal progress changes the field

Since the legal battle began, courts around the world have made major clarifications on the inclusion of ‘Scope 3’ emissions in Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA). These are emissions that don’t happen on-site, but would not be locked in if the facility did not exist. In the case of Project One, those would be the substantial emissions from fracking and processing gas in the US to feed the plant – and the ‘downstream’ emissions of incinerating eventual plastic waste. Legally, as made clear in recent national and international judgments, the full extent of these emissions must be fully and accurately reflected in an EIA. [2]

ClientEarth lawyer Tatiana Luján, who is leading the case, said: “We know categorically that we need no more plastic-producing infrastructure globally. Yet right here in Europe, authorities are bending over backwards to enable the biggest plastics facility on the continent yet.

“Project One has a shiny image, but its story is founded on fossil fuels. The gas supply chain is riddled with injustice and huge emissions and this is currently flying under the radar. Meanwhile, experts have detailed a projected local impact that people in Belgium are not being made aware of.

“Recent rulings on how authorities need to tally up the real impact of industrial developments change the prospects of this legal challenge. This is the first time a court will weigh in on Scope 3 and plastics. That makes it a crucial case.”

On the ground in shale country

Focus is now moving to the source of the gas that would be needed to power and feed the plant. INEOS ships much of the gas for its existing operations in Antwerp from the US, where fracking operations can take place on the doorstep of local communities. In Pennsylvania, for example, drilling can legally take place just 152 metres from private property.

INEOS has indicated in the EIA for Project One that they intend to use a selection of US suppliers to provide the plant’s fracked gas.

In October, communities from fracking hotspots in the US visited Belgium, to present their situation to politicians in Flanders and Brussels – as the human impact of using fracked gas to make plastic has largely escaped discussion in the narrative around this plant.

Community member and activist Jodi Borello, from Washington County, lives within just a few hundred metres of seven separate fracking ‘well pads’. She was part of a push that brought her neighbourhood’s situation to a Grand Jury. She said:

“My family suffered for years at the hands of the oil and gas industry. We had nosebleeds. We received medical treatment for chemical burns to our skin and eyes.  My message to European decision makers is that fracking is harming humans – it’s causing cancer and it’s destroying our way of life.”

Fenceline Watch Policy Director Shiv Srivastava, based in Texas, said:

"Communities that are along the Gulf Coast, including my community, in Houston, are impacted by companies that are based in the EU. For too long, the industry has controlled the narrative on petrochemical production – it’s been about the global supply chain. It needs to be about the international people chain that connects all of us – our stories, our families, our environment, our safety and our livelihood.

"On top of that, any focus on trying to clean up the industry has centred on greenhouse gases. But discussion about decarbonisation, without talking about detoxification, is deception. To truly tackle the climate crisis and protect human health, we must confront the toxic chemicals at the heart of petrochemical production.”

Closer to home

The residents of Antwerp have long lived with shorelines littered with plastic pellets from the general industrial area, and have major concerns about the possible health impact of an added chemical facility in the Port.

Kira van den Ende, from Belgian organisation Bond Beter Leefmilieu, said: “We expect ministers to respect the law. Project One would convert millions of tonnes of shale gas into millions of tonnes of often disposable plastics, which would end up in nature or in incinerators. This would cause enormous damage to the climate and the environment, no matter how green the words of CEOs may sound. Granting permits without taking this into account is no longer an option.”

ENDS

Notes to editors:

Media pack available here – please credit images as detailed in metadata.

Project One, a €4 billion chemical facility currently under construction in the Port of Antwerp, Belgium, would transform ethane (from US shale gas) into ethylene – the raw material used to make plastic. This process is called ‘cracking’ – and the plant is therefore called a ‘cracker’.

The project is owned by INEOS, a British company which recently bought football team Manchester United.

Construction has been underway since December 2022 in spite of [4] successive lawsuits brought by NGOs and neighbouring authorities against the Flemish authorities. The first of these lawsuits was brought in 2020. The court granted one injunction in 2020. INEOS then withdrew this permit and submitted another. The NGOs took further action and, in a parallel case, the Netherlands province of Nord Brabant won in court in 2023, striking down the permit and sending INEOS back to square one. INEOS attempted to administratively appeal this ruling, to the Council of State – but the ruling was upheld last month. Today’s new case is against the latest permit, approved by authorities in January this year.

Legal cases have focused on what lawyers argue are vastly underestimated appraisals of the true impact of building and operating this plant. In court, and in the current administrative procedure, INEOS has disputed the reports put forward by scientific experts. INEOS has not yet seen the new reports (on health and on greenhouse gas emissions) submitted in this fresh legal action.

The 15 litigants are:

ClientEarth, Greenpeace Belgium, Grootouders voor het klimaat, WWF, De steltkluut, Gallifrey Foundation, Bond Beter Leefmilieu, Mobilisation for the Environment (MOB), Fair Resource Foundation, Plastic Soup Foundation, FairFin, Dryade, BOS+, Klimaatzaak, and Climaxi.

Project One has been the recipient of huge subsidies from the UK, Flanders, Spanish and Italian coffers. The UK alone backed the plant to the tune of £600 million; Flanders gave it a €500 million guarantee, and recently awarded an extra €2 million ‘sustainability grant’ to the fossil fuel-fed project.

A report by Stand.earth earlier this year traced some of INEOS’s operations back to the Permian Basin, in Texas, with associated human rights and environmental concerns.

Read FairFin’s new report, ‘The high costs of the Flemish petrochemical industry: Critical examination of a fossil industry’.

Read S&P Global’s analysis of European petrochemical overcapacity.

Plastic production is the largest driver of the petrochemicals industry, as petrochemicals are derived from oil and gas. Petrochemical companies are therefore key drivers of global fossil fuel demand.

[1] Key findings from new reports

Access to the reports, which were submitted as court evidence, is available on request.

Health

Two reports by Energy and Clean Air Analytics (ECAA) and Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) focus on projected health impacts in the zone around Project One.

According to the ECAA report, exposure to NO2 related to the plant would result in “a projected 280 deaths (…) over 40 years of operation in the area within 50 km of the project. Other health impacts include 110 new cases of asthmas in children and 120 emergency room visits for asthma. (…) This health impact is additional to the projected 130 deaths from PM2.5 and ozone exposure in [the author’s] earlier report, as these health impacts were assessed over a long distance, and did not include the impacts of exposure to NO2.”

Meanwhile, the CREA report details estimated hospital admissions for cardiovascular and respiratory complaints; bronchitis; and restricted activity days, all associated with particulate matter exposure resulting from the plant’s operations.

The report critiques the approach taken by INEOS in its EIA.

Without specific knowledge of where gas will be sourced in the US, it is difficult to project those health impacts, so these reports centre on the in-country radius of the cracker.

Carbon and methane

Two reports by Data Desk and Oilfield Witness interrogate the full supply chain emissions for the plant (i.e. including Scope 3), which currently do not feature in the EIA.

Data Desk’s report states that the projected indirect emissions of Project One “are substantial, and are poised to far exceed the plant’s direct, on-site emissions”.

It adds: “While the facility may be more efficient than older European crackers, this analysis suggests this efficiency is achieved by shifting the emissions burden to other parts of the world and other stages of the plastic lifecycle. A comprehensive environmental assessment cannot ignore these indirect, out-of-sight impacts, which fall outside the direct scope of regional regulations like the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.”

Data Desk concludes that the full sum of emissions from Project One, including Scope 3, could reach 4-5x the CO2 estimate featured in INEOS’s EIA.

Oilfield Witness points to the hidden methane emissions that will likely feature in the supply chain from gas extraction sites, based on prior concerns about the reporting carried out by supplier companies cited by INEOS.

The report states: “Independent estimates of the industry average methane emissions for the area of production for products destined for the INEOS project are 9.5 times higher than self-reported emissions estimates from INEOS suppliers.”

Methane is known to be a potent climate-heating gas, 80x more destructive than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

At a visit to the construction site this summer, Prime Minister Bart De Wever was quoted as saying: “The progress on INEOS Project One is highly impressive and confirms why I have always fought for this project. What we see happening before our eyes here is how investment in new technology is dramatically reducing CO2 emissions and ensuring our prosperity for the future.”

[2] New precedents on including Scope 3 in EIAs

UK Supreme Court: In ‘Finch’, a UK case which confirmed in 2024 that authorities need to consider ‘downstream’ emissions from a project, i.e. when extracted oil is eventually burned, when issuing approvals. In the previous Project One cases, INEOS relied on the original decision regarding Scope 3 in Finch – but this has now been reversed.

EFTA: In 2025, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) court ruled that Scope 3 emissions must be assessed in weighing oil project approvals. Indeed, the approval is prohibited without those assessments. The Court noted that the authorities assessing [a] project “are in full control of whether or not the environmental effects will occur”.

ECHR: The European Court of Human Rights ruled just last week in a case brought by Greenpeace Nordic and other individuals, that “[i]n the context of petroleum production projects, the environmental impact assessment must include, at a minimum, a quantification of the GHG emissions anticipated to be produced (including the combustion emissions both within the country and abroad; compare, mutatis mutandis, Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others, cited above, § 550). Moreover, at the level of the public authorities, there must be an assessment of whether the activity is compatible with their obligations under national and international law to take effective measures against the adverse effects of climate change.”

ICJ: In an accompanying declaration to the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion, issued in July this year, two judges opined that EIAs must include Scope 3 emissions.

About ClientEarth

ClientEarth is a non-profit organisation that uses the law to create systemic change that protects the Earth for – and with – its inhabitants. We are tackling climate change, protecting nature and stopping pollution, with partners and citizens around the globe. We hold industry and governments to account and defend everyone’s right to a healthy world. ClientEarth teams in Europe, Asia and the USA work to shape, implement and enforce the law, to build a future for our planet in which people and nature can thrive together.