Burning rubber/ Officials noncommittal about power plant

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Aug 12, 2000 | by Pam Zubeck

Just off Interstate 25 at the south El Paso County line, there's a modular office building with a road heading west.

That road leads over a ridge to an expanse of craters filled with tires - more than 3 million in 1-ton bales and millions more in pits.

It's one way to legally dispose of tires.

But the mounds of licorice-colored doughnuts also could feed electricity to thousands of households.

That's the idea behind a proposal by an Englewood firm to burn roughly 20 million tires annually to continually generate 83 megawatts of power to be sold to Public Service Co. of Colorado, the state's biggest power company. Each megawatt could provide power for 1,000 families in northern Colorado, the Denver metro area and several rural electric coops the company serves.

If approved by state and federal environmental regulators and the El Paso County Commission, it would be the first of its kind in the state and one of a few in the nation.

Supporters of the plant say it's an ideal way to rid the landscape of insidious rubber tires - one of the nation's biggest disposal headaches - while also providing a needed commodity.

"We could clean up all the tires in the area and make them disappear," said Vernie Houtchens, owner of Midway Tire Disposal/ Recycling Inc., whose office south of Fountain oversees the site. The new plant would be built on 40 acres near the office and tire dump.

His disposal site, which takes in about 2 million tires a year, is a logical place for the power station, to be built and operated by Wilexco Inc.

It sits amid a rural landscape and borders a railroad spur, which would allow the plant's tires to be delivered by rail rather than tractor-trailer trucks.

"And the product that will be made will be shipped out by wire," Houtchens said, "so there wouldn't be any more additional highway traffic at all."

Wilexco owner Brian Wilde promises the plant will be as clean as technologically possible.

But some worry the plant may pose a danger.

Lidia Seebeck lives just south of the Midway tire disposal area and future plant site.

"My biggest concern is the fire hazard," she said. "I'm afraid a tire fire could really get out of control in a hurry. From an uncontrolled tire fire, I hear the pollution is pretty bad."

Indeed, burning tires spew deadly chemicals into the air, including hydrocarbons, dioxins, hydrogen chloride, arsenic, nickel, zinc and chromium. Such toxins can cause acute and chronic health hazards, including skin, eye and respiratory tract maladies, as well as central nervous system depression and cancer.

But the tires won't be burned openly. It's not yet clear what kind of cleaning system will be used because Wilde hasn't filed applications with regulatory agencies, but the plant would have to use some kind of equipment to remove harmful substances.

So far, authorities aren't willing to comment on the plant, viewing it as a curiosity.

"We haven't seen one of these puppies," said Larry Svoboda, the Environmental Protection Agency's manager of air quality planning in Denver.

But he said testing shows tires-to-power plants can have minimal impact.

"We're told these things can emit no more (pollution) than fossil fuel facilities," Svoboda said.

But the plants aren't foolproof.

The owners of a 26-megawatt plant in Sterling, Conn., paid $75,000 to settle a case with state regulators who alleged the plant exceeded allowed emissions levels from 1994 to 1996.

Kelly Farr, a spokesman for the plant's co-owner, CMS Energy Corp., of Dearborn, Mich., called the problems "technical in nature" that posed little if any health threats. He also noted the air- quality violations created no public outcry.

A spokesman at the Sterling Town Hall said the plant has been a good neighbor in the town of 2,500 people and hasn't elicited much controversy.

Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment officials declined to comment on Wilexco's plant, saying they plan to meet next week with company officials and learn more.

Houtchens has found there's not much of a market for used tires that just keep piling up at his Midway disposal facility like they do across the country.

The EPA estimates 3 billion scrap tires are stored in landfills and stockpiles across the United States.

And one tire per person on average is added to the mountains of discards annually. They pose an environmental nightmare because they can take decades to decompose in the ground.

- Edited by Jim Borden

What's next

Wilexco Inc. of Englewood plans to submit an application to El Paso County next month seeking approval to build the plant near the Midway Tire Disposal/Recycling Inc. site 16 miles south of Colorado Springs on Interstate 25. The company also will seek approval from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which issues permits for plants that require air-quality monitoring. A meeting of Wilexco and state officials is expected next week, though the application won't be filed until September. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at some point will weigh in on the tire-burning plant as part of the state process.