His tree trimming business evolved into an operation that cleared land of trees, stumps and debris. By 1987, his flagship company, Taylor Recycling Facility LLC began perfecting a process to sort mixed waste streams and recycle the debris. Taylor Recycling, located in Montgomery, N.Y., recognized a market for scrap metal, cardboard, mulch and landfill cover.
In late 1989, his business hit a snag when New York passed legislation making tree residue a regulated waste. “We were told, ‘You gotta take it to an approved place,’” he recalls. There wasn’t one, and it turned out to be Taylor’s eureka moment. A gasification idea was born. But he got sidetracked along the way.
When the twin towers collapsed on that fateful day in September 2001, Taylor used his company’s expertise to implement two custom forensic systems that filtered a half-million tons of rubble. Taylor Recycling’s processes enabled the FBI and New York Police Department investigators to sift through ashes and waste materials to recover potential evidence and human remains. It took nine months.
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Now the Big Easy is calling. The bayou has been burdened by more than 20 million tons of construction debris from Hurricane Katrina’s devastating swath. Taylor has his sights set on New Orleans and its mountains of garbage. Area scrap wood and other materials traditionally found in the mixed construction and demolition stream are ideal for his process.
This will be a time-consuming process and Taylor admits to being frustrated at the pace of the clean-up and Louisiana regulatory hurdles. He’s actually eyeing nearly two dozen sites in and around New Orleans, but is keeping busy at other projects in the meantime.
One of those endeavors is a waste project in Uganda, currently in the due diligence stage. Another is a partnership with Abengoa Bioenergy, the St. Louis affiliate of a Spain-based company. Abengoa and Taylor Biomass are currently in negotiations to build a $76 million waste-powered ethanol plant near Colwich, Kan.
Meanwhile, Taylor occupies himself with his waste-to-biomass technology that is awaiting a patent. It resembles a blender. But, because Taylor thinks big, this model would be a bartender’s high-torque special.
One Gigantic Cocktail: Hold the Tequila
Taylor’s proprietary system is called fast pyrolysis biomass gasification. It uses two vertical tubes nearly 70 feet tall. Each hollow tube is 4-feet in diameter. Sand is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit in one tube, and is then jettisoned into the second tube along with a smaller quantity of chopped biomass. The mixture is blended like a mega cocktail so that the whirling sand granules convert the engulfed biomass into methane, hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Some residual fly ash and char remain.
The gas is then siphoned off and cleaned. The fly ash has construction applications as a stabilizer in concrete and asphalt. The char and sand are fed back into the first tube, where the char is burned off to heat the sand and the process starts all over again.
Emissions are minimized by the removal of recyclables, household hazardous waste, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics and treated wood during front-end separation. But emissions are also eliminated because wood and other biomass fuels have no sulfur, and Taylor is emphatic that his process doesn’t involve combustion. He says C&D feedstock has inherently high reactive qualities, so don’t ever ask him to “burn” your cocktail.
Taylor’s gasification system also results in the destruction of hydrocarbon tars, which he views as an essential element in gas cleanup. Taylor Biomass employs a proprietary method of converting the tars into additional synthesis gas. The composition of the synthesis gas is altered to significantly increase its hydrogen-to-carbon-monoxide ratio.
The process hasn’t been flawless. The company is working to perfect the separation process crucial to the initial phase of the operation. In September 2007, fireworks didn’t get culled out of the waste stream and exploded in the grinder. Pyrotechnic debris injured two of his employees and caused significant damage to the equipment.
His road to solid waste success has had other bumps along the way. In late 2007, Taylor and his companies emerged successfully from a brutal lawsuit filed by a competitor claiming they had stolen trade secrets when Taylor hired away the rival’s chief engineer. A U.S. District Court in Georgia dismissed the claim. Taylor isn’t breaking out the human cocktail blender yet, however as an appeal is expected. The lawsuit would have essentially forced Taylor and his waste empire out of business, so he waits while the appeals process slowly churns.
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