“In ’85 after Hurricane Gloria hit, what did they do with all that material?” asks Joe Murray, chief executive officer of Green Energy Resources. Hurricane Gloria lost strength before it hit land on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, but the storm rode coastal waters north and gained tremendous power, finally making its second landfall on Long Island, N.Y. It turned into one of the most powerful hurricanes to hit New England in years, causing $900 million in property damage and generating millions of tons of debris. “They took it all and dumped it in landfills,” Murray says. “Then they’d fill them up. It’s a crazy waste of time and taxpayer money.”
Twenty years later when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast, debris management was much the same and as inefficient as ever. Mountains of woody debris were piled up and then trucked to a landfill, torched, or just left to rot. “There are properties from Katrina and Rita where piles are still sitting,” Murray says. His company, Green Energy Resources, offered to purchase 2 million tons of wood waste that the hurricanes left behind at $10 a ton but found no takers.
Article Continues After Advertisement
“The federal contractors—they could care less,” he says. “They wanted to do business the traditional way. They have an arrangement and I don’t completely understand it. If they need to take it and dump it in a landfill, then the landfill capitalizes and makes money and the cleanup guys make money. It sounds a little cozy to me. And what’s worse is you’re offering to pay for a product that none of them even own, which should be recoverable by the local taxpayers because it’s their disaster. No one would even give it a second thought.”
Cleaning up Ground Zero
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is still being criticized after its questionable managing of Katrina—and rightfully so. From delayed rescues of minorities and the poor, to setting people up in chemically contaminated trailers, to managing waste wood and debris, FEMA is not winning any popularity contests lately. Jim Taylor Jr., owner of Taylor Biomass Energy, puts FEMA’s “landfill or burn” practice in perspective. “You’ve got to remember that there’s no technology down there set up to handle that much material,” he says. A clear mission exists to get people safely out of their homes, open the streets and clean up the town—all as quickly as possible. “There’s not the latitude to do much more than that,” Taylor says.
Taylor Biomass Energy specializes in sorting and separating technology, and was contracted by the FBI to clean up ground zero where the World Trade Center twin towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001. He was hired by the FBI because the enormous mountain of rubble was not just a disaster site but it was also a crime scene. “We were hired because of our technology,” Taylor says. “It put their workers in a safe environment, and was seven times more effective in getting out what they were looking for—the human recovery, looking for someone’s belt buckle, ring or watch to be able to relate to someone.” Countless personal affects were sorted out from the 550,000 tons of debris Taylor’s company processed, which were then put on display for familes to identify.
Debris from ground zero was barged 15 miles to Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, where Taylor set up portable separation outfits that ran 24/7 for nine months. “We put the material through our station and separated fines of three-quarters of an inch and less, versus from three-quarters of an inch to six inches, then six inches to two feet, and then two
feet and above,” Taylor tells Biomass Magazine.
The history of Taylor’s sorting and separating technology began as “five men in a box,” he says. “We learned it the hard way but in the end we learned sorting and separating very well.” His company was one of the first construction and demolition (C&D) waste recyclers around, and today his family-owned technology finds useful purposes for stuff formerly thought to be unreusable. Waste wood is used for mulch; dirt collected from tree stumps is screened and sold as top soil; rock, asphalt, brick and concrete are crushed, aggregated and reused; old drywall is peeled and the paper is sold as animal bedding while the gypsum is crushed and sold back to a drywall plant.
After he developed ways to recycle a good percentage of C&D waste, Taylor says he then delved into finding the next tool to do something with the rest of the materials. “The recycled product we’d next manufacture is green energy,” he says. Taylor spent a couple of years negotiating with Battelle labs in Atlanta to develop gasification technology but no agreements were made. Then he set out with a former employee of Battelle to develop the gasification and gas cleanup technologies he implements today. It’s still patent-pending but Taylor says he expects his patents in six months. “Coming on line with these biomass gasification plants is really the solution for natural disasters and storms,” he says.
| 1 2 | Next Page --> | |
| View Entire Article | ||