New Hampshire banned the use of construction and demolition (C&D) waste, whether it’s clean, unadulterated wood waste generated at construction sites or “dirty” wood—the pressure-treated and painted variety of lumber. In Massachusetts there is a moratorium on using C&D waste. In Portland, Ore., the city prohibits any use of painted or pressure-treated woods except in “incidental” quantities. In New York, the state court of appeals shot down an appeal from a biomass plant that wanted to burn clean wood chips in the case of Laidlaw Energy & Environmental Inc. v. Town of Ellicottville. The appellate court upheld the trial court’s refusal to accept the biomass plant status in permitting as being “carbon neutral” because the company did not have a “sustainable fuel source management plan” in place; and the court argued that the distance the chips had to be transported hadn’t been considered in the company’s revelation of the plant’s carbon footprint. Obstacles exist prohibiting the use of dirty wood—and in the Laidlaw case clean wood—in local and state regulations across the United States. Despite these prohibitions on the combustion or burning of these types of materials, the C&D industries keep generating it. So what should be done with all this wood?

According to Jim Taylor, president and chief executive officer of Taylor Biomass Energy LLC and head of the Construction Materials Recycling Association, the material received by a C&D facility, where sorting and separating mixed debris occurs, on average is about one-third clean and unadulterated wood; one-third glued and pressed boards; and one-third pressure-treated and painted woods. For Taylor, the politics behind the limited outlets for dirty wood are more than just regulatory in nature. As a businessman, Taylor has personal politics to contend with, and as president of the CMRA he must consider the politics of the industry he represents.

His company is expecting to break ground this spring on a state-of-the-art biomass gasification plant in Montgomery, N.Y. Unlike the oxygen-rich combustion of dirty wood for energy in a boiler or incinerating it at a burn plant, gasification holds a lot of promise for increased utilization of dirty woods. The anaerobic or oxygen-free environment significantly reduces emissions, which is much less costly than controlling emissions at the back end of the plant. “I know many of my industry counterparts are capable of burning or combusting painted or pressure-treated wood,” he says. Even so, Taylor says he’s made a personal choice not to use dirty wood to fuel his new gasification facility. “We wanted to develop the most environmentally sound process out there today and, by keeping pressure-treated and painted woods out, we believe we can do that,” Taylor says. “From our approach, we are voluntarily staying out of the pressure-treated and painted woods market.” He says it’s not a decision based on regulations, or policy. “It’s a personal decision,”
Taylor tells Biomass Magazine. “Our waste chronology is to reduce, reuse, recycle and recover the energy content, and landfill or incinerate last. That’s how I drive my business.”

Dangerous Emissions?
Shane Carpenter with Continental Biomass Industries Inc., a company in New Hampshire that engineers and sells industrial biomass processing equipment, says even though emissions from gasification are much less abundant and dangerous than effluent from combustion or incineration, there is a deficiency in gasification technologies proven to work on a large enough scale to process more than a thousand tons a day. And, with a growth-stunting recession in full swing, the cost is definitely a concern. Tad Wollenhaupt, president of Massachusetts-based Air One Inc., a company that develops industrial dust and odor control systems, says to build a 200-plus ton per day gasification plant it could cost more than $100 million. “For these projects it is about economics—that’s my opinion,” Wollenhaupt says. Carpenter adds to this, saying, “Economics is a big factor, yes, but we probably have not focused enough on the politics involved, the local politics. People are saying, ‘I don’t want this stuff being burned in my backyard.’ I think there’s this feeling that the emissions coming from utilizing this type of dirty wood are very dangerous.”

In September 2007, the University of New Hampshire published a comprehensive paper on the life-cycle analyses of C&D woods, in which the authors leveraged existing research along with data from Greg Wirsen of Green Seal Environmental Inc. to profile the emissions from clean and dirty C&D woods in different applications. “A facility with an advanced air pollution control system combusting 10 percent C&D derived biomass mixed with virgin wood had lower dioxin emissions than a facility combusting 100 percent virgin wood,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, the levels of arsenic and dioxin emissions were well below levels found at municipal solid waste combustors and below all applicable regulations.”

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