Incinerator to reopen
Monday, Dec 12, 2005 - Posted by Rich Miller
This incinerator, and others like it, was a huge political issue several years ago
An unpopular tire incinerator is scheduled to reopen Jan. 1 in Ford Heights, worrying some residents who fear their children’s health will worsen and the plant again will fail to meet environmental standards.
The new owners say the plant, one of only two such facilities operating in the country, will convert about 6 million tires a year into energy. Geneva 7 Energy bought the incinerator out of bankruptcy in March and received a permit Oct. 20 from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.
The incinerator, idle since early 2004, received permission to restart in a year when Gov. Rod Blagojevich has made a public effort to shut down the state’s remaining medical-waste incinerators, citing concerns about the cancer-causing dioxins they emit.
The Illinois EPA says the two types of incinerators should not be compared, but environmentalists said Blagojevich is backing away from his promise to limit air pollution.
“His administration is busy permitting a giant tire incinerator that collectively dwarfs the pollution from these hospital incinerators … at a time when we need to be reducing air pollution and protecting public health, and reducing the number of asthma attacks and associated health problems,” said Bruce Nilles, the Sierra Club’s Midwest representative
A trash-to-energy incinerator in the southwest suburbs caused at least one incumbent House Democrat (Terry Steczo) to lose his re-election bid in 1994 and was a hot issue all over the region.
Back then, Illinois encouraged the construction of the incinerators by forcing utility companies to pay the plants retail rates for the electricity they produced. That law was repealed after the ‘94 campaign.
- VanillaMan - Monday, Dec 12, 05 @ 10:33 am:
Ford Heights is a very sad place to live. 100 years ago, it wasn’t a place, but only where non-white Chicago Heights workers could live. Like most villages with these kind of roots, Ford Heights never had a chance to succeed.
There are dozens of desperate villages throughout South Cook County. They are small and packed together among successful neighborhoods struggling to continue with their own development. They are preyed upon by organizations looking for a Chicago-based market but sell a questionable business plan. Cases such as this one were sold to one of Illinois’ most desperate and amateur village boards. This plant will not only pollute Ford Heights, it will also pollute Glenwood, Homewood, Lynwood, Chicago Heights, Lansing, Flossmoor, Olympia Fields, Park Forest, Steger and Dyer Indiana, who all voted “NO” when approached by this operation 15 years ago. Ford Heights, being the weak link, became the spot where this polluter found a home, and spent their investor’s monies building it. Fortunately, the other villages were able to shut it down via the State.
These communities have been getting the hustle from indian casinos, tire-buring plants, mulch composting operations, and other fly-by-night schemes promising jobs and a future tax base. The tire-burning plant successfully hustled Ford Heights, the rotting compost warehouse successfully hustled Riverdale and stunk the town up, and the indian casino, with Rep. Jackson’s hard work, is currently hustling Lynwood, Glenwood and Lansing.
The best solution to these struggling suburbs can be seen next door in Indiana. Indiana is booming, while these suburbs continue to whither. With Illinois’ obsolete Democratic socialist mentality towards business regulation and taxation, these villages and towns are stuck in this economic miasma and desperate.
What the governor is doing is trying to find a photo op to show the voters he brings jobs to these areas. Blagojevich’s interest is completely insincere and highly suspicious, especially considering how his plan doesn’t fit anything he has been preaching for four years. I think he is going to get his pictures, pretend to do something, and then go away again to let the Ford Heights plant continue to rot away, letting the adults take care of it.
- Some techno-geek - Monday, Dec 12, 05 @ 11:09 am:
There’s another type of technology, in the same family as the incinerators, but different. It was pioneered by an Illinois company, but they couldn’t find any venture capital funding for the demonstration plant in Illinois, so they built it out east. WIRED magazine had an article on it, called “Oil Out of Anything”. It’s interesting technology for several reasons of interest to Illinois; political, ecological, and financial.
What it does is use high heat and water under pressure to literally ‘cook’ waste materials into their constituent components. You input garbage, medwaste, waste from hog farms and chicken farms, even plastic and rubber tires… and what comes out the other end are raw feedstocks of things like petroleum, refined metal, phosphorus, etc. The waste remaining is steam, some co2, and soem solid waste that’s reduced hundreds of time in volume, plus the recovered raw materials. It sounds almost too good to be true; some sort of cornucopia, garbage-in, goods-out. But the technological basis is pretty sound.
Regular incinerators don’t burn hot enough, they just reduce the waste and free up a lot of carbon and complex, toxic molecules. You need heat, water, and super-high pressure to do the “magic”.
Like the ultra-high heat in cement kilns dissasociates deadly pollutants like PCB, ripping their molecules apart into safer constituents - these “cooker” plants can more safely dispose of toxics, keeping waste out of landfills and the water table and the air, and bringing back a small return of raw materials and chemicals of use to industry.
No, those end-products will never be enough to pay for the plant, and the energy costs for these are great, but… they could find a market locally, if they are a steady supply.
Mega hog-farms and the like in Illinois are growing, with serious health and environmental implications, especially to groundwater. The smell is just the obvious component, but large mega-farms output sewage equivalent to a small town, all by themselves, sewage that has to be treated, that sometimes escapes into the local groundwater, rendering it useless for humans to consume, even causing illness. Once groundwater aquifers are contaminated, there’s no going back.
Hogs are very big business for Illinois. Poultry is growing too, as agribusiness tries to diversify from just corn and beans. Co-locating cooker plants with the large confinement operations could perhaps be a good investment, stimulating local manufacturing with the raw feedstocks that come out, as well as reducing environmental pollution by handling the stuff we put into it.
So why isn’t somebody doing it NOW? Old fashioned incinerators are cheap to run, make money the way the are, and work in a known-quantity regulatory environment. Newer technology would cost more to set up, would need some government support and subsidies to get on it’s feet, and the paperwork is a jungle.
Why the inventors of this technology couldn’t find venture capital and support in Illinois is a question the administration, our universities, and the business associations and banks need to explore. Somebody is going to be making money, crating jobs, and improving the environment using this tech, and it’s not going to be in our state. Modern internet browsing came out of Champaign Illinois from a little thing called Mosaic, and the world was fundamentally changed. We need to support more such innovation here, not with press conferences and empty mouth-flapping, but with money.
- enviro zealot - Friday, Dec 16, 05 @ 4:59 pm:
How about replacing the Ford Heights tire burner with a crumb rubber manufacturing plant that can convert scrap tires into playground and landscaping mulch, athletic surfaces, rubber modified asphalt and molded products.
- Z-Man - Thursday, Jan 12, 06 @ 1:58 pm:
Sadly, the mis-information campaign continues. This plant, and teh technology it employs, has the very capability mentioned above, to reduce the carbon-bearing compounds into heat and CO2, with little remaining pollution. What little remains is largely removed by the down-stream emissions control equipment. Sure, if the operator screws up and lets things go, pollution could rise, but the same can be said for any industrial process. People should worry more about the thousands of deaths related to tractor trailers, and heavy equipment accidents each year, and the huge amount of pollution they emit without any regulation. How about jet planes??? O’Hare airport jet planes emit more Nitrogen Oxides than 10,000 MegaWatts of combined cycle power plants… it’s just so convenient to blame the big problems on the readily visible “undesirables” in society…