Tire burn bumps up against pollution limit, is scaled back

MONTPELIER, Vt. --Surprising even some of its toughest critics, International Paper Co. had to scale back its test tire burn at a mill on Lake Champlain's west shore when, burning tires at one-third the allowed rate, it was bumping up against the limit for a key pollutant, officials said Friday.

A test-burn of "tire-derived fuel," started Tuesday at the Ticonderoga, N.Y., mill, was set up with a permitted limit of three tons per hour of tire chips being fed into the boiler that powers the plant's electrical generator and provides steam for paper-making processes.

But feeding the fuel at a rate of one ton per hour, the plant hit its limit for the amount of particulate matter -- essentially tiny particles of smoke -- that the boiler was emitting, said Jeffrey Wennberg, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.

"They did not expect and, to be perfectly honest, our scientists did not expect to see this level of increase (in particulates) at this level of use of the fuel," Wennberg said in a phone interview.

"We did not believe all their numbers and we felt it was a much higher likelihood that they would exceed their limits when they got to three" tons per hour, he said. "But at the point-five to one (ton per hour) level to see numbers this high was a surprise even to us."

IP spokeswoman Donna Wadsworth said later that the company never intended to reach the full three tons per hour of tire fuel being fed into the boiler, even though its permit from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation allows that level. "We'd be thrilled to get a ton or a ton and a half in," she said.

Wennberg and his boss, Gov. James Douglas, have argued for years that IP should have been required to install state-of-the-art anti-pollution equipment before being allowed to burn any tire chips at the mill. The company has argued that one purpose of the test would be to see what kind of anti-pollution equipment might be needed.

The particulate limit in question requires the boiler to produce no more than a tenth of a pound of particulate matter per million British thermal units of heat energy it makes. The company set out to do a three-hour test on Thursday at a fuel-feed level of one ton of tire chips per hour.

In the first hour, the boiler emitted 0.109 pounds of particulates -- 9 percent over the limit. In hour two, it produced 0.093 pounds of particulates -- 7 percent below the limit. There was no hour three, because the test was stopped.

"As we said we would throughout discussions around this trial, when monitored particulate emissions approached permitted levels, we stopped the test," IP said in a statement Friday.

The company's permit from the New York DEC allows IP to burn tire fuel at the mill for up to 14 days during a period that began Monday and ends Nov. 27.

Wadsworth said the plant reduced the amount of tire-derived fuel to a half ton per hour on Friday, stopped for the weekend Friday evening, and would resume the test on Monday.

Wennberg said the way the test has gone so far, he was beginning to doubt that it would ever get reliable test results for several other pollutants, including zinc, mercury and other toxic heavy metals.

"They've got some tough decisions to make as to how much value they're going to derive from these efforts," he said.