Irony isn't dead. But even it has to sit down and self-medicate when the Portland Cement Association rolls out it annual "Environment and Energy Awards." This year's winners include the CEMEX Louisville Kentucky plant (27,000 pounds of toxic releases in 2010) for its substitution of a a pug screw for the more traditional pug mill, Titan's Troutville, Virginia plant (13,882 pounds of toxic releases in 2010) for it's excellent cub scout tours and self-interested quarry expansion PR campaign, and Holcim's Theodore, Alabama plant (1, 037 pounds of toxic releases in 2010) for burning tires and plastics.  We are not making this up.   Read More

Here's a story from Florida about the Brooksville Cemex cement plant's new permit that displays the quintessential spin from the cement industry about their transformation into garbage burners. 1)The headline uses the preferred industry term of "alternative fuels" instead of garbage. 2) It leads with all the feel-good fuzzy bio-garbage like peanut shells and wood chips. Only further down do they let you see the rest of the list -  "including plastics, carpet, roofing materials and wood treated with creosote. Included, too, are so-called engineered fuels such as cleanup debris from natural disasters, processed municipal solid waste, dried and sanitized sewage bio-solids, noninfectious hospital materials, expired pharmaceuticals and confiscated narcotics." 3) It makes sure you know that this new garbage burning will shrink the plant's carbon footprint and lower emissions of toxic chemicals like Mercury - but the plant will not be amending its operating permit to reflect those proposed decreases. 4) for all the talk of "alternative fuels," the plant is mainly still burning coal and tires, both of which it's been burning for a long time. The largest expense of running a cement plant is fuel costs. The industry is always finding a way to cut those costs. In the 1980's and 90's it tried turning cement kilns into hazardous waste incinerators by getting paid by polluters to burn their crap for less money than the pros. That met with quite a bit of public resistance and new regulations that made it harder to keep doing that. So now the industry is pivoting toward a laundry list of  "non-hazardous" wastes - municipal garbage, sewage, medical waste, plastics, car interiors - garbage. Except that anyone who's ever studied the the history of American  garbage incineration - and there's quite a history - knows there's nothing non-hazardous about the practice. Just because a waste isn't classified by EPA as a "hazardous" waste coming in the front door doesn't mean it doesn't emit hazardous air pollution when it's burned or carted off as ash out the back door. And even thought there's a lot of boasting about emission decreases, the industry isn't backing up that talk with real cuts in their permits. Places like Midlothian, home of three huge cement plants, and a concentration of cement manufacturing unmatched anywhere else in the US, are looked upon as nothing but large "landfills in the sky" to both waste producers and the cement plant operators themselves. TXI's Midlothian plant, directly south and upwind of DFW, just received a new permit "amendment" last June that allows them to burn the same kind of  long list of garbage as the Florida kiln. They got this without any public notice or hearing or anything. None required as long as TXI promises, cross their heart, that the emissions won't increase above what they are now. And if they do? We won't even be able to know for sure until a test burn that will occur after they start burning garbage - they can wait up to a year to do the testing. This is why public participation is an over-arching issue in Texas now. Without it, there are no checks and balances. Only more experiments taking place in your lungs.   Read More

Word comes that Lehigh's Glens Falls New York cement plant is applying for a another version of a "Landfill in the Sky" permit that would allow them to burn International Paper's "Enviro Fuel Cubes" made-up of all kinds of wood and paper waste. Lehigh says the cubes reduce Sulfur Dioxide pollution. So do Scrubbers. On the other hand, the cubes also produce "minor increases" in dioxins, chromium, lead, and nickel. There is no safe level of exposure to minor increases in dioxin or lead. A letter to the N.Y. state environmental agency from 27 groups also points out that burning this kind of waste discourages the real recycling and in-house reduction of it. As always, cement kilns are acting as cheap garbage disposals for waste from other industries.  Read More

Among the many faux EPA outrages Big Business and House Republicans have fostered upon us, you may remember the meme that the feds were going to put thousands of hospitals and school boilers out of business with super strict new emission rules. In fact, the facilities most affected by the rules weren't schools or hospitals. They were on-site chemical incinerators and boilers and of course, cement kilns. However, the pile of manure that was churned out enveloped the Agency and, as with the new ozone standards, made it retreat and reconsider the originally-proposed rules. Newly reconstituted, the Commercial and Industrial Solid Waste Incineration rules (CISWI) were dumped by the Administration last Friday at closing time like a late-night gangland victim at a hospital emergency room. After review, it's easy to understand why. The rules did not go far enough for industry, which would find any regulations onerous. And in an attempt to win the business community favor, the administration gave away strict standards for particulate matter, dioxin, and toxic heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Nothing was done to narrow the broad definitions of "nonhazardous solid waste" that allows for the burning of just about everything is it gets the right exemptions, including tires, plastics garbage, car interiors, and creosote-treated wood. This is where the entire industry is headed - the grey area of these nonhazardous solid wastes - as exemplified by TXI's "landfill in the sky" permit recently awarded by TCEQ to the company without any public notice or opportunity for comment.  And for the time being, this administrations seems happy to allow it.   Read More

While there may be some signs of life in the national economic picture, it seems to be a terrible time to have the Lone Star State's name attached to your business. As the Thanksgiving holiday began, the stock price of TXI, aka Texas industries, aka the owners of a brand new permit to burn industrial wastes at its Midlothian cement plant, reached a 52-week low of about $22 per share, compared to more than twice that earlier in the year. That decline could have something to do with its "EBITDA to sales ration," basically an earnings to revenue formula that's supposed to tell you how financially healthy a company is supposed to be.  It's estimate of how many years of earnings would be necessary to pay back all the debt a company has. This ratio is considered to be alarming when it is greater than 3.0. TXI's is 146. It's next closest competitor in the construction materials market is Headwaters at 11. It's numbers like these that consistently land TXI on a list of companies ripe for takeover, especially in an industry that's been consolidating at a record pace the last twenty years. It's also what's motivating the company to turn itself back into a waste incinerator. By this time next year, TXI headquarters could be overseas. Meanwhile Energy Future Holdings, aka, the old Texas Utilities, is also swimming in debt thanks to ill-timed gambling on aging coal plants and hitching its fate to natural gas prices. "It's kind of like Greece -- by any cold, sober analysis, the math doesn't work,' said one power investment banker," according to Reuters lengthy analysis. The once mighty giant could hit a wall as soon as 2014 when it faces a $4 billion loan payment. Markets put the chance of EFH going into default at 91%. Changes in ownership mean changes in operation at the large polluting facilities of these companies. Could be good - jettisoning those old coal plants for example, or bad - cranking up the kiln to burn even more wastes to cut fuel costs. Stay tuned.    Read More

(Dallas)---- Only three years after it finally stopped the controversial practice of burning hazardous waste at its Midlothian cement plant, TXI was awarded a permit in June by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality allowing the company to burn at least 12 new kinds of industrial wastes in its kiln without any public notice, comment, or hearing, and based only on other cement plants' data.  Read More

A profile of a Florida Cemex plant reveals the fluidity of current fuel mixes finding their way to your local neighborhood kiln. The entire industry is in flux as a result of new EPA emission rules, concern about greenhouse gases, and the costs of coal in a poor economy. That's opened up possibilities that just weren't there even five years ago. In this case, the good news is that agricultural waste such as peanut shells and wood chips are being taken seriously. The bad news is that the plant is still burning tires and tire "fluff" - the polyester part of what you roll on -  and trying to equate those hazardous "non-hazardous"  wastes with with the biofuels that could really improve air quality. We're seeing the same thing here in North Texas with TXI's new proposed "Landfill in the Sky" permit that could have the Midlothian plant burning everything from Switchgrass and Wheat Straw (Good) to plastic trash and car "fluff" - all the non-steel parts of a car ground up into piles that are thrown into the kiln (Bad). Because of the uncertainty surrounding where all this is going in light of new EPA definitions of "solid wastes" and "recycling," now is a good time for citizens to intervene in local permit fights and state and federal policy decisions in order to direct that chaos in a direction that benefits public health. In this case "crisis" really does translate into "danger" and "opportunity."  Read More

Because of the relative abundance of cheap land, most Western states have not seen the kind of garbage-incinerator building spree a lot of the East Coat and Mid-West has experienced over the last 30 or so years. We still landfill our trash in Texas for the most part. In their sales pitches, garbage burners are often touted as "renewable energy," and/or "recycling" - just like TXI's burning of hazardous waste was labeled "recycling." What really happens is that other people poisons get recycled into your lungs. Now the Environmental Integrity Project has the audacity to actually compare emissions from garbage burners in Maryland to the state's four coal-fired utility plants, and gosh, those incinerators don't look so green anymore. They generated up to five times more mercury and up to 18 times more lead than all four coal-fired plants between 2007 and 2009. The punchline? Maryland wants to double its trash-burning capacity over the next decade.  Read More