EEUU: City says CEMEX wants to burn plastic in cement kiln

It’s already burning tires, having gone through a lengthy study and approval process with regulators. Now the Kosmos cement plant owned byCEMEX has told city officials it wants to burn plastic waste and other alternative fuels in their kiln in southwest Louisville.

The company will need to secure a “consistency” determination from the Louisville Metro solid waste board, which is charged with making sure waste management practices in Jefferson County are allowed under the local waste management plan, said Pete Flood, a staffer with the city’s solid waste division.

Flood briefed the solid waste board last night on the matter, and said afterwards he’s not yet sure exactly what the company wants to do because it hasn’t filed an application. But it’s safe to say that residents of southwest Louisville, who already feel dumped on, will will want to make sure this proposal gets full and fair scrutiny.

My guess is that CEMEX might also need approvals from the local air district as well as the state Division of Waste Management, and I’ll be checking on that — and with the company.

Interestingly enough, the American Chemical Society and the University of Texas at Austin recently published a study from Texas of an “evaluation of the energetic, environmental, and economic trade-offs” of using leftover plastics and other fibers from recycling facilities as an alternative to coal in cement kilns. This sounds similar to what CEMEX to what was mentioned at the meeting.

DesignNews wrote about the study earlier this month, and provided a link to it.

The study reported test burns at a Texas cement kiln as a technical success, with the plastic and other recycling center residue equaling coal in energy output, allowing the waste to be diverted away from a landfill.

Some air pollutants went down and others went up:

– Sulfur dioxide emission rates were cut in half during the test burn.

– The emission rate of nitrogen oxides went up by 25 percent when the material was used
at 1 ton per hour and by 93 percent during the 2 ton per hour rate.

The total emissions were still within permitted levels, the study concluded.

This all ties into the movement by cities toward single-stream recycling. Remember how we used to have to separate paper from plastic, and glass — and sometimes even glass by color. Not anymore in many communities, including Louisville, where we dump all our recyclables together and they are hauled by garbage truck to a recycling facility that uses automation and workers to separate everything there.

However, the process results in some plastics and paper, paperboard, and cardboard fibers that are not able to be recycled and they go a landfill. The study said that can be 5 to 15 percent of what we think we’re actually recycling.

Those materials contain energy in them that can be put to use if burned.

If the economics are there, I think the question will come down to air quality.

In the past, burning waste products has been very controversial because of the pollutants that can be released, including a variety of toxic emissions that I did not see covered by the Texas study. That was then. We’ll see about now.