July/August 2011
Tire recyclers are relieved now that an EPA regulation that could have threatened the tire-derived fuel market was less problematic in its final form. The rule still leaves several questions unanswered, however.
By Theodore Fischer
The tire recycling industry has relied on the market for tire-derived fuel for more than 30 years, and the endeavor has seemed like a winning combination for processor and consumer alike. TDF consumers—cement kilns, paper mills, and similar “combustion units”—were the first and are still the largest buyers of recycled tire rubber, taking in about half of the scrap tires recycled in the United States each year. By using tires as fuel, these companies have reduced their energy costs, conserved vast amounts of nonrenewable energy resources such as oil and coal, and kept hundreds of millions of scrap tires out of the nation’s landfills.
That relationship was threatened a few years ago by a lawsuit that forced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Washington, D.C.) to revisit its regulation of those consumers and the materials they use as fuel. The lawsuit—and the proposed regulations—sought to reclassify combustion units that burn scrap tires and other secondary materials as solid waste incinerators, putting them under more stringent emissions controls. Rather than comply with those stricter rules, many TDF consumers were likely to stop using tires as fuel—an outcome that would have threatened the tire recycling industry and had environmental and economic repercussions across the country.
After hearing from tire recyclers and manufacturers and TDF consumers about the negative potential impact of such a change, the EPA revised its rules, allowing combustion units that burn secondary materials to avoid the solid waste incinerator designation so long as the secondary materials meet certain criteria. The new rules seem to preserve much of the TDF market—and the viability of the tire recycling industry—but some unanswered questions still leave tire processors with concerns.
What Is TDF?
Recycled tires used for fuel are the same tires recycled for other purposes. TDF can consist of whole or shredded tires, and tire processors classify it into several grades, based mainly on the amount of metal wire and fabric the material contains. Wire-free TDF is the highest and most expensive grade because it’s also the most expensive to produce. Combustion units that consume TDF often mix the material with coal and other fuels.
TDF was the first—and practically the only—market for scrap tires between 1979 and 1992, when governments started using shredded tires for civil engineering applications and other markets for tire granulate began to emerge, according to a history of the material on the EPA website. TDF caught on because the material offers its consumers several benefits. Its heating value is higher than other fuels—25 percent to 50 percent higher than coal, 100 percent to 200 percent higher than wood. The EPA site points out other ways in which TDF outshines coal: TDF ash residues might contain lower heavy metals content than some coals, and TDF produces lower nitrogen oxide emissions than many coals. The EPA also credits TDF as a lower-cost alternative to fossil fuels and as a way to divert used tires from landfills and tire stockpiles, where they provide habitats for mosquitoes and rodents and can be a fire hazard.
About 54 percent of the nearly 300 million tires recycled annually in the United States become TDF used in cement kilns, paper mills, and power plants, according to data from the Rubber Manufacturers Association, saving those consumers an estimated $100 million a year in fuel costs.
Atmospheric Pressure
What threatened the longtime relationship between tire processors and TDF consumers was a 2005 lawsuit the Natural Resources Defense Council and three other environmental groups filed against the EPA to void two rules under the Clean Air Act. The rules regulated combustion units that burn secondary materials (including TDF) less stringently than the EPA regulates solid waste incinerators. “The environmental groups said tires need to be covered by the more stringent sections of the Clean Air Act,” explains Jonathan Levy, ISRI’s director of state and local programs. “The EPA disagreed, so they went to court, and the EPA lost.”
The EPA was in a quandary, Levy says: The agency understood the benefits of TDF and its importance in the management of scrap tires, but it had to conform to the court ruling. To do so, it needed to determine when it considers secondary materials used in combustion units fuels, and when it considers them solid waste. “The EPA, in trying to encourage the use of TDF, wrote into its regulations [years ago] that combustion units that use things like tires go under the fuel rules, not the solid waste rules,” explains David Wagger, ISRI’s director of environmental management. But the court found the rules differentiating the burning of secondary materials for energy recovery from those burning secondary materials for disposal were inconsistent with the law.
In 2010, in response to the court ruling, the EPA proposed rules that clarified the solid waste vs. fuel issue. The proposed rules would have moved TDF into the solid waste category in most circumstances. It “provided a very narrow door to allow materials to not be a solid waste,” Wagger says. The only secondary materials that could avoid that designation were those that had been “sufficiently processed to produce a fuel or ingredient product that meets the legitimacy criteria.” For tires, the proposed rule moved them out of the waste category only if they were processed to a nearly metal-free state.
TDF supporters took issue with that narrow definition on two grounds. First, when processing tires to remove the wire, “the expense of making the product is greater than the value of the product as a fuel,” Wagger says. “It would have required the entire TDF industry to make a significant upgrade in [its processing equipment], and most likely [firms] wouldn’t be able to sell [TDF] profitably” because the price would no longer be competitive with coal or other fuels. Second, the additional processing the rule would require could potentially reduce demand for the material. Some TDF consumers have facilities designed to use TDF without significant metal removal. The cement industry, which consumes the largest proportion of TDF, wants the tire wire as well as the tire rubber. “The metal component of a tire contributes significantly to the formation of the clinker material that is eventually ground to make cement,” explains Tyrone Wilson, director of regulatory affairs for the Portland Cement Association (Skokie, Ill.). “For us, TDF has two uses: as a fuel and as an ingredient.”
Industry Concerns
There was a third, broader concern that brought the tire manufacturers, tire recyclers, and ReMA together in their opposition to the proposed rule: its potential impact on the tire recycling industry as a whole. As a recycling association, ReMA takes the position that burning tires as fuel is not recycling, says Kip Vincent of Colt (Scott, La.), president of ISRI’s Scrap Tire Processors Chapter. It would prefer to see companies such as his “replace TDF with higher-end markets,” such as asphalt rubber road surfaces, civil engineering projects, and products made from granulated rubber. But the role of TDF in the recycled tire market made the issue an ReMA concern. If TDF consumers faced paying higher prices for wire-free TDF or, alternatively, with outfitting their combustion units with expensive emissions controls to operate as solid waste incinerators, they might choose a third option: leave the market altogether.
The RMA analyzed the effects of a potential loss of TDF markets in its 2009 report “Scrap Tire Markets in the United States.” Within several months of the rule’s implementation, the report states, “a relatively high number of scrap tire processors could go out of business due to increased cost (caused by the loss of the economy of scale create by processing tires for TDF), loss of markets, the inability to landfill tires or the exceedance of permitted limits for on-site storage, barring any waiver by the state.” Processors in New England, where 99 percent of tires become TDF, and the Mid-Atlantic region would be most affected.
The RMA report goes on to describe the potential environmental and health impacts of such a market collapse: The proportion of tires going to landfills would rise from 10 percent currently to between 60 percent and 80 percent. States that ban landfilling would see existing stockpiles grow beyond permitted limits and the development of new, illegal stockpiles, both of which would “increase the probability of large-scale, outdoor, uncontrolled tire fires [which] pose a significant environmental and public health risk.” The propensity of mosquitoes to breed in water that collects in tire stockpiles could lead to an increase in mosquito-borne diseases, the report adds.
As ReMA stated in its comments to the EPA during the rulemaking process, the proposed rule “would likely increase environmental impacts and energy consumption as consequences of its provisions that would negate the current benefits of using scrap tires as fuel.”
A Better Outcome
The final rule the EPA published on Feb. 23 went a long way toward alleviating the tire processing industry’s concerns. Scheduled to go into effect in 2014, the final rule clarifies which secondary materials burned in combustion units—a category that includes used oil, wood, coal refuse, and construction and demolition debris as well as scrap tires—the agency considers “solid waste” or “not a solid waste.” Solid wastes require additional treatment before combustion in units that are not regulated as solid waste incinerators; nonwastes do not require treatment.
The final rule has two important specifications concerning scrap tires. First, it states that when used as fuel, scrap tires—both whole and shredded, with or without metal—are not solid waste when they are removed from vehicles and collected under the oversight of an “established tire collection program.” In a session on the new rule at the ReMA convention in Los Angeles this past April, George Faison, from the EPA’s Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery, explained that the agency allows some leeway in what qualifies as an established collection program. It “doesn’t strictly have to be a state program; it could be a private program, as long as [the tires are] taken off the car, stored someplace for a period of time, and tracked all the way to the combuster, so we know where they’re coming from.” Colt’s Vincent says he would like even further clarity on this point. “A manifest system, which most states have nowadays, is a way of tracking where [a tire] came from, who hauled it, what processor it went to, and from what processor to what end market,” he explains. “So there’s a paper trail, but there are questions about whether a state manifest is a program or not.”
The second key specification in the rule is that tires taken from scrap tire stockpiles must undergo “sufficient processing” for the agency to categorize them as nonwastes. It defines sufficiently processed tires as “previously discarded tires that have been made into TDF (shredded/chipped), sized, sorted, and with a significant portion of the metal belts or wire removed, at a level appropriate for the unit.” Tire processors and consumers have some concerns about this provision. Processors wonder how they will have to change their operations to segregate scrap tires from collection programs from those they receive from other sources. As Gary Champlin of Champlin Tire Recycling (Concordia, Kan.), chair of ISRI’s Tire & Rubber Division, puts it, “After that workshop [at the ReMA convention], several people came up to me and said, ‘We handle [tires] from stockpiles and from amnesty events that cities and counties and states run. We can’t separate [those] from what’s coming in every day. It all comes in together.’”
Further, Champlin says, these processors worry about tires that don’t have the requisite paper trail or those currently in stockpiles. “If my end market is TDF, and my state has a landfill ban on tires,” and the cost of processing the tires as the rule requires is prohibitive, “what do I do with these tires? The EPA’s not answering that question.” He is concerned that TDF may no longer function as the scrap tire market of last resort. “TDF has always been the catchall, the market of lowest return that catches those tires that don’t go to other markets,” he says. “If you take that market away, and there’s no landfilling, that tire’s going to sit.”
Because this provision still requires the removal of “a significant portion” of the tire wire, it also could have an impact on demand for TDF in the cement industry. The PCA’s Wilson says his members take issue with the EPA’s seemingly arbitrary distinction between newly collected and salvaged tires. “There’s no way to distinguish from a quality or an environmental standpoint … a tire that’s taken off a vehicle and shipped to a cement plant versus one that might be in a tire pile somewhere,” he says. Faison conceded that point at the ReMA convention session. “I’ll be the first to admit that … a tire coming out of a waste pile and a tire from an established collection program is the same thing,” he said. “It’s purely a legal definition.” The EPA realizes the rule could be clearer in some areas, Faison said, attributing its deficiencies to the unparalleled haste of its formulation, necessitated by the court’s deadline. “We did this rule in six months, which for a federal agency is lightning speed, so there’s a lot of application issues that we weren’t able to address.”
The ultimate effect on the tire processing industry of the final EPA rule remains to be seen. “A lot of feedback is going to come back from the consumers, the plants that actually use TDF. That’s really going to be the defining moment on how this moves forward,” Champlin says, “but TDF is alive and well right now.”
Theodore Fischer is a writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
Tire recyclers are relieved now that an EPA regulation that could have threatened the tire-derived fuel market was less problematic in its final form. The rule still leaves several questions unanswered, however.