Shredded tires have been used to power cement kilns and paper and pulp factories for decades.
Motorists drive on the reopened section of I-95 about a week after it was closed due to damage from a tire fire in March 1996.If there’s a hierarchy of things you don’t want to burn, on purpose, most people would assume used rubber tires are close to the top.
That’s why environmental groups and locals in Carbon County are pushing back against a digital mining company’s plan to help power its cryptocurrency operation by burning a mixture of shredded tires, known as tire-derived fuel . In, the Panther Creek Electric Generating Facility, 85 miles north of Philadelphia in Nesquehoning, said it hoped to use “chipped and processed” tires to provide up to 15% of its fuel.At a recent public meeting in Carbon County, the DEP heard from locals opposed to Panther Creek’s plan. “We’re sick and tired of being the dumping ground of polluting companies, which would not be acceptable in other wealthier communities,” said a township resident The Pennsylvania Clean Air Council said Pennsylvania’s DEP has cited Panther Creek for unpermitted air pollution seven times since 2021. Russell Zerbo, an advocate with the Clean Air Council, said Panther Creek’s application cites federal emissions studies that are decades old. Pennsylvania’s Sierra Club, along with the nonprofit Earthjustice, submitted letters to the DEP seeking more information about the application. A spokeswoman for Stronghold Digital Mining, which acquired the Panther Creek Plant in 2021, declined to comment on the application process. Burning scrap tires for fuel is not that unusual. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, TDF is used as fuel for cement kilns, pulp and paper plants, and other facilities. It’s not recycling, the EPA wrote on its website,. New Jersey has more than most states, according to industry reports. Sometimes they’re simply piled high, often in urban areas, where they cancatch fire, sending acrid, black smoke into the air. It happened earlier this week “We definitely don’t want to see piles of tires out there in the landscape,” said John Sheerin, director of the Sheerin said approximately 71% of scrap tires are “delivered” back into the market every year, used in everything from landscaping mulch to athletic fields to playgrounds. TDF makes up a large percentage of that reuse, he said, most of it coming from cement kilns. Sheerin said Panther Creek’s proposal is one of the first nationwide to use TDF for cryptocurrency mining. “People think of it as plumes of black smoke but that is not at all what tire derived fuel is,” he said.on crypto’s effects on climate change found that the industry’s electricity usage “is similar to all home computers or residential lighting in the United States.” A United Nations University study found that crypto’s potential environmental impact went beyond carbon, noting that Bitcoin’s water footprintSave Carbon County, an environmental nonprofit group, claimed power produced by burning tires will not go back to the grid, or help locals. A spokesperson for Stronghold Digital Media, in an email to The Inquirer, said the company does, in fact, provide power to the grid “while cleaning up the state’s largest water pollutant, waste coal.” Crypto, the company said, is not the “villain.” “Bitcoin mining allows us to keep the plants operational and efficient,” the spokesperson said, via email, “and therefore also keeps the important remedial work we do in cleaning up the state of polluting waste coal operational.”
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