For the Times-News: a special project

Having in all likelihood blown its travel and special projects budget for the year on the counterproductive Steris series in Mexico, the Erie Times-News probably has none left for a special project that would truly benefit the Erie area.

Namely, travel to various tire-to-fuel plants around the country to find out how they operate, what their impacts on the communities have been: social, economic, cultural and environmental, whether beneficial or adverse. There are dozens of these plants in the U.S., some as close as New York and Connecticut, some of which have been in operation since the late ‘70s, or earlier.

Instead of rushing to judgment, the newspaper could launch such a worthwhile investigative project to gather empirical information, rather than rely on hearsay or sponsors’ spin. Anyone who’s been around major industrial projects knows they cannot rely upon the sponsors to be upfront about potentially adverse consequences, either because they haven’t done enough study and don’t know, or because they don’t want to jeopardize the project’s acceptance at the outset.

The owners of the new biofuels plant, for example, knew at the outset that bringing its boilers on stream would have a negative people impact here, but concealed that knowledge in order to advance its project. No doubt, there will be other unwelcome surprises as that facility, so to speak, gathers steam. It will be interesting to see what they are.

If the Times-News undertakes such an investigative project, it will learn, among other things, that the concept is not monolithic. There are tires-to-fuel plants and there are tires-to-fuel plants, as diverse as the areas they serve.

Times-News editors and reporters would also learn, if they undertook such a project, that most, if not all of these plants do not rely solely on waste tires for their raw fuel, but mix other combustibles with the tire chips, such as wood, natural gas, waste petroleum products, offal, coal, manure and others, some to a much larger degree than others.

Thus the nature of a particular tires-to-fuel project and its multiple effects on the community singularly depend upon the fuel mix it consumes to reduce the tires to utilitarian fuel. This is the threshold decision any sponsors of a proposed tires-to-energy plant must make before proceeding any further. Even before they prepare and submit to appropriate authorities applications for the necessary permits needed to proceed.

If the current sponsors of the tires-to-fuel plant proposed for Erie have reached that threshold decision, they have not made it publicly known. From that, all other decisions and actions must flow.