Tire burning-Mercury

[Guest guest]

LaFarge Cement in the Lehigh Valley recently started burning tires and a co-gen nearby is asking the DEP to have permissison to burn them..Think we have enough..... I think we have to refocus our efforts and not just worry about Thermoseal.. Heavy Metals Tires contain around 20 different metals, none of which can be destroyed by burning them, since they're elements. Metals known to be in tires include aluminum, antimony, arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, lead, magnesium, manganese, mercury, nickel, selenium, silicon, tin, titanium and zinc.2,13,33,34 Zinc is present in particularly high amounts, since zinc oxide is

used in the vucanization process. Most of them, including arsenic, lead, mercury, and chromium VI, are quite toxic to humans and can also wreak ecological havoc on aquatic wildlife if even a small quantity finds its way into a body of water. Some metals, like mercury, can accumulate in wildlife. A 2002 test of emissions from a Colorado cement kiln burning TDF with coal found an 8% increase in mercury when TDF was used, leading to nearly 5 pounds of additional mercury pollution per year -- enough to contaminate about 2,000 twenty-acre lakes to the point where the fish cannot be eaten due to methylmercury bioaccumulation. The test data for metal emissions varies widely for each metal, but the overall trend shows increases in most metals when TDF is burned along with coal This evidence clearly demonstrates that tire incineration releases a variety of toxic pollutants into the air, posing a dangerous and potentially deadly threat to human health and the environment. Alternatives to Tire Incineration