Storm wood waste being converted to energy

PHOTOGRAPHER: Stephen Williams

In a normal spring, Halfmoon roadsides would need hardly any cleanup at all, town Highway Superintendent John Pingelski said.

But this hasn’t been a normal spring for Halfmoon or any of the other communities hard-hit by tree damage in last December’s ice storm.

Halfmoon highway crews have been out picking up fallen limbs and branches all winter — and they have collected tons of wood, including debris dragged to curbside this spring by residents.

The wood is put through a chipper, and the chips are being taken to the Finch Pruyn and International Paper paper mills to be burned for fuel.

That’s the sort of thing federal and state officials hope will happen with storm-related wood waste.

Like Halfmoon, highway departments across the region face the problem this spring of disposing of massive volumes of wood debris.

Federal and state experts estimate that there are more than 700,000 cubic yards of ice storm debris in the nine counties covered by the federal major disaster declaration, which include most of the Capital Region counties.

Almost all communities chip the wood they collect roadside, which reduces its volume by about 75 percent.

Then, federal and state officials want the debris disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner.

Sending the chips to a paper mill is one of the “green” alternatives that regulators recommend. Both International Paper in Ticonderoga and Finch Pruyn in Glens Falls are on the list of acceptable disposal sites, said Maureen Wren, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

The mills use them in their furnaces.

“It’s really a win-win,” said John Brodt, a Finch Pruyn spokesman. “The municipalities have a need to get rid of wood, and we have a need for wood chips to burn. It reduces our use of fossil fuel and is good for the environment.”

Brodt said Finch Pruyn uses about 600 tons of wood chips per day. It pays for them, but he declined to release the price, citing competitive reasons.

He said Finch Pruyn buys wood chips in large volume and may be purchasing ice storm debris through wholesalers without being aware of it.

“The ice storm has been a nice little boost for us,” he said.

Shortly after the storm, DEC officials said they got a number of questions about how to dispose of wood debris, and they held a meeting for municipal officials in Saratoga and Washington counties, two of the hardest-hit areas.

“We got a call from one town wanting to bury their wood chips,” said DEC Environmental Engineer Gus Carayiannis. “We steered them instead towards the beneficial use of debris option.”

In addition to use in wood-fired power plants, another acceptable option is to provide the chips to landscaping material companies, DEC officials said.

Clifton Park’s wood chips are also going to the two regional paper mills, said town Highway Superintendent Richard Kukuk.

Clifton Park hired a contractor, VanAuken Trucking of Rexford, to do 90 percent of the town’s roadside debris collection. VanAuken will end up being paid around $1.2 million, Kukuk said, though the town expects 87 percent of that cost to be reimbursed through the Federal Emergency Management Administration and the state.

“At times over the winter it looked unmanageable or intimidating, but once we got a good contractor in it wasn’t as bad as we expected,” Kukuk said.

He said FEMA rules call for environmentally safe disposal methods, and FEMA officials are tracking the results.

“FEMA is all over it,” he said.

The town of Malta was also hard-hit but plans to use the chipped wood itself. It currently has four large piles it is storing. It expects to use them over the coming months on its recreation trails, said Town Comptroller Kevin T. King.

“We have four piles,” he said. “In a normal year, we wouldn’t have any.”