Some legislators in Ohio want to classify burning tires as “renewable energy”.
Tires are made primarily from oil. Burning oil doesn’t sound like a form of “renewable energy”
Burning Tires for energy. It sounds easy. It probably can be done cleanly if enough pollution controls are applied. But… Dioxins and furans are chemical families involving halogens, mostly chlorine. Dioxins are extremely toxic carcinogens. A study of dioxin and furan content of stack gasses at a variety of cement mills, paper mills, boilers, and power plants conducted in the 1990s shows a wide and inconsistent variation in dioxin and furan output when fueled partially by TDF (That’s Tire Derived Fuel folks) as compared to the same facilities powered by only coal. Some facilities added as little as 4% TDF and experienced as much as a 4,140% increase in dioxin and furan emissions.
This of course means burning TDF is dirtier than burning coal.
– from sustainabledesignupdate