A Pennsylvania company wants to burn old tires to power Bitcoin mining

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 (TDF). In an application to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, 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 according to WFMZ-TV out of Allentown.

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, but it could be worse.

“It is better to recover the energy from a tire rather than landfill it,” the agency wrote.

Approximately 292 million “end-of-life tires” are generated in the United States every year, according to a World Business Council for Sustainable Development report. 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 in Arizona, and 40 years ago, in Virginia, when 7 million tires burned for nine months, polluting local water sources.

A tire fire closed I-95 in Philadelphia in 1996.

“We definitely don’t want to see piles of tires out there in the landscape,” said John Sheerin, director of the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association’s End of Life Tire Program.

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.

Cryptocurrency mining requires a substantial amount of energy to power its computers. A 2022 White House report 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 footprint “was similar to the amount of water required to fill over 660,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.”

Save 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.”