Rebel with a cause
By BOB ROZYCKI

Jim Taylor has a way to make waste disappear.

Jim Taylor doesn’t look like a revolutionary.

He’s not looking to overturn the government, although the long list of visitors to his construction and demolition-debris recycling center in Montgomery might make the FBI sit up and take note.

The guests have come from far afield -- town of Thompson officials in Sullivan County to California to Uganda and China. And the balmy beach nations from around the Caribbean to the former war-torn country of Kosovo, too, have made the trip to Neelytown Road just off Interstate 84 in Orange County.

Disparate perhaps in political ideologies, the countries are united in one worldwide problem -- trash.

Imagine an invention that could get rid of waste, create enough electricity to power a town the size of Montgomery -- about 23,000 single-family homes -- create jobs, add a new infusion of taxes and reduce America’s dependency on crude oil. Taylor says he has it; he calls it his black box -- a biomass gasifier.

His gasifier is unlike others, he says. And in the next few weeks he hopes to announce a partnership in a venture with one of the world’s largest producers of ethanol that would use the gasifier “to produce energy cheaply to make ethanol production facilities more efficient.”

The interest by ethanol companies is a result of a U.S. Department of Energy grant for $500 million to build the world’s first biocellulosic ethanol plant.

Taylor also hopes to announce, in the next few weeks, that he has the needed investment for the $75 million to build the “black box,” the first commercial organic gasification process at his Montgomery site.

STARTING OUT

To understand Taylor’s claims and pride about his gasifier takes a little explaining. The road is pockmarked with lawsuits, a bankruptcy and even the loss of half of a thumb.

The Newburgh native, who still resides in the city, grew up in an Orange County that was a poverty pocket. After graduating from Valley Central School, Taylor joined the U.S. Army. Taylor’s father had owned a series of gas stations in Newburgh until he noticed that his brother was making good money working half as hard in the tree-cutting business. Back from the Army, Taylor worked for his dad.

A couple years passed and his dad, who was a smoker, got cancer and died. The same followed for Taylor’s mother.

“Being the young buck, wanting to go kill the world, I decided to grow the tree business,” he said.

The county’s economy improved and the business expanded. Taylor Tree Surgery became Taylor Tree and Landscaping.

While clearing land for housing developments and malls, Taylor took note that his company was also taking down “beautiful trees that people would give their hind-teeth for to have in their front yards.”

Figuring that people who were buying the expensive homes wanted nice-looking trees to enhance their properties, Taylor saved certain ones, dug them up and resold them.

ALMOST STUMPED

Everything was going along smoothly until Dec. 1, 1989. That was the day New York state passed its first solid-waste law.

Put simply, all of Taylor’s land-clearing debris became construction and demolition debris. So what were chips on Nov. 30, 1989, became regulated waste a day later.

James Taylor has big plans for his 95-acre property on Neelytown Road.

Taylor’s company on Dec. 1, 1989, was clearing a section of the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County. The waste now had to go to a permitted facility. “Only problem was there weren’t any such facilities created. ‘What does one look like? We have no idea.’” So from that December until April 1991, the state developed rules and regulations to coincide with the law. One of the reasons for the law was that a lot of developers would just bury the stumps on the least-desirable plot in a development, leaving the last person to buy with a huge cleanup.

Taylor’s company was generating hundreds of thousands of tons of wood chips. One acre of woods would typically generate 150 to 200 tons of chips.

There was no end in sight since he was clearing hundreds and hundreds of acres in Orange, Dutchess, Putnam, Ulster, Sullivan, Rockland and Columbia counties. The chips the company was creating in land clearing were brought to the Neelytown property to turn into mulch -- another side venture.

From 1991 to 1995, Taylor tried to build and permit a construction and demolition debris (C&D) recycling facility. It was a difficult time.

“The town didn’t want it because they didn’t know what it was, what it looked like, or even define it. It was a brand-new industry. … I was one of the first in the nation to go down the road to being a C&D recycling facility.”

HITTING BOTTOM

While trying to get the necessary permits and create a C&D recycling facility, the Taylor tree business didn’t change.

“The state needed to permit someone so they could hang their hat on and say ‘There’s someone who does it.’ But the town was the fight; 13 lawsuits, a bankruptcy, a divorce, a finger…. This is what a successful recycling facility in Montgomery cost. Five years of hell.”

Taylor went to two banks trying to obtain funding for the recycling facility. They weren’t interested in loaning money to an unproven entity. They suggested that he file for Chapter 11 under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

“That was the toughest decision of my entire life; to go and declare bankruptcy for the tree company because I did nothing wrong. … It finally broke me.”

But Taylor made up his mind to see it through.

He eventually received state and federal permits to start the facility. The town relented because they “ran out of reasons.”

Taylor still remained frustrated at not being able to convince people of the need to recycle, rather than send everything to a landfill.

In one of life’s little ironies, now that he had a state-approved facility, the county and the same town that had fought him over its creation were now mandated under law to send haulers and others with construction and demolition debris to his place.

It was a time of territorial wars in the trash business. Taylor was just “a little Irish family in the business.” His independent standing held up.

HANDS-ON LEARNING

What ultimately became the facility’s core competency was the ability to sort and separate.

When a dump truck or roll-off container came to the gate, Taylor put a five-man crew in it and actually handpicked all of the pieces.

“And the five-man crew of course was my wife, myself and the three kids.”

They initially could go through a 30-yard container in an hour and then got it down to 45 minutes. The unadulterated wood, nothing on it or in it, was thrown one way. The cardboard got picked out and went another way. The asphalt, brick and concrete got picked out and went another way and the metal went a fourth way.

At that point, the container was either half full or half-empty, depending on how you look at it, Taylor said.

“The next commandment of life is ‘What do we do with the rest of it?’ And that became my life, what do we do with the rest of it.”

The ability to manually separate the debris was a great experience for Taylor and family. It gave them a clear understanding of waste’s composition. He says it’s pretty simplistic; there’s household hazardous waste, organic material and inorganic material.

Of the 50 percent left in the box, Taylor decided to grind it up and test it. Since he was venturing into an uncharted frontier, he was worried about the health of his employees who happened to be his family. They wore breathing masks and other safety gear and tested quarterly for any ill effects. He also tested the storm water and made sure it was cleaner leaving the site than when it entered.

“I became extreme in getting in as much data. I wanted to know everything was good, safe and clean.”

The remainder of the material after being ground up was a dirtlike product that became a soil cover substitute for landfills called alternative daily cover (ADC). After a couple years he determined that any Sheetrock in the mix causes a problem; it produces a gas called hydrogen sulfide, a rotten-egg smell. A process was set up that stripped the Sheetrock of its paper, which could be used for animal bedding, and the gypsum was ground up and sent back to the manufacturer as material for new Sheetrock.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, one of Taylor’s sons, Hans, recognized that the cleanup is one major C&D job that would also include sorting for human and evidence recovery. Calls were made and just days after the attacks, Taylor and specialized equipment were sifting and sorting through millions of tons of World Trade Center debris.

Taylor’s company spent nine months at the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island. After paying expenses, Taylor took any profit and had a memorial built at the Orange County Arboretum for the county residents killed during the attacks.

THINKING BIG AND SMALL

Taylor was still in search of a tool to get rid of “the rest of it” when he read about gasification.

What he remembered about gasification was from his 8th-grade wood shop; putting initials in a piece of wood. “If you held temperature long enough you could put a hole in the wood. And that’s what gasification is: a heat-transfer process. With a heat-transfer process you can make things disappear. No ash, no combustion, no flame, just smoke, which is the gas.”

From about the end of 2001 to 2005, Taylor tried to negotiate an agreement with FERCO, a Georgia-based company that had gasification technology. Following what he described as fruitless talks, Taylor decided to develop his own gasification process and formed Taylor Biomass Energy L.L.C.

One of the inventors and one of the top gasification experts in the world, Mark Paisley, called Taylor and asked if he could join him. Now in one of the most-regulated arenas in the world, Taylor with no college education set out to form the best team he could. Paisley joined as vice president of research and development. Taylor also included intellectual property attorneys Lackenbach Siegel L.L.P. of Scarsdale, to prepare for lawsuits.

They tested and tested and came up with the Taylor gasifier.

The New York Public Service Commission instituted a renewable portfolio standard in 2005 that looked to generate more electricity through renewable resources that include biomass technologies. Taylor’s gasifier is a state-approved tool to convert organic biomass into gas and then electricity. “That electric product is considered green energy in the state of New York. If you use Taylor, it’s approved,” he said.

THE PLAN

With the election of a new town supervisor, and one who has an environmental engineering background, Taylor is feeling pretty good.

Now, in addition to countries from around the world, Ulster, Putnam and Rockland are looking into Taylor’s gasifier. Dutchess and Westchester have incinerators.

“In today’s world, we’ve got to clean up the way we do things; solid-waste practices and electrical generation. My concept is along the lines of buy local. How do we take this waste that we’re trucking 300 miles to every state west and convert that as a fuel source to reduce dependency on foreign fossil fuels? And create energy.

“This is the magic business plan that solves all of those issues.”

Taylor’s idea is place his gasifier in an industrial setting in a community base of 250,000 people within a 30-mile radius for trucking waste so as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and convert trash to energy and also create jobs.

“The smallest plant, which takes 850 tons of mixed garbage a day in the front door, creates 75 jobs, in a clean, safe manner to produce green power into the grid 24 hours, seven days a week ... not when the wind blows or when the sun comes out.”

“It solves solid-waste problems. We’re increasing recycling, creating jobs, we’re paying taxes, reducing dependency for fossil fuels, we’re reducing greenhouse gas emissions of long-haul trucking and landfills, two of the biggest sources, and we’re not contributing to creating these scenic mountains (of trash). So it sounds like a good business model.”

Taylor’s gasifier, 45 by 45 by 90 feet high depending on local law, can convert solid gas in an oxygen-starved chamber without combustion.

A sandlike product, he won’t disclose its name, is heated in one chamber to 1,800 degrees. It is then blown into an oxygen-starved chamber where the dilution rate is 20 parts sand to 1 part biomass by weight.

“In a quarter of a second, it immediately blows the gas. In that transformation from a solid to a gas, 95 percent blows gas on first pass. On the recirculation, of the 5 percent of all of the carbon that has been used up on first pass, with charcoal coming out, it get cycloned back to the first sand heater and ultimately charcoal becomes the fuel for the flame process to heat the sand.” Initially, natural gas or another fuel is need for ignition.

The gas hits a turbine that generates electricity.

The smallest facility, with 300 dry tons going into gasifier, generates 23 megawatts of electricity, typically enough for 23,000 single-family homes, Taylor said.

Since the gasifier needs fuel 24 hours a day, silos would be built to hold biomass for 5,000 cubic yards.

As for the remaining ash, which Taylor said is similar to the kind in an outdoor grill, it can be used in a concrete product, “so there’d be no waste.”

Taylor’s dream complete.