http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/08/19/us_castoffs_resuming_dirty_career/US castoffs resuming dirty career
Old plants, buses are sold to poorer nations
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff
| August 19, 2007
Sixth in a series of occasional articles examining climate change, its effects, and possible
solutions.
TURNERS FALLS -- Some townspeople in this 19th-century mill village on the Connecticut River celebrated
when workers began tearing down a shuttered coal-fired power plant this year. First, they dismantled the towering boiler.
In June, the smokestack that belched hundreds of thousands of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air came down. Last month,
workers hauled away the five-story steel skeleton, leaving just a concrete silo as a reminder of this local icon of global
warming.
But the demolition is hardly a victory in the battle against manmade climate change.
Virtually every
piece of the 2,600-ton plant is being shipped to Guatemala to be rebuilt, girder by girder, to power a textile mill that sells
pants, shirts, and sportswear to the United States. It could last, and continue to pollute, for another 50 years.
From
4-ton trucks to 40-ton boilers, US vehicles and equipment are finding a second life in developing countries -- postponing
meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by inefficiently using energy or directly emitting carbon dioxide.
A
1950s-era paper-making machine from the Curtis Paper mill in Adams is operating in Egypt. A 1992 school bus from Vermont's
tiny North Hero Island is chugging along the roads of Costa Rica. A rock-crushing machine used to make talcum powder in West
Windsor, Vt., has been dismantled and reassembled in Colombia.
"This clearly isn't what we want to happen," said Armond
Cohen, executive director of the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force, a national advocacy group. "It's troubling that we'd be
handing down the remnants of our industrial-era technology rather than helping these places with cleaner options."
When
a factory closes or a school bus fleet is retired in the United States, its components often enter an international marketplace.
Through online auctions and a series of middlemen, the vehicles and machines are sold and shipped around the world, usually
to countries that cannot afford cleaner technology. There, the used equipment can have a second act that lasts longer than
the first.
This international trade in retired equipment and vehicles, which a German research group in 2003 estimated
at $150 billion annually, is rarely discussed as scientists call for immediate measures to avoid the worst consequences of
global warming. Yet as New Englanders trade in sport utility vehicles for hybrid cars and move toward more climate-friendly
technologies, the exporting of old equipment represents a significant leak in the expanding worldwide effort to plug emissions
of gases that trap the sun's heat.
Often, technology considered obsolete in the United States reduces certain types
of pollution compared with what it replaces in developing countries. But the equipment still results in the emission of far
more greenhouse gases than newer technologies or alternative energy sources.
A generation ago, economists and scientists
envisioned a different future. Rich, developed countries were going to invest in cutting-edge technology to demonstrate its
effectiveness. Then, developing countries would use that climate-friendly technology to leapfrog over wealthy nations' cast-offs.
"It
just hasn't happened and we need a return to that vision," said Dale Jamieson, director of environmental studies at New York
University. "We are living with emissions that are occurring everywhere. It's in our best interest to have technology everywhere
that emits less."
The story of the Turners Falls power plant demonstrates, however, just how complex it will be to
find a solution.
A new home in Guatemala
About 10 miles southwest of Guatemala City earlier this month, dozens of
workers in hard hats poured a concrete foundation on two muddy acres behind a sprawling textile mill. Thousands of rusty tubes
and pipes from the Turners Falls power plant were piled nearby like enormous jigsaw-puzzle pieces. A 50-foot section of the
smokestack rested next to a curved piece of the boiler wall.
Shipped to Guatemala in cargo containers over the last
nine months, the pieces are spray-painted with numbers and arrows to guide construction workers where to weld them together
to reassemble the plant. Next year, the plant will be powering the textile mill and selling surplus electricity to the region's
power grid.
Guillermo Zimeri M., owner of the cavernous Textisur textile mill, is buying the power plant to reduce
his energy bills and better compete with mills in other countries.
A new power plant would cost more and take almost
three times
longer to complete. Largely because of China's and India's explosive growth, waits for specialized industrial
equipment like boilers and furnaces can stretch two years or more, and steel and metal prices are spiking.
The Turners
Falls plant cost about $44 million when it was erected in the late 1980s to power a paper mill. It is being dismantled, shipped,
and rebuilt for about $22 million.
Founded in 1981, the Villa Nueva textile mill employs about 900 workers who use
a mix of high-tech and home-taught sewing to produce close to 2 million yards of towels, fabrics, shirts, pants, and mattress
covers every month. Row upon row of automated machines transform raw cotton into long threads in a warehouse-sized room where
tiny puffs of cotton float in the air. Nearby, dozens of clicking machines weave filaments into giant white rolls of spandex.
Women and men in another room hunch over sewing machines, hemming cotton towels.
Trade restrictions have recently eased
between the United States and Guatemala, and as a result, Zimeri is investing heavily in new looms and spinning machines.
But to compete with the cheap labor in Chinese textile mills, he needs an inexpensive energy source.
Textisur now gets
about 40 percent of its electricity from independently owned power plants that burn heavy oil. Zimeri also has two boilers
that use oil to produce steam for the textile mill. As the price of oil has soared, Textisur's operating costs have skyrocketed.
The
Turners Falls plant, with enough juice to power about 20,000 homes, represents survival for Textisur.
"It is our future,"
Zimeri said.
Coal plant equals progress
In Villa Nueva, where a fine layer of soot can coat the skin, the hand-me-down
coal plant in many ways represents environmental progress.
The oil-burning facilities from which the textile mill gets
energy have few emission controls, so the Turners Falls plant will pollute less. The coal plant is fitted with millions of
dollars in filters and other equipment required in the United States to capture much of the air pollution that can cause respiratory
problems and contribute to other illnesses. Those environmental controls will remain in place in Guatemala even though they
far exceed standard practice there.
"It sounds strange, but having a coal plant in Guatemala is actually cleaning up
emissions," said Michael Crippen of Calpwr/PSC, a US consulting firm that is overseeing the complicated task of dismantling,
reassembling, and restarting the power plant.
Edgar Figueroa, a Guatemalan businessman who conceived and brokered the
deal with his energy consulting company Simsa, is proud that the coal plant met strict US Environmental Protection Agency
standards. If it had not closed in the mid-1990s after the paper mill it powered shut down, the plant probably would still
be legally operating in Massachusetts, according to state officials.
In Villa Nueva, the power plant will also provide
excess steam to the mill. This will increase energy efficiency and allow Zimeri to shut down the mill's two oil-burning boilers,
which have few emission controls.
But the coal plant will not reduce the discharge of carbon dioxide, though precise
calculations are not available. First, burning coal typically releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than burning
oil. Second, the oil-burning power plants will probably continue to operate to supply Guatemala's growing energy demands.
Facing
economic realities
When the coal plant goes online, Zimeri probably won't scrap the two oil-burning boilers. He will probably
sell them to be used elsewhere -- further evidence of the economic realities undermining the drive to blunt global warming.
Such
secondhand trade in capital equipment is worldwide in scope and growing, according to Adelphi Research, a German think tank
that published the 2003 report, one of the few to focus on the phenomenon. For example, in Thailand, 90 percent of textile
machines were secondhand, the report noted, while in Morocco 35 percent of all imported machines were used.
The report
estimates that secondhand machinery, often built with older technology, consumes an average of 20 percent more energy than
modern equipment -- often resulting in more greenhouse gas emissions. In 2006, a Belgian research group said the market for
used machinery was booming, with a growth rate in the double digits.
Economists and even environmentalists are loath
to condemn developing countries for buying secondhand equipment and vehicles to support their growing economies.
But
they suggest some solutions. Nations could adopt stricter trade restrictions, foreign investment policies or environmental
laws that would ban the trade of secondhand machinery or vehicles that don't meet certain efficiency standards. Industrialized
countries should also assist developing countries to buy newer and better technologies to leapfrog over older equipment.
"This
leapfrogging process is not automatic," said Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of the Energy Technology Innovation Project at
Harvard University's Belfer Center. For example, three US auto manufacturers recently introduced automobile emission-control
technology to China that would not have met US air pollution standards, she said.
The United States has refused to
sign an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases because it does not include similar commitments from developing countries.
"Clearly
our position and policy in terms of trade doesn't match up," said Danilo Pelletiere, a senior fellow in the school of public
policy at George Mason University who studies the secondhand vehicle trade. "That is the irony. If we want to require [developing
countries] to meet higher standards, we should be responsible for giving them the capacity to do so."
Village moves
forward
All that is left of the Turners Falls plant is a pile of bricks and the approximately 100-foot-tall concrete silo
where coal was stored. A recently built bike path winds along a canal across from the former power plant, and there is talk
of creating a film production school and studio in the adjacent mill. The village off Route 2, part of the larger town of
Montague, is trying hard to transform into a quaint tourist village.
Early on, some residents had discussed the possibility
of creating a public art piece on the coal silo.
"Something that said this used to be a coal plant . . . or a monument
to a new form of environmentalism," said Frank Abbondanzio, Montague town administrator. "But of course, we know it leaves
here and just goes somewhere else."
Maria Cramer of the Globe staff contributed to this story. Beth Daley can be reached
at bdaley@globe.com.
