Brilliant Ideas from Our TechBro Betters
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I’m trying to think of something dumber in modern history, but this is a high bar.
A bitcoin mine located at a waste coal power plant in Pennsylvania wants to add a new fuel to its power generation mix: scrap tires.
Stronghold Digital Mining describes itself as an “environmentally beneficial” bitcoin miner. But during a virtual press conference on Monday, Russell Zerbo, an advocate at Clean Air Council, said the facility, Panther Creek, had received at least seven air quality violations since it was acquired by the cryptocurrency mining company in 2021.
The press conference brought together representatives of local and national environmental organizations, including Earthjustice and PennFuture, along with residents of Carbon County—where the plant is located—to ask the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to reject Stronghold’s permit application for this new fuel source.
Tires are a significant waste problem: The United States generates some 300 million scrap tires every year. According to the EPA, burning scrap tires is better than dumping them in a landfill, but not as beneficial as finding ways to reuse or recycle them. In a landfill, the flammable materials that tires are made of can pose a risk of uncontrolled tire fires. Abandoned tires can also become breeding grounds for disease vectors like mosquitoes.
Another problem is that the burning of tires releases a number of air pollutants. In addition to the usual pollutants and greenhouse gases associated with burning fossil fuels—such as carbon oxides, sulfur oxides, and nitrogen oxides—burning tires can also release polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), along with other hazardous air pollutants and metals. Many PAHs are carcinogenic, but as the environmental organizations protesting Stronghold’s application point out, Panther Creek does not monitor releases of these pollutants.
I’m sure I’ve said that cryptocurrency is a giant tire fire, but I didn’t mean it quite this literally. LoomCoin on the other hand only burns the best tires to generate its endless wealth.