Caledonia board OK’s fly ash brick plant: Journal Times

By Michael Burke
Journal Times

CALEDONIA — Despite some citizen opposition Thursday evening, a fly ash-to-brick manufacturing plant here can go forward.

The Caledonia Village Board voted unanimously to allow CalStar Cement to manufacture bricks in part of the former Young Radiator building, 2825 4 Mile Road.

CalStar, based in Silicon Valley, Calif., will use We Energies fly ash from the Oak Creek Power Plant to manufacture about 40 million bricks per year.

Fly ash is the noncombustible mineral ash left behind after coal is burned to create electricity.

Before the board voted, it heard 50 minutes of questions and complaints from five speakers.

John Schacht, who lives on 5 Mile Road, was most concerned about what he said fly ash contains, including, he claimed, radioactive wastes. “What about medical problems of people using it in their homes?” Schacht said. “What about kids playing around it?”

Caledonia resident Marty Byland was most concerned about the extra truck traffic, saying, “I don’t want to see all these tanker trucks. I don’t want to wait in line at the corner when I’m going to the post office. This is where all the moms and kids do their shopping.”

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CalStar officials earlier said the plant will be ready for production in about October. Company Vice President of Business Development Luke Pustejovsky said it will create about 12-15 jobs by next year and perhaps 25-30 by 2012.

He said CalStar Cement will be here for the long term because the fly ash source is here and the market is the Chicago area.

Wispark, the real-estate development subsidiary of Wisconsin Energy Corp., hopes to buy the building on 4 Mile Road and lease part of it to CalStar.

Company Director of Product Development Julie Rapoport said the bricks will break new ground as the first high-percentage fly ash bricks commercialized in this country.

Pustejovsky said the plant will produce up to 40 million bricks a year, which CalStar will sell into about five Midwest states through distributors.

Rapoport said all manufacturing and materials storage will happen indoors, and the finished bricks should be rapidly shipped out to buyers.

Company officials said fly-ash bricks need as little about 10 percent of the energy for manufacturing that brick kilns do. Thus, the plant will slash energy input and carbon-dioxide emissions, compared with traditional bricks.

Pustejovsky said the bricks, which are decorative — not structural — will compete well with clay bricks in both price and performance.

He said they naturally are a buff color but, when tinted, will be offered in about 10 colors.

CalStar executives said ongoing research could lead to future fly ash products.

Fly ash in bricks judged a safe use

What is a power utility to do with by-products of coal burning such as fly ash?

One of the best uses is as a building material, say environmental watchdogs and building industry organizations.

CalStar Cement received final approval Thursday to set up a brick manufacturing plant at 2825 4 Mile Road, using We Energies fly ash.

Fly ash is already widely used as a building material component in concrete, road construction and so on. In Wisconsin, 86 percent of it is used that way, said Susan Bangert, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Air and Waste Division’s deputy administrator. The DNR judges that a safe use.

Bangert said the DNR has done extensive toxicity testing on state fly ash, and it is not classified as a hazardous material.

The U.S. Green Building Council promotes its use through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification program. The Council awards points for using fly ash in construction when rating construction projects.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also says that bricks made from fly ash pass the safety test.

“Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash … may be even safer than predicted,” an EPA case-study report stated. “Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.”

The report also stated, “Fly ash bricks both find a use for some of that waste and counter the environmental impact from the manufacture of standard bricks.”

That’s a point that CalStar officials underscore. They point out that fly ash bricks are made at low temperatures, thus using a small fraction of the energy clay bricks demand.

Tom Pounds, CalStar’s chief operating officer, said substituting fly ash for ordinary Portland cement avoided more than 200 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions since 1990. “(Fly ash) is a very important weapon in the climate-change battle,” he said.

Journal Times reporter Lindsay Fiori contributed to this story.