Tarps Greener Than Ever
Since its founding in 2009, Alyak 2000 has been providing its customers with high-quality, more durable, and resilient tarps. Thanks to its manufacturing processes and the Tarpmaster products from Canadian supplier Naizil, Alyak 2000 enables carriers to benefit from tarps that can last up to 15 years, significantly longer than imported competing products. But what to do at the end of the life cycle of these tarps? But what to do at the end of the life cycle of these tarps? How to avoid filling landfills with worn-out tarps or tarp scraps, as these products take hundreds of years to fully decompose?
This is the question that Bruce Lacasse, President and Founder of Alyak 2000, tackled. For years, Bruce had been searching for a solution to allow his customers to dispose of overly worn-out tarps in harmony with the company’s waste reduction efforts and to promote a healthier environment.
Unfortunately, no local options are available for recovering, recycling, or valorizing polyester tarps. Therefore, Alyak 2000 turned to Europe, where a technology developed by an Italian company, VinyLoop, allowed for the recycling of PVC tarps.
Unfortunately, in addition to being too costly, this solution proved impossible following the closure of Vinyloop at the end of 2018. Since then, the main instigator of this solution, Serge Ferrari, has relaunched the project through a start-up, Polyloop. However, the question of the excessively high cost remained.
It was then that Bruce Lacasse heard of another, more viable option: energy valorization of tarps. This solution is proposed by Covanta, an American environmental solutions company. Covanta offers turnkey solutions for waste management. From its various service points, including one located in Chambly, Covanta offers a wide range of environmental services. But the one that interests us here is energy generation from waste, or Energy-from-Waste (EfW).
In a state-of-the-art incinerator located in New York at Niagara, Covanta burns non-recyclable waste, thus generating electrical energy that is redistributed in the region’s grid. Covanta has several similar sites in the United States. It is important to note that Covanta’s EfW facilities are nothing like traditional incinerators, which are more polluting. Very tight emission controls classify the energy output from these facilities as clean and renewable energy.
Thanks to Covanta, Alyak 2000 can now offer its customers a clean and economically viable way to dispose of overly worn-out tarps. At the same time, Alyak 2000 can also utilize energy valorization for tarp scraps and residues created during tarp manufacturing.
Already, Alyak 2000 has shipped a first delivery of worn-out tarps from Océanex, a customer and partner of Alyak 2000 in this new, more environmentally friendly practice of waste management, to Covanta’s sorting center in Chambly.
The energy valorization of worn-out tarps coincides with Alyak 2000’s goal of preserving the environment and marks an important step towards Zero Waste operations for the company. For more details on Covanta’s Energy-from-Waste process, visit the website https://www.covanta.com/Sustainability/Energy-from-Waste.
For more information on the energy valorization of worn-out tarps, contact Alyak 2000 at 450-821-6090.
