Lewis’ company started out in larger industrial-type settings, performing larger burns for municipalities. “The last couple of years we’ve been really busy out there talking to munici -pal and provincial governments, talking about wood waste diversion programs to get this stuff away from landfills,” he says. “We’ve been seeing the most success for our contracts in the landfill waste diver -sion side of things.” While Lewis admits there are lots of great things going on with biomass, some-times it’s simply unmarketable. “We did a little bit of investigating, driving around the province and looking at some of the disposal sites. We were seeing fields of mushy, old, rotten storm and wood debris that was just sitting there doing nothing but rotting away,” he says. “There’s a lot of good going on with bio -mass, but sometimes the biomass is just waste and has nowhere to go. So, elimina -tion is the best solution to prevent further emissions, and processing costs. So, that’s where we landed with the business in the past two years.” WILDFIRE MITIGATION While BioBurn Pros has been busy ser -vicing municipalities’ storm debris, Lewis has learned that the Air Burners technolo -gy also has other forestry applications and has been active performing forest thin-nings and land clearing projects. “We learned the benefits of using it for wildfire cleanups or even wildfire miti -gation projects for preventative work,” Lewis says. BioBurn Pros has met with a few dif -ferent municipal emergency preparedness managers to discuss how they can work together, helping them with their wildfire mitigation strategies. “You’re seeing communities actively invest into wildfire mitigation programs like FireSmart, and doing all the preven -tative work,” Lewis says. “But there’s a huge expense to those residuals… the conversations we’ve had with these mu -nicipal managers is that we can open these programs and open up central dump loca-tions for the residents and the businesses to bring all this stuff.” The company is still in the early stag -es of discussions with municipalities for work related to fire mitigation strategies, but there is interest from communities. BioBurn Pros recently met with the Town of Truro to offer a demo of their Air Burn -ers technology. “They said, ‘We love the idea, but we’re scared about the smoke or the idea of fire,’ for where they have all this stuff stored. It’s close to a provincial park and it’s close to communities. So, we said, ‘Okay, if you’re worried about it, how about we do a demo day for you?’ So, we went out there and we found a wood lot, and we burned for four days straight out there. They brought out all the municipal department of natural re-sources people; the fire marshals were out; the wildfire mitigation officers were out; and they all loved it,” Lewis says. He adds that his business will bene-fit the forestry industry and surrounding communities by reducing fees related to hauling wood waste, and lowering CO2 emissions. “It’s going to benefit not only residents, but it will benefit the forestry industry, all the landscapers and excavating companies doing land clearing. Right now, because we don’t have facilities like this, it’s creat -ing a lot of unregulated and illegal dump-ing of the products. We’re really trying to help mitigate that,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of people bring up methane off-gassing from rot – the ability to not only provide a carbon neutral process for eliminating the wood waste, but something that avoids the methane. So, there’s some methane diver -sion discussions going on as well.” The company now has additional demonstrations scheduled with munici-palities booked between all the way into September. The company recently purchased a second Air Burners unit, a BurnBoss, to service smaller projects. “We were having a tough time engag-ing with small residential agriculture and forestry. Those markets, they love the technology, but the budgets for this type of thing are sometimes thin in those indus-tries. So, we decided to go buy another Air Burner so we can engage more with those markets,” Lewis says. • 2025 INTERNATIONAL BIOMASS ATTENDEES STOP BY BOOTH 603 Canadian BIOMASS 23
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