Texas county judges grappling with mounting piles of mulch, storm debris, and old tires are being asked to consider a different approach: turning that waste into power. On a December 2025 episode of The Building Texas Show, LOCOAL co-founder and CEO Miles Murray made a direct pitch to local officials, arguing that waste-to-energy technology can solve both disposal and fire-risk problems.
Murray told host Justin McKenzie that mulch piles often sit a couple of miles off the interstate, out of view, and that the mulch market is nearly saturated, so most material ends up in large piles that linger for long stretches. In dry seasons, those piles become fire hazards. “These become fire hazards … They can be accelerants to very large wildfires that we've seen in the last decade,” Murray said. The Houston Fire Department's fire safety standard for wood waste processors echoes that concern, stating that “wood chipping, hogging, composting and mulching operations and storage create a significant fire hazard and are rated as a very high hazard.”
LOCOAL's system, developed with support from the U.S. Air Force through the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, uses pyrolysis—heating wood waste without oxygen—to produce electricity and a high-purity carbon product. Federal SBIR records list Air Force Phase I and Phase II awards to the company, which describes itself as seed-funded by an AFWERX contract. Murray said the company is also moving into rubber from tires. The first commercial unit is installed in Houston, and the system is built to travel. “It's a 50-foot system that is basically your maximum flatbed sized module that can be transported,” Murray said. “You could show up with eight flatbed trucks and within a couple of weeks you've got yourself a power plant that can move about 50 tons of material per system per day.”
Murray framed the work as a way to make landfills obsolete. “So what would normally be a cost to somebody, we've turned into a revenue stream,” he said. He also addressed skepticism about carbon markets, arguing that LOCOAL tracks its carbon from where the waste starts to where it ends up. “When you hear about things like carbon credits and people are like that's a bunch of hocus pocus … it is whenever you're measuring it from a helicopter over the Amazon,” he said.
The conversation marks Murray's third appearance on The Building Texas Show, following episodes in 2023 and 2024. County leaders and fire officials can find more Texas stories at buildingtexasshow.com and learn more about the technology at LOCOAL.
