Norske disputes watchdog findings

By EDWARD HILL
The Chronicle (Ladysmith)
May 31 2005

A government pollution watchdog has pegged NorskeCanada's Crofton pulp mill as having the largest increase in pollutant release in Canada, a charge mill management says is dead wrong.
The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) released its annual report "Taking Stock" on Tuesday, a compendium of toxic releases from more than 24,000 industrial locations in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. It gathered the Canadian data from Environment Canada's National Pollution Release Inventory (NPRI).
The report states the Crofton mill released 1.4-million more kilograms of toxins in 2002 - the latest data available for the study - than in 1995, the bulk of that being hydrochloric acid and methanol.
Looking at a shorter period, 1998 to 2002, Crofton is downgraded to emitting the fourth largest increase in pollutants in Canada. Additionally, it ranks the mill No. 5 in Canada for largest actual release of furans and dioxins at 11.4 toxic-equivalent grams.
However, Norske mill management says the CEC is making improper comparisons, which leads to wildly inaccurate rankings. The argument goes that in the past, the mill reported fewer chemicals and therefore less overall pollution was catalogued. Now it logs a more accurate version of chemical emissions.
Crofton mill vice-president Don McKendrick said for instance in 1998, the mill reported perhaps two compounds to the NPRI, but in 2002 it reported 23. As a further complication, in 2002 it changed from submitting emission estimates to using actual stack data, inflating the numbers considerably.
"These reports compare apples and oranges," McKendrick said. "The compounds were always there, just not reported on."
Although the NPRI - a public database of polluters and pollutants - was established in 1992, reporting on toxic emissions was not required until 1999.
McKendrick said the mill was releasing 17 tonnes of particulate matter per day in 1990 as compared to 1.2 tonnes now. "The improvements are real and measurable," he added.
Norske Crofton's environmental director Graham Kissack said the CEC has an "unfortunate approach" on how it analyses data and interprets the report.
The Montreal-based CEC acknowledged its methods are imperfect and anomalies exist for every industrial site. "Most mills changed their reporting methods in 1999," said Evan Lloyd, CEC spokesperson. "We can only report what we have."
The report itself states reasons given for apparent pollution increases was due to "updated estimation methods."
While the mill insists pollution is going down, Norske is still revising how it calculates stack emissions, making it difficult to have "apple to apple" comparisons for subsequent years.
For example, in 2002 the mill emitted 554 tonnes of methanol but in 2003 it reported 882 tonnes, but only due to changes in mathematical emission factors. From this it is not clear if there was more, less or the same actual amounts of methanol leaving the stacks.
Meanwhile, the Crofton mill's arch nemesis, the Crofton Airshed Citizens Group, has latched on to the CEC report as further evidence Norske is an unrepentant polluter. CACG frontman Michael Ableman called Norske's explanation of the CEC analysis "outrageous spin."
"There is no question that every passing week we are getting more information that there is a real problem [at the mill]," Ableman said. "We want less time on spin and more time fixing the problems."
The citizens group, via engineering consultants RWDI and Pioneer, recently released a damning analysis of the 2004 Jacques Whitford air quality and health risk study. The study looked at Crofton mill emissions and if they were likely to cause health problems.
That RWDI report called for a complete redo of the work, which the mill will presumably ignore. JW scientists, another engineering firm called SENES and the mill say the study is good enough, and more importantly, the air is safe to breathe.