Catalyst Paper Corporation’s Powell River mill has been in compliance with air quality regulations during 2014 according information released at a public presentation.
At a recent community stakeholder meeting, Sarah Barkowski, environment manager at the Powell River mill, reviewed air quality findings collected at several locations near the mill.
Barkowski first reviewed dust fall, which is a particulate that travels short distances. “It’s considered a nuisance parameter. It is not considered a health parameter,” she said.
There are four dust fall monitors that are located between the mill’s landfill and the Wildwood community. Testing is performed there every summer.
“We set up the monitors on Canada Day and we run through the months of July, August and September,” Barkowski said.
In July, three of the four dust fall monitors, and in August and September, all four monitors showed results that were within the objective set for residential areas.
Barkowski said the one monitor that was high in July was really not of concern because all of the material gathered in the monitor was organic matter, not inorganic, meaning it was not airborne emissions from the mill.
“We do this dust fall testing because of concern about our fly ash getting out of the landfill,” Barkowski said. “We’ve shown that dust fall that fell into the monitor with the high number was not fly ash, or inorganic matter for that matter.”
Particulate matter, another parameter for which the mill monitors, is completely different, and is the matter that travels long distances, Barkowski said. “By that I mean around the planet, not across the street,” she said.
Particulate matter known as PM10, which is smaller than 10 micrometres in size, is measured at five locations around the community. At the mill’s landfill there is a monitor that cycles on every six days. A pump runs for 24 hours and a reading is recorded for that day.
There are continuous monitors on the roof of the gymnasium at James Thomson Elementary School and a location on King Avenue in Wildwood. Both of those locations are equipped with a PM10 and a PM2.5 continuous monitor.
“The results from these monitors are compared to objectives that are set by the ministry of environment,” Barkowski said.
While dust fall is considered a nuisance parameter, the particulate matter of the PM2.5 size is associated with health risks, so it’s important to keep the emissions low, she added.
The objective for the PM10 sampling that runs every six days is a measurement of 50 micrograms per cubic metre or less. The readings for 2014 have ranged from about 12 to four.
In analyzing the 2014 readings for PM2.5 recorded at the station on King, Barkowski said the readings are consistent with what has been recorded in the past.
She said particulate matter monitoring results are within the objectives set by the provincial ministry of environment. The national standard is less than 30 micrograms per cubic metre or less and the provincial objective is 25. During 2014, up to September, the daily averages had not been higher than about five micrograms per cubic metre.
In terms of community feedback received by the mill, from the beginning of 2014 to the end of September, the mill had received 17 complaints from the public. Last year there were 38 by year-end.
In terms of this year’s complaints, there were 10 for odour, three for noise, two for particulate and two miscellaneous.
“Our biggest challenge is odour from the sludge,” Barkowski said. “When we take our power boiler down and run our mill, it means we are making sludge but we are not in a position to burn it. We are running our backup boiler on gas. We are not in a position to process our sludge in a normal way.
“I think we’ve done a lot of good things around this in terms of where we drop the sludge. It travels normally by conveyor and is dropped on the conveyor that carries the hog fuel to the boiler. When that boiler and hog fuel conveyor is not running, we drop the sludge on the back of the reclaim pile, which is about as far away as we can get from the community. The sludge gets mixed with hog fuel and is put aside for storage at a lower concentration.”
When it’s time to reclaim that sludge, the mill typically looks for dates when there are no planned public activities in Townsite or coincide with three-day weekends.
“As we were reclaiming the sludge in our pile, we had the equivalent of about three barge loads of blended sludge and hog,” Barkowski said. “We got to a point where we had reclaimed about a third of that. Then we had beautiful hot weather and I’m well aware it didn’t smell good in the Townsite.”
