by Rob Wiltzen
A new Reach for Unbleached! report, Pulp and Paper Pollution: The Toxic Legacy of Federal Neglect has found that the federal government has neglected their responsibility to enact and enforce pollution prevention laws to regulate the environmental impact of pulp and paper mills in Canada.
Throughout the various steps in the pulp and paper process, numerous hazardous contaminants such as dioxin, PCB, nonylphenol, chloroform, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and heavymetals are generated and released to air, water and land.
These pollutants contribute to acid rain, smog, destruction of fish habitat, all of which affect the quality of air, water and food.
They also contribute to and cause respiratory and cardiovascular disease, skin disorders, damage to organs, and compromise the immune system.
They include known or suspected carcinogens, neurotoxins, endocrine disruptors, and reproductive toxins. Emissions include persistent pollutants – those that do not break down, remaining in the environment and human bodies.
In this way, the toxic legacy of pulp mills includes the historical emissions of pulp mill facilities, whether or not they are currently operating. Those that are operating continue to add to the accumulated toxins in the environment. Those that are closed leave behind a toxic stew of chemicals at landfills, plant sites and affected ecosystems near and far.
Consequently, the government bears a critical responsibility in the regulation of the facilities’ emissions in order to ensure minimum impact on public health and surrounding ecosystems. Pulp and Paper Pollution: The Toxic Legacy of Federal Neglect concludes that government has failed in their regulatory responsibility by having barriers to access to information on emissions, inadequate and inconsistent regulations and enforcement, and ineffective toxic substance management programs.
Information Access
The report compiled all obtainable data on the toxic emissions of Canadian pulp and paper mills, while highlighting the significant gaps in information. The lack of consistency in what mills reported and the industry classifications that they reported under to the National Pollution Release Inventory, made a comprehensive overview of Canadian pulp mill emissions impossible.
The absence of clear and consistent reporting requirements for mills provides a significant barrier to information access for any member of the Canadian public attempting to learn what toxic emissions they may be exposed to. Perhaps more importantly, it implies that the federal government is not adequately tracking the range and quantity of substances being emitted from the facilities. Without this knowledge it is virtually impossible for government to fulfill its responsibilities to safeguard public and ecological health against harm from hazardous industrial emissions.
Regulations and Enforcement
In Canada, the federal and provincial governments share authority over environmental issues. The provinces retain authority over the implementation of environmental regulations including emission limits and compliance measures.
In practice, the only enforceable regulations on air emissions from pulp and paper facilities in the country are through provincial emission permits. Permits, however, are wildly inconsistent across the country. Even within a province, permits vary substantially in the substances that are regulated, emission limits and monitoring requirements. With no requirement for renewals or upgrades, many permits are decades old, do not reflect current mill operations and completely ignore the advance of technology in pollution prevention and control measures. A requirement for renewal periods is essential to an effective regulatory regime, the report concludes.
The report argues that a common standard for permits should be implemented and that regulations should be based on Best Available Technology (BAT). Currently permits are based on negotiation between provincial environmental officers and mill executives and on the existing technology at the mill at the time of permit issue. The potential for pollution prevention and control given the technology available at the time are not considered. A variety of widely accepted standards are available to define BAT at pulp mills, most notably the Reference Document on Best Available Techniques in the Pulp and Paper Industry from the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control of the European Commission.
The report also notes that no standard will be effective in controlling pollution without effective compliance policies. With serious inadequacies in the enforcement histories of provincial regulations, an easily achievable first step in shoring up the failing regulatory system is effective enforcement of the current permits. The political will to hold industry accountable for their environmental and human health impact is a fundamental and necessary precursor to any effective system. Its absence is clear in the lack of enforcement measures taken when mills emit more pollution than their permits allow.
Toxic Substance Management Program
While federal effluent regulations instituted in the early 1990s have been effective, this appears to be an anomaly. The failure of the federal government to take effective measures to reduce pollution from pulp and paper mills across Canada is demonstrated in several ways. A range of programs on the Pulp and Paper Sector that were started, have either been aborted, or rendered ineffective.
Fundamental to the problems in regulation is that the industry is not properly monitored. The use of industry codes that are inconsistent and incomplete results in an inability to know what mills are actually operating, what is being monitored, or whether reductions in emissions are due to improved performance or due to shut downs.
The federal government currently has proposals for federal air emissions regulation based on data whose accuracy cannot be verified due to these reporting problems. The report holds that the proposed regulations are inadequate because they address only two pollutants.
The federal government’s Chemical Management Plan is currently instituting the Challenge Program, purported to deal with high priority substances. The program shows some serious deficiencies in that action for specific chemicals is based on risk assessments which do not consider cumulative health effects, concurrent exposure to other substances, or specific populations at higher risk of exposure such as workers, infants or children. There also appears to be serious flaws in the process that named 200 substances as ‘priorities for action’ out of approximately 23,000. The recent release of risk assessments for the third batch of chemicals under the program declassified 15 of the 19 included ‘priority’ substances from being declared toxic or requiring any measures at all.
Apart from the issues around domestic obligations, Canada is party to a number of international agreements that govern its responsibilities internationally, including the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Convention on Long-Range Trans-boundary Air Pollution, which includes several protocols related to Criteria Air Contaminants, heavy metals, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Volatile Organic Compounds. The report notes that lack of effective monitoring and regulation leaves Canada unable to claim that it is living up to these global commitments.
Pulp and Paper Pollution: The Toxic Legacy of Federal Neglect should be a wakeup call to all those who believe that our government is protecting human health and the environment from industrial emissions. It calls for the federal and provincial governments to live up to their responsibilities to develop strong enforceable regulations, institute credible and verifiable monitoring, and deal with the legacy of contaminated sites.
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Pulp and Paper Pollution: The Toxic Legacy of Federal Neglect by Anna Tilman for Reach for Unbleached! is available for download at www.rfu.org
[From WS November/December 2008]