 |
No. 12 October 1997 News for All Interested in Featuring News, Analysis, Resources and Contacts |
Search this site Campaigns Publications Technical  Pulp & Paper About Reach! Contact Us Links |
MillWatch table of contents
MillWatch No. 12 - October 1997
MX or Compound X?
Diseased Trees And Sludge
Skeena Mill Re-Opens
Fibre For Sustainable Us Pulp & Paper Industry
Pulp Growth Stats
Powell River Grate Ash/Lime Dregs Appeal: Substantive Victory!
Mercury In Bellingham Bay
Evergreen Students
Explosion Injures Seven
Pulping Borneo
Fletcher Sells Blandin
Thanks this issue to Laurie Valeriano, Miranda Holmes, Darrell Geist, Verona Goodwin, Peter Ronald, Billy Stern, Brainerd Foundation, Rogers Environ mental Education Foundation, Bullitt Foundation.
A study in the Journal of the US National Cancer Institute reports that MX, a byproduct from the chlorination of drinking water in the presence of organic matter, is associated in the lab with a number of different types of cancer in rats.
MX (3-chloro-4-(dichloromethyl)-5-hydroxy-2(5H)-furone) is produced in trace amounts, but is one of the strongest mutagens ever tested in the Ames assay. It is thought to be responsible for over one-third of the mutagenicity of chlorinated pulp effluent. MX can also be formed by aqueous chlorination of several phenolic compounds.
* Victoria Times-Colonist, July 1997 and "Mutagenic Compounds in Chlorinated Pulp Bleaching Waters and Drinking Waters," Complex Mixtures and Cancer Risk, ed. H. Hainie et al. Lyon, Inter national Agency for Research on Cancer, 1990.
Pole-sized Red pine in Georgia Pacific's Wiscon sin plantations where paper mill sludge had been spread several years before appear to be more suscep tible to shoot blight and canker than comparable untreated plantations. Pine needles in treated stands showed 20% to 30% more nitrogen than the untreated stands and a higher colonization by shoot blight spores. Similar results have been reported in the Netherlands, where the nitrogen comes from high levels of ammonium in the soil due to atmospheric deposition. Canker diseases in loblolly pine have also been associated with the application of animal manure or chemical fertilizer. Researchers speculate that excessive nitrogen nutrition may stimulate fungal infection by inducing moisture stress.
* "Can Fertilization with Paper Mill Waste Sludge Threaten Forest Health and Productivity?" G. R. Stanosz and J. Trobaugh, Pulp and Paper Canada, 97:5 (1996)
After weeks of hardball negotiations, the British Columbia government, the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada, and the Toronto-Dominion and Royal banks, agreed to re-open the Skeena Cellulose pulp mill in Prince Rupert on the northern coast of British Columbia. The mill, drowning in debt, had been cast out of George Petty's foundering Repap Co., closing sawmills across the north.
The banks wrote off $305 million in debt for a 55% share in the mill, with the government holding 25% and passing 20% on to the union. Workers suffered a 10% wage rollback, and the loss of 161 jobs. The government will put up $155 million, including a $74 million loan for capital expenditures. The mill's effluent fails daphnia toxicity tests.
Some critics blame the high cost of pulp chips in the province for woes in the pulp industry, while others note that the province has at least one too many pulp mills. British Columbia produces about 15% of the world's market kraft pulp.
* Vancouver Sun, Prince Rupert Daily News, October 1997 AIR PERMIT INCREASES
In May, Howe Sound Pulp Mill was given an air permit amendment, increasing its nitrogen oxide emissions and tripling its allowable level of sulphur dioxide output to 300 milligrams per cubic metre. The mill had been unable to abide by its permit since the early 1990s. The mill plans to install new hog fuel presses and burn more waste wood efficiently.
* North Shore News, May 1997
Maureen Smith, The U. S. Paper Industry and Sustainable Production: An Argument for Restructuring. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1997 303 pp., $30 US.
This book should be read by anyone concerned with the long-term environmental OR economic sustainability of the pulp and paper industry in North America. Although the "sectoral analysis" with an environmental slant which the author expounds has a somewhat academic flavour, the text provides an illuminating analysis of the structure of this massive and ponderous industry. The book is divided into six chapters. The first provides an overview of the US industry, and those familiar with the Canadian industry will quickly see the similarities and differences between the two. The next chapters examine forests and shifting regional sources of fibre, production processes and pollution, and paper recycling. The fifth chapter presents a fascinating historical account of MacMillan Bloedel's somewhat ham-fisted attempt to establish a gigantic recycling plant in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta of California. In her concluding chapter, Smith calls for regional sectoral analyses, due to the differences in fibres, markets and structures of the industry in different regions.
Smith explores the fashion in which the pulp industry actually calls the shots in the logging indus try, since over 60% of US fibre now goes to the pulp and chip markets. She highlights the shocking increase in US paper consumption of 56% between 1970 and 1990. She also examines how recycling has, instead of alleviating pressure on the forest, allowed industry to begin a new emphasis on export of pulp chips from the Pacific Northwest. She suggests that a bioregional approach to the industry might be able to focus on such obvious weak points for established mills as the transport of fibre and product, which represent 10-25% of the delivered cost of pulp and paper, as well as promoting appropriate new fibre mini-mills, both from pollution permit and consumer angles.
The dominant industry view of the future essentially, as activists know too well, involves some minor tinkering with the edges of production, whereas Smith suggests that alternative guidelines for sustainable paper production and consumption will include diversification around regional, sustainable fibre sources, diversification of geographic distribution, clean production for alternative fibres and smaller mills, declining consumption, and declining long- distance trade in fibre, pulp, paper and wastepaper.
Pulp & paper capacity in Canada continued to grow in 1996 although production declined slightly. The industry operated at 89.7% of capacity compared to 94.4% in 1994 and the high of 95.3% in 1980. Total Canadian shipments of pulp and paper products totaled 27.96 million tonnes of which 83% was exported. Recyclable paper consumption as a percentage of paper and paperboard production reached 23.8% in 1996. Canadian newsprint capacity was 25.8% of estimated world capacity, down from 30.7% ten years ago. During that same period, world demand rose 24.4%.
World pulp and paper production chips 4 billion trees annually. Paper consumption has increased at four times the population growth in this century, and is projected to double again within 15 years.
In the USA, the largest consumer of paper in the world, 272 million trees are cut annually to produce paper. Americans use 600 pounds per person. The pulp and paper industry is the third largest energy consumer in the US and the single largest user of industrial fuel oil.
* Reference Tables, Canadian Pulp and Paper Association;
* Fact sheet, Native Forest Network
Powell River Grate Ash/Lime Dregs Appeal: Substantive Victory!
The BC Ministry of Environment has released its decision on the appeal of the Powell River kraft pulp mill's permit to spread grate ash and lime dregs in "experimental" applications. The appeal, by writer Anne Cameron, Paddy Goggins, and Reach for Un bleached, was denied in its attempt to have the permit squashed, but substantively upheld in the matter of further testing as requested by Reach and ordered by Deputy Director of Waste Management Dave F. Brown, the official hearing the appeal.
The mill wished to use the grate ash as a roadbed material, and apply the lime dregs to a disused golf course as a soil amendment. The decision grouped the grounds for appeal and responded to each argument.
A) The permit fails to protect the environment:
* insufficient data to support the benign nature of the waste
* less than adequate testing of the current waste disposal systems
"For the most part" dismissed: "However the data presented is inadequate to determine if the beneficial reuse option should be pursued," especially at more than one site. Permit to be amended to require additional testing before any disposal: seven different samples to be analysed for the heavy metals, dioxins and furans, total PAHs, and phenolics identified in Schedules 4 & 5 of the Contaminated Sites Regulation. Testing required because of anomalies in analyses, and some high values for metals and organics. Results to be tabulated and made public.
B) The permit violates the precautionary principle
* design of experimental project is flawed
* potential for waste materials to end up in surface water
UPHELD! Permit must be amended to require:
The mill claimed these dispersals were "beneficial re-use" but the ministry said that no benefit had yet been proven and at this point the dispersals were "a linear landfill" and a "overland flow disposal system."
C) The waste material contains phthalates, including DEHP
Denied; but additional testing to determine if the DEHP was a "transitory contaminant."
D) lack of public consultation
Denied.
Copies of all required reports to be provided to appellants and the community.
Puget Soundkeeper Alliance is suing Georgia-Pacific Corp. for mercury releases from its Bellingham sulfite pulp mill, claiming G-P exceeded its Clean Water Act permit limits for mercury dis charges 32 times between November 1992 and early 1997. Georgia-Pacific and Washington state Department of Ecology dispute the charges. Meanwhile, the company and governments are studying methods to clean up mercury-contaminated sediments in Belling ham Bay. The mill has been in operation since the mid-1920's, and manufactures chlorine and caustic soda as well as pulp.
* Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, July 1997
Evergreen Students for Chlorine Free Paper at Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington have produced a fine booklet called "Chlorine Free Paper: How to Make the Switch" which out lines the steps they took in their campaign to switch the campus to a recycled unbleached paper. Their booklet has sample letters to faculty and resources to help other students. If you would like a copy of this booklet, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Reach for Un bleached Canada.
An explosion at a Georgia Pacific Pulp and Paper plant in Columbus Ohio sent seven people to hospital and caused the evacuation of neighbouring businesses. The incident occurred when a plant employee mixed phenol and formaldehyde with sulfuric acid to make a resin.
* ENS, September 1997
China and Malaysia plan a $1.6 billion venture to build a pulp and paper mill on Borneo, producing 750,000 tons of pulp and 225,000 tons of paper annually, largely for export to China. It will provide 6,500 jobs, including 200 managerial and technical positions. The project will have its own "sustainable forest management program converting and rehabilitating waste and idle land" into 220,000 hectares of forest plantation with an annual production of 3.8 million cubic meters of pulp wood. The partners are also looking into other possible sites in Malaysia to establish another pulp and paper mill of similar capacity.
* AP, August 1997
Fletcher Challenge Canada has sold its US subsidiary Blandin Paper Co. of to UPM-Kymmene of Helsinki for $900 million Can. UPM is the world's second largest printing paper producer. Fletcher plans to concentrate on newsprint and groundwood pulp. It is one of the world's specialists in using sawdust to make market pulp.