The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency announced yesterday it was launching an environmental assessment of the proposed cleanup of the Boat Harbour lagoons where tens of million of litres of daily effluent from the kraft pulp mill at Abercrombie Point have been stored, aerated, and released into the Northumberland Strait for 50 years. Tonnes of watery […]
Nova Scotia has a mercury problem
Facilities associated with Northern Pulp Mill's proposed effluent pipe are immediately adjacent to a mercury-contaminated toxic waste site left over from the Canso Chemicals operation
Cover photo: A Mad Tea-Party by Lewis Carroll with the Hatter, March Hare and Alice. It turns out that using a lot of mercury, as human beings have done for centuries — in everything from haberdashery to gold production to medicine — wasn’t such a great idea after all. Although this realization came only in […]
Pulp Culture
How Nova Scotia’s Faustian bargain with the pulp industry may leave the sawmills in ruins
I wonder if Billy Freeman, a sixth generation saw-miller with 15 years experience, saw this juncture coming. A few weeks ago, Freeman, the process improvement manager at Harry Freeman and Son Ltd. in Greenfield, Nova Scotia wrote an illuminating op-ed in the Chronicle Herald supporting Northern Pulp in its request for an extension of the […]
The Canso Chemicals mystery: With the chemical plant long gone, why is the company still alive? And what about all that mercury pollution?
Canso Chemicals hasn’t produced any chemicals for 29 years, but — contrary to what I wrote in the Halifax Examiner in “Northern Pulp’s environmental documents: missing mercury, a pulp mill that never was, and oodles of contradictions” — the company lives on. Sort of. For two decades Canso Chemicals produced chlorine for the pulping process […]