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” - 公司继续前进。

Sort of.

二十年来，CANSO化学物质在皮克图县（Pictou County）的Abercrombie Point附近的一个地点生产了氯为制浆过程，但是当1992年新的纸浆和纸质废水法规生效时，该磨坊改用二氧化碳。不再需要化学厂关闭。

A Google search for “Canso Chemicals” turns up an address (Granton Abercrombie Road, New Glasgow, NS) and a phone number, which I called. Although the Google result states that it is “permanently closed,” someone did answer the phone with the words, “Canso Chemicals.” When I introduced myself, he said he could not make any comment, but would try to find someone who could answer my questions about the company. He took my number. I haven’t had a return call.

Canso Chemicals is also an “active” company on the Nova Scotia Registry of Joint Stocks. Its listed directors are: Curtis Richards of Cleveland, Tennessee; Pierre Ducharme of Becancour, Quebec (also listed as president); Choong Wei Tan of Richmond, BC (who is also a北部资源新斯科舍省公司主任, parent to Northern Pulp), and Seymore Thomas Dewtie of Abercrombie, NS. Canso Chemicals’ registered office and mailing address are the same as McInnes Cooper law offices in Halifax.

Canso Chemicals is anentityof the Olin Corporation, a “leading U.S. manufacturer of ammunition” and global supplier of chemicals. No stranger to Canada, the Olin Corporation’s Winchester Division has wonnumerous tenders向联邦政府提供军备，并在2009年赢得了一份合同以出售$ 420,313worth of guns to the federal penitentiary in Dorchester, NB.

For many years, the约翰·奥林基金会used “profits from the Olin chemical and munitions fortune” to channel millions of dollars into right-wing think tanks andastroturfgroups promoting conservative programs and causes in the United States.

Canso Chemicals’ relationship to the Olin Corporation explains the presence of Olin managers on the Canso Chemicals board of directors:Pierre Ducharmeis manager for Olin Canada ULC, andCurtis Richardsis Vice President of Environment, Health & Safety for the Olin Corporation in the US.

But Canso Chemicals’ relationship with the Olin Corporation does nothing to explain why the company still exists, and why it still owns 23 acres of land on Abercrombie Point on the site of a former plant that has not produced chemicals for the pulping process since 1992.

According to the Northern Pulp document (Section 8), p 165, submitted to the province for the environmental assessment process in February 2019:

The former Canso Chemicals plant is located on the adjacent property south of the NPNS [Northern Pulp Nova Scotia] facility industrial site. This adjacent operation was discontinued in the 1990s, but continues to serve as a distribution facility for NaOH [caustic soda].

In 2000, Dillon Consulting submitted a report entitled “Canso Chemicals Site Decommissioning Final Report” to the general manager of Canso Chemicals Limited, and cc’ed to Pioneer Chemicals Limited. The report says that Canso Chemicals had operated its chlor-alkali plant on Abercrombie Point for two decades, producing chlorine and caustic soda for the pulping process.

To do that, it needed mercury, and lots of it.

“We didn’t come here … to poison people”

Even before it opened in 1970, people in Pictou County were concerned about the possibility of mercury pollution from the Canso Chemicals plant. This was a time when the media were reporting widely on the debilitating effects ofMinamata diseaseof the central nervous system, caused by methyl mercury pollution.

1970年4月，弗格森·麦凯（Ferguson Mackay）发了一封电报，然后渔业部长杰克·戴维斯（Jack Davis）强调了风险：

代表Pictou县诺森伯兰海峡地区控制污染委员会，我们正在抗议Abercrombie的Canso Chemicals Limited工厂的开放，该工厂计划在几天之内运作。由于行动和毁灭性的结果，我们害怕在诺森伯兰海峡受到汞污染[;]我们要求阻止植物进行运作，直到对这些事项进行了调查。

In response, Canso Chemicals’ Jack Pink assured the community:

我们没有来这里……毒人……[我们]just to be an industry, employ people, and perform a useful service. This plant was designed and set up as the most modern of its kind for its size in the country but this mercury waste problem blew up only a short time ago and nobody had heard of it until then.

And:

The actual waste of mercury is minimal. Mercury is an expensive metal so every new plant is built a little better than the last one for the good reason of saving costs.

1970年4月29日，新的格拉斯哥新闻报道说，省政府水资源委员会的代表与CANSO化学官员会面，并告诉他们他们必须确保其新工厂只会造成可忽略的汞损失。该公司保证将采取措施遵守。

无论采取什么步骤，Canso化学品都采取了防止汞损失的方法，这些步骤显然无效。1977年，加拿大媒体报道说，该工厂“大量汞造成了神秘损失”。由于该公司于1972年开始向联邦环境部门报告，Canso Chemicals报告说，“未指控的汞损失”平均每年几吨，1975年达到高峰，损失了五吨。

It wasn’t until the plant stopped production in 1992, and the decommissioning of the plant began, that the mystery of the missing mercury was solved. According to the 2000 Dillon decommissioning report, equipment failures in the plant’s cell room from 1973 to 1975 resulted in “high mercury consumption and mercury was lost to the floor.”

Jill Graham Scanlan, president of the citizens’ groupFriends of the Northumberland Strait, whose father worked at Canso Chemicals, recalls her own working experience in the plant.

I worked there as a summer student while in university for a couple of years. One of my tasks was to vacuum mercury in the basement, under the cells, so I can certainly attest to the presence of mercury!

After it closed its plant, Canso Chemicals submitted a site remedial plan to the Nova Scotia Department of Environment. Remedial activities undertaken between 1992 and 1996 included finding mercury-contaminated soil under and around the Canso Chemicals plant, as well as materials collected in structures that were demolished; those items were to be disposed of in a “secure landfill” near the southern corner of the defunct plant.

后来，当1999年拆除建筑物的基础时，“在基岩中鉴定出元素汞”，深处是前室和盐水地下室的深处。这些汞矿床由于存在扩展污染的风险和深度而无法清除。正如我之前报道的Halifax Examiner, the mercury contamination is eight metres deep, five metres below the water table, and “there is potential for it to dissolve into groundwater and migrate towards Pictou Harbour.” According to the Dillon decommissioning report:

…the receptor of the mercury-impacted groundwater is expected to be Pictou Harbour, and the plume is expected to eventually discharge to the harbour approximately 700 m northwest of the former cell room … both water quality and sediment quality could be affected …

If there is any good news here, it is that the mercury plume may not reach Pictou Harbour for 200 years.

But that doesn’t mean the mercury isn’t a serious and constant concern. The provincial government has been doing annual mercury monitoring at the former Canso Chemical site for at least 20 years.

And, as先前报告的, the site being monitored for mercury is “next to the site of the proposed Northern Pulp effluent treatment plant.”

Northern Pulp在2019年2月提交的文件中没有提及汞污染provincial environmental assessmentof its replacement effluent treatment facility, despite the proximity of the proposed treatment plant and basins to the mercury-contaminated bedrock and landfill on the Canso Chemicals site. Some of the treatment basins proposed have depths of over seven metres.

An email to Nova Scotia Environment with questions about the nature of the mercury monitoring, where that monitoring is being conducted, whether the monitoring includes the landfill where contaminated materials were deposited in the 1990s, and whether Canso Chemicals pays for the monitoring, has not been answered.

该网站并未显示为新斯科舍省之一contaminated project sites.

谁拥有汞的问题?

Given that the mercury problem won’t be going away, monitoring will have to continue for many decades, even centuries. It is not clear who will pay the costs of the monitoring, or for more clean-up, should it be required — if the owners of Canso Chemicals are liable for these costs, or if Nova Scotians could wind up on the hook for them, as they are for theremediation of Boat Harbour.

The ownership of Canso Chemicals has never been widely publicized.

According to an unpublished report from 1970, the company was formed in 1968 by Canadian Industries Limited (CIL), Scott Maritimes (the first owner of the Pictou County pulp mill), Nova Scotia Pulp Ltd. at Port Hawkesbury.

1988年，Cil变成了ICI Canada. At some point,奥林came into the picture. Olin is a massive corporation that employs “6,500 professionals in more than 20 countries with customers in nearly 100 countries across the globe.” Today, Olin owns half of Canso Chemicals.

在它的2017 annual report, Olin reports that Northern Pulp, which it cryptically notes is “Pioneer related,” owns the other half of Canso Chemicals.

奥林的2018年filings美国证券交易委员会（SEC）表明，在其近100个子公司中，有一个称为“先锋公司，有限责任公司”的子公司，但没有解释先锋与北部纸浆的关系。

Northern Pulp是卓越论文集团的一员Sinar Mas“brand of companies, active in 6 business pillars: Pulp & Paper, Agri-business & Food, Financial Services, Real Estate, Communications & Technology and in Energy & Infrastructure.”

Northern Pulp certainly doesn’t advertise its partial ownership of Canso Chemicals. I could find no mention of it on the Paper Excellence / Northern Pulpwebsite.

AFacebook pagefor Canso Chemicals has been moribund since 2016.

Manta, a website documenting small businesses in America, describes Canso Chemicals Limited as a “privately held company in New Glasgow, NS,” and a “Single Location business” that can be categorized under “Special Warehousing and Storage.” According to Manta, “current estimates” show Canso Chemicals has annual revenue of $296,220 and a staff of “approximately 3.”

It is difficult to imagine that the two giant corporate behemoths that are ultimately its owners, Sinar Mas and Olin Corporation, can have much interest in such a tiny remnant of a company, which today employs three people and produces nothing at all.

So why does Canso Chemicals still exist?

Is it somehow more advantageous to keep the company in operation, at least nominally, so as to delay or avoid confronting the environmental liability of the mercury contamination on the land that Canso Chemicals owns?

Or is it possible — as impossible as it seems — that the Canso Chemicals site provides such an ideal caustic soda shipping and receiving facility that it is worthwhile for its owners to keep the company going?

But most importantly, has Canso Chemicals ensured that the mercury contamination on its land is a safe distance from Northern Pulp’s proposed replacement effluent treatment facility on Abercrombie Point?

Those are the questions I wanted to ask when I rang Canso Chemicals yesterday and left my number, hoping to hear back from someone who could answer them.

到目前为止，我还没有从Canso Chemicals中回电，Nova Scotia环境没有回复我的电子邮件，也没有回答我在加拿大Olin Canada发言人的问题。

I am still waiting.

Update:加拿大奥林发表后发表了以下声明：

2007年，奥林（Olin）收购了包括CANSO码头在内的PCI Canada ULC的资产。CANSO码头用于将产品运送到我们的新斯科舍省客户群。当前的提案不包括垃圾填埋场附近的发掘。作为一家负责护理公司，我们积极与加拿大的监管机构合作，以推动我们所有运营中的环境和安全性卓越。员工，社区和我们的环境的安全始终是我们的重中之重。

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Joan Baxter is author of工厂：五十年的纸浆和抗议.

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