Sent to the Spec in response to Howard Elliots Opinion Piece. Mr.Elliot, I couldnt agree more. Most of the people opposed to this plant would love to see some evidence and less marketing rhetoric, less emotional response to the potential of jobs and possibly taxes. However, we need to start with clearing up the misunderstanding about incineration. Incineration of waste materials converts the waste into ash, flue gas, and heat. The ash is mostly formed by the inorganic constituents of the waste, and may take the form of solid lumps or particulates carried by the flue gas. Thats what this plant does. It isnt a oil drum with a tire burning in it, but it is legally classified as an incinerator. Repeat, it is an incinerator. As for the rhetoric around pollution, from Port Fuel and Material Services, Inc.s own website, comes the document that states the model process in Swindon fails to meet Ontarios Guideline A7 -Air Pollution Control, Design and Operation Guidelines for Municipal Waste Thermal Treatment Facilities. Repeat, doesnt meet Ontarios Environmental Emission Standards. The company says it will add pollution controls to their process, but there is no data to prove those controls will make the process meet the standards. And that leads to the very important fact that isnt mentioned at all. The plant in Hamilton is going to be 3,400x larger than anything they have built. They have a test facility run intermittently for 3,000 hours over a 8 year period. (there are 23,040 working hours in 8 years) Their test facility had no environmental monitoring done by any government agency, it was too small. They were licensed to burn only 50 tonnes of garbage a year. They want to burn 200,000 tonnes in Hamilton. This company has never built a full size plant; has never received approval to build a plant this large. As this plant is a more complex operation than an oil drum to burn tires, problems in upscaling are massive. Existing Plants using gasification, pyrolysis, or plasma arc technologies have major technical problems causing pollution and long term shut downs. The Plasco plant in Ottawa is a case in point. Another fact, not rhetoric is that if they succeed in getting this plant built, they have applied to receive garbage from all over Canada, by truck, by rail, by barge through our harbour. They will have to bring in garbage, large amounts of it because we dont make enough garbage to make this plant commercially viable. Plus, municipal waste alone wont make this plant commercially viable. Landfill operators can drop their dumping fees per tonne to $3.00 and still make a profit. The lowest price per tonne mentioned by PFMS Inc, is $50.00 per tonne. The only sources that will pay $50.00 and up per tonne to dump garbage produce toxic waste. So in summary, without passionate rhetoric, An inexperienced company wishes to build an experimental garbage plant adjacent to land that was promised to be remediated by the Port Authority into public access green space. They have said they will add pollution controls to make the process meet Ontario Emission standards, but havent tried or tested them. No data available. This company wants to import 200,000 tonnes of garbage a year to be processed on Hamiltons Harbour front. 200,000 tonnes of garbage on our roads, rail lines and on our harbour. Their profitability appears to be based on processing toxic waste. In return for this, Hamilton might gain 30 jobs, the majority of them in lower paying jobs sorting garbage and housekeeping. Without emotional rhetoric, I fail to see the logic here
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 20:41:33 +0000
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