Just found this in the Montreal Gazette.
Wednesday 15 August 2001
Critics deflate tire deal
'Cement firms willing to burn anything,' says Sierra Club
MICHELLE LALONDE
The Gazette
ALLEN MCINNIS, GAZETTE
Workers in Saint-Constant bail tires yesterday for shipment to cement plant for burning. Quebec has signed $8 million in contracts with two cement companies in bid to empty tire-dump sites.
ALLEN MCINNIS, GAZETTE
Seen from the air, millions of tires sit in Saint-Constant awaiting shipment to local Lafarge Canada cement plant for burning.
Paying cement firms to burn up Quebec's mountains of used tires in their kilns is playing with fire, a prominent national environmental organization said yesterday.
"These cement companies are willing to burn anything that burns in their kilns, and I am not at all convinced they can burn tires cleanly," said Daniel Green, environmental scientist and adviser to the Sierra Club of Canada.
Environment Minister Andre Boisclair announced yesterday that the Quebec government has signed $8 million worth of contracts with two cement companies, Lafarge Canada in Saint-Constant and St. Lawrence Cement in Joliette.
The province will seek to sign an additional $14 million in contracts next spring in its bid to empty thousands of dedicated tire-dump sites across the province by 2008.
Boisclair said the dumps, where an estimated 25 million old tires are stockpiled, pose serious environmental and health hazards.
The province has been struggling with the question of what to do about the tire dumps since a major fire in Saint-Amable in 1990.
That fire, which consumed about 3 million tires, resulted in evacuations of residents and $12 million in clean-up costs to the government.
Boisclair also noted that old tires often hold stagnant water, creating mosquito breeding grounds that are of particular concern because mosquitoes can transmit the West Nile Virus and other diseases.
"We don't want tire dumps in Quebec," Boisclair said at an elaborate press conference at Lafarge's Saint-Constant plant yesterday.
TV camera operators and photographers boarded helicopters for a bird's-eye view of the scope of the South Shore's tire problem, while reporters toured the Lafarge facility to see how tires have been integrated into the cement-making process.
Quebec motorists are, in fact, financing the project, through the $3 "environmental fee" they pay on each new tire they buy.
That fee brings in about $20 million annually, with about one-third of that fund going toward emptying old dump sites and the rest toward dealing with the 6.5 million used tires generated annually.
Both cement plants have been burning non-recyclable tires since the mid-1990s, from Quebec and elsewhere, and have already retrofitted their kilns to accommodate this new fuel. The new contracts commit the companies to accept 7.5 million tires from dump sites over the next three years.
Boisclair called the program "avant-garde" and a good example to other jurisdictions. Quebec is recycling or reusing 83 per cent of the 6.5 million tires discarded each year in the province.
Cement is made by combining limestone, silica, alumina and iron in huge, rotating cylindrical ovens at temperatures of 1,450 degrees Celsius or higher. Cement plants can use various fuels to achieve that high temperature: Lafarge currently uses pitch and liquid coke - two petroleum by-products - as its main fuel, while St. Lawrence Cement uses waste oil, discarded railway ties and even old telephone poles as fuel.
While the used tires are mainly used as fuel, the steel belts in them do replace some of the iron required to produce cement. So the cement firms are not only being paid $40 to $50 a metric tonne to accept a fuel they need, they are being supplied with a raw material.
Pierre Beaulieu, environment and energy manager at St. Lawrence Cement, acknowledged the tire program is a good deal for cement producers. But he noted that the companies had to invest to retrofit their operations for tires and that they are helping the Quebec government with a pressing environmental problem.
He said tires do not produce more pollutants than other fuels the plants were already using, and for some pollutants, such as sulphur, the tires produce less.
Boisclair said the tires are being burned at such a high heat that there are virtually no emissions, but officials from both plants said only that their emissions are well below provincial and federal environmental norms.
Boisclair said no additional stack monitoring will be put in place by the province to determine emissions from tire burning, but he said current annual testing by the province is adequate.
The Sierra Club's Green said the province's environmental-monitoring system of cement plants and other industrial emissions is poor, and the federal government's National Pollution Release Inventory is also too dependent on self-monitoring by the industry.
Large polluters are required under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to report toxic emissions to the NPRI annually.
Lafarge Canada's Saint-Constant plant reported that it produced more than 11 tonnes of chromium, a toxic substance that some studies have linked to cancer, according to the NPRI's 1999 report. St. Lawrence Cement did not report to the NPRI, and neither plant officials nor NPRI officials could say yesterday why the company did not report.
Green called for a "full, independent, environmental audit on what these cement plants are emitting" when they burn tires and other fuels.
"Before we rush to burn mountains of tires, we have to make sure the cure is not worse than the (initial) problem," Green said.
He said tire manufacturers should be responsible for recycling or safely disposing of their tires, and that would put pressure on them to develop more environmentally friendly tires.
- Michelle Lalonde's E-mail address is mlalonde@thegazette.southam.ca.
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