With the pipeline now gone, Canso Chemicals and Northern Pulp have to find other ways to deal with the surface water that accumulates on their industrial sites.
As the Halifax Examiner reported here, Northern Pulp negotiated an attractive arrangement for itself with the Municipality of the Council of Colchester to dispose of its wastewater — landfill leachate and stormwater — in the Colchester facility that empties into the Salmon River, which in turn runs into Cobequid Bay in the inner Bay of Fundy.
A 2020 Ministerial Order mandated the company use an “Approved” facility to treat the wastewater.
However, Canso Chemicals found another option. According to Tracy Barron, spokesperson for Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change (NSECC), Canso Chemicals installed a “treatment unit for site runoff (surface water)” in May this year.
“The volume is weather dependent,” Barron told the Examiner. “The company tests the site runoff (including for mercury) and has not discharged any treated site runoff into the environment at this time. Canso Chemicals has an Industrial Approval to discharge the treated site runoff into the East River if the analysis meets the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment criteria. To this point, it has not met the criteria and has been shipped to a third-party facility for additional treatment.”
More details can be found here...