akeside Leader Formaldehyde, cadmium, carbon monoxide. Lead, sulphur dioxide and phosphorus too. They’re all coming out of the stacks of industrial plants in the Slave Lake area, or in effluent.
Slave Lake Town councillor Rob Irwin raised more than a few eyebrows last month at a council meeting when he asked Tolko officials about formaldehyde emissions. Noting that Tolko’s Slave Lake plant had released 17.5 tonnes of the noxious gas in 2004, Irwin wanted to know if the company was doing enough to reduce such emissions.
It was unexpected, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been. Such information about local industries is readily available on the Internet. Environment Canada publishes company-by-company figures from across the country and has been for some time. Irwin had simply searched on the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) website for the M.D. of Lesser Slave River, and got a list of all the industrial operators. Under each is a ‘preliminary’ account of what it released in 2004 and in some cases several years before that.
The intent of the information being made public, as Irwin understands it, “is to encourage industry to do better.” He thinks Environment Canada provides the data hoping it will result in public pressure on industry to improve its practices.
In fact the NPRI itself has no opinion (at least publicly) about the figures it posts. Art Becket of that organization told The Leader that “the public’s right to know,’ is the main consideration.
Given the mills’ distance from town, and the general lack of enthusiasm for environmental activism in the area, public pressure may not be forthcoming in any great degree. But anyone interested can find the emission figures for Acclaim Energy’s Mitsue gas plant at the top of the list, down to Vanderwell Contractors’ sawmill at the lower end of the alphabet at http://www.ec.gc.ca/npri-inrp-comm. In between are Alberta Plywood, Slave Lake Pulp and numerous gas plants.
Some examples: Acclaim’s Mitsue gas plant dumped 251 tonnes of nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere in 2004. Alberta Plywood’s veneer mill sent up 2,176 tonnes of carbon monoxide, doing its part for global warming. Devon Canada’s Marten Hills gas plant emitted 22.7 tonnes of sulphur dioxide. Slave Lake Pulp produced 44 kilograms of cadmium, which according to the NPRI information was disposed of off-site.
“Cadmium is very, very nasty,” says Irwin.
The list goes on. It is interesting enough in itself, but in the absence of any background information on the properties of the pollutants and how the figures relate to government limits, it’s only marginally useful. Plenty of research would be required to put it into some sort of helpful perspective.
In the case of formaldehyde, Tolko engineer Erik Munck provides some of that perspective. For starters, he says, the NPRI figures – although probably accurate in themselves, can be misleading. The reporting is voluntary, and thus somewhat unreliable as a means of comparing one facility to another.
For example, a conscientious company, reporting comprehensive emission figures, could “end up looking like the bad guy,” next to a similar producer that does less diligent testing or reporting.
The Tolko formaldehyde, Munck says is a natural by-product of the heating of wood. When the strands that make up oriented strandboard are heated to drive the moisture out, formaldehyde in the wood is released. It goes up the stack, and occurs in fairly high concentrations there. However, it loses its potency quite quickly, as ambient air tests at ground level around the mill show.
“By the time the plume touches the ground, concentrations are very low,” Munck says.
Some formaldehyde is also released in the OSB press, and goes out with the steam through a stack.
There is also the possibility of leakage of formaldehyde gas from the dryer, which apparently happened in Tolko’s High Prairie mill.
“High Prairie had different dryers,” Munck says. “They had leakage problems. They’ve spent $20 million on upgrades.”
Munck says the newer system there has reduced emissions, improved fire safety (chips in the dryers occasionally ignite) and increased chip throughput.
Tolko’s new mill will have a chip-drying system that is slower, and will therefore release less formaldehyde than the dryers in use at the current mill. But even those emissions are far below the province’s acceptable limits, Munck says.
The highest ground-level measurement of formaldehyde near the mill in 2004 was .12 micrograms per cubic metre. According to Munck, the Alberta Environment guideline is 65 micrograms per cubic metre. Kent Dixon of that department told The Leader it was 100.
The cadmium by-product produced at Slave Lake Pulp is also well within the limits set out by the province. According to mill manager Rick Denton, the heavy metal occurs naturally in the wood the mill uses to make pulp. It comes out suspended or dissolved in liquid effluent. Some of it ends up into the Lesser Slave River and some of it is in the sludge that the mill spreads on farmers’ fields as fertilizer.
Some of the cadmium – as well as nitrogen and phosphorus (84 tonnes last year) – in the sludge comes from the fertilizer that the mill uses in effluent treatment. Denton says all effluent treatment – including that of every municipality – uses nitrogen and phosphorus and also releases ammonia.
“The excess gets discharged,” he says. “I’m sure the Town discharges more ammonia than we do.”
Municipalities, however, do not have to report their pollutant releases to the NPRI, something that Denton thinks is not really fair.
Alberta Environment doesn’t seem to have any big concerns with the pollutant releases of companies in Slave Lake. Amit Banerjee, an industrial approvals engineer with the department, says although the amounts of nitrogen oxides released by local plants might seem like a lot, compared to the releases at power plants, they aren’t. Environment keeps a closer eye on them, he says.
Alberta Environment is generally keeping an eye on everything, assures department spokesperson Kent Dixon. The department monitors companies’ stack emission reports and does spot checks of stacks as well as occasional ground-level air quality tests. Companies in the Slave Lake area have been complying well, he says.
To find out details about each of the substances reported in this article or on the National Pollutant Release Inventory website, the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) website at atsdr.cdc.gov, is a good place to start. It provides fact sheets about each pollutant – what it is, how it enters the environment and what are its health risks.

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