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Canada and the United States are gradually cutting their industrial toxic waste streams, says the NAFTA environmental agency—thanks mainly to the good work of big, multinational industries.
Globalization may actually be good for the environment, says NAFTA’s Commission for Environmental Co-operation. In fact, small and medium-sized industries are becoming the worst offenders in the toxic waste area, the agency warns.
This view runs counter to the argument that globalization allows big companies to move from country to country to escape pollution controls. The commission’s top officer says global companies know they must take care, so that pollution problems in one country won’t undermine profits around the globe.
The agency found that Canada and the U.S. cut their industrial waste stream by 15 per cent from 1998 to 2004 (the most recent year for which figures are ready) and progress is especially good in reducing emissions of the most toxic categories of chemical wastes.
The annual report, Taking Stock 2004, is scheduled to go online today at www.cec.org.
The report breaks down toxic emissions by country, province and state, and lists individual pollutants separately.
The document is tricky to read: it counts both “releases” (such as gases vented to the air) and “transfers” (wastes sent to a treatment site or a recycler), and all pollutants are listed by weight, even though a kilogram of mercury is much more toxic than a kilogram of paint solvent.
Of the 3.12 million tonnes of chemicals released in Canada and the U.S., nearly one-quarter (707,500 tonnes) were released as air pollutants, largely by rubber or plastics factories.
Ontario had the largest total releases and transfers in North America, followed by Texas, Indiana and Ohio. But Ontario has a special case: a Windsor metal recycling firm called Zalev Brothers accounted for 19 per cent of Ontario’s total.
On paper, Zalev shows up as a source of pollution. In reality, recyclers like this one are taking scrap metal, reclaiming a large part of it to be used again, and discarding only the material that can’t be recycled—none of which really came from the recycling firm in the first place.
Without Zalev, Texas would have had the largest total releases and transfers and Ontario would have ranked second.
“In general, the report shows a
decline (in pollution) in the past six years, both in the U.S. and Canada,” Adrian Vazquez-Galvez, the commission’s executive director, said in an interview.
“That’s great news. The other great news is that the overall amount of highly toxic substances is in decline.”
Releases of cancer-causing pollutants fell by 22 per cent from 1998 to 2004 (31 per cent less to the air and 14 per cent less into lakes and rivers).
But some individual factories are still major polluters: Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting, in Flin Flon, Man., led the continent by putting 1,482 kilograms of mercury into the air; Irving Pulp and Paper in Saint John, N.B., flushed a North-American-high 17 tonnes of formaldehyde into nearby waters.
The overall improvement “is good news, and it’s also a useful reminder of the importance of having these pollutant-release and transfer registers,” said Rick Findlay, who runs the water-pollution office of Pollution Probe.
“You can be guaranteed that environmental groups, citizens in those communities and probably local governments and provincial governments are going to be looking at these findings,” he said.
“This is important information, and it should be and is being used by local citizens to ask questions about what’s happening in their communities and what the impact on their health might be, and what the companies’ plans are for improving that.”
The biggest progress comes from companies with one million kilograms or more of waste substances, Mr. Vazquez-Galvez said.
Small and medium industries “show a tendency to increase” in waste production, he said. “To us it means that we really need to pay more attention to these facilities.”
He believes that smaller companies are less likely to create formal waste-reduction plans, to support them with staff and funds or to adopt environmental management standards such as ISO 14000.
“The tendency of large corporations is to go global,” he said. This, he said, makes them better environmental citizens because it raises their profile: “They don’t want to be associated with liabilities or with some problem to export or move their products across borders, so normally they invest heavily in their environmental issues. So that is not a surprise. It speaks well of the large corporations in North America, which is something that we have been promoting—to have protection of the environmental as a competitive edge for North America.”
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007