Air Pollution

Coastal pulp mills create one-fifth of all the dioxin in Canada.

by Delores Broten

They still make dioxin in paradise. On the coast of BC traditionally logs are boomed and transported in salt water, soaking in salt on the trip and during storage. Coastal pulp mills burn bark and sawmill waste ("hog fuel") in their power boilers to make energy to run the mill.

Ozone is just good old oxygen, the stuff of life, but instead of two atoms of oxygen joined together, O2, ozone has 3, O3. Ozone is bad down here on earth, causing chronic lung damage to humans and billions of dollars of damage to crops. It is one pollutant which has not improved in urban areas over the last twenty years.

What's Going On Up There? and What's It Doing Down Here?

Air pollution is one of those complicated subjects where each factor is related to the other in a busy interdependent cycle of air pollution, atmospheric change, and natural balances.

by Wayne Cullins

This fall, the BC government is expected to pass new leg­islation (Bill 57 – The En­vironmental Management Act) that will replace the current pol­lution legislation, the Waste Manage­ment Act and the old Environmental Management Act. It contains several significant changes that would have major impacts on the way polluting industries are regulated in BC.

by Delores Broten

Ableman was speaking at a sombre public meeting on the eve of Earth Day in Crofton BC, the site of the controversial Norske Canada Crofton kraft mill. At the meeting, the CACG released a damning 122-page report prepared by RWDI AIR Inc. of Vancouver and Pioneer Technologies Corp. of Olympia WA. The report, commissioned by Reach for Unbleached! with proceeds

by Francesca Lyman
Published in The Green Guide (NewYork, March 2005) www.thegreenguide.com

You are what you eat, so they say. According to a number of new studies, however, you are also what you breathe — and even what your mother breathed. Recent research shows that air pollution of various

The BC “Gateway Program,” combined with the Canadian “Pacific Gateway Strategy,” is a $7 billion at­tempt to capture Asia-Pacific trade. The Gateway projects include new and expanded highways, bridges, rail expansions, rail yards and container terminals that will ultimately cost the taxpayers.

by Joe Foy, Campaign Director, Wilderness Committee

by Rob Wiltzen

A new Reach for Unbleached! report, Pulp and Paper Pollution: The Toxic Legacy of Federal Neglect has found that the federal government has neglected their responsibility to enact and enforce pollution prevention laws to regulate the environmental impact of pulp and paper mills in Canada. 

Throughout the various steps in the pulp and paper process, numerous hazardous contaminants such as dioxin, PCB, nonylphenol, chloroform, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and heavy

by Dave Stevens

“Out of Kilter: BC Pollution Monitors,” (Summer 2010), looked at errors in pollution data in the BC provin­cial monitoring network. There are similar issues on the national scene. 

The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, revised in

by Delores Broten

It comes as no surprise to those suffering from frequent “bad air days” around BC’s pulp mills. A new study of the air quality impacts of the Crofton pulp mill reveals that the air pollution permit levels could expose a wide swath of the countryside to air quality worse than provincial or fed­eral guidelines.

Reach for Unbleached! and the Crofton Airshed Citi­zens Group commissioned RWDI Air to model the po­tential impacts of mill emissions if the mill were to pump out pollution at the levels allowed by the permits