Author Archives: Anca Pascalau

It’s water cannons vs. dust at Unimin mine site near Havelock

Mikhail Clarkson points to a 10-acre section of mostly flat, gray hardpan. A scattering of grasses and other vegetation that are taking hold grow thicker close to a pond at one end where a half dozen Canada geese swim.

A series of pipes supply an irrigation system and a few large water cannons.

“Five years ago we maintained this area just like a big desert. It was a beach,” says Clarkson, the assistant plant manager at Unimin Canada’s nepheline syenite mine north-east of Havelock in the heart of cottage country. “There was no grass at all.”

Dust was a real problem, especially on hot, dry windy summer days.

Nepheline syenite is an igneous rock that bubbled up to the surface as lava just over one million years ago. It crushes down to a bright, white powder that is used as a filler in almost all glass and ceramic products and in outdoor paint

The tailings left over after the rock is crushed and powdered had always been “slurried.” That is, mixed with water, pumped out over several flat areas that total about 100 acres and left to dry. Hence the dust.

Water was also a problem. Not technically a problem because the company had permits that allowed it to draw water from lakes on the mine property and discharge effluent back in.

However, like most modern corporations, Unimin no longer frames its environmental obligations as simply meeting the base requirements set by government regulators.

“I think that attitude started to change at about the same time that I was hired on, about 10 years ago,” says Clarkson. That was right after he graduated from Queen’s University with a degree in mining engineering.

“It’s something that’s happening in corporate Canada generally. You use the term ‘social licence to operate.’ You can’t be in industry any more without being conscious of the people around you and the environment in which you work.”

The dust problem came to a head in 2012. After a particularly hot, dry spell, high winds stirred a dust storm that affected cottages and homes on nearby Kasshabog Lake. The company was charged by the provincial environment ministry and eventually fined more than $400,000.

But long before the court case was settled, Unimin had begun a $1.5 million investment that would solve the dust issue, substantially reduce the amount of water the mine uses and completely end all effluent discharge.

One part of the solution was to use water that drains off the hillsides of the property as the mixing agent for slurry. Water is still taken from two lakes on the mine property, Barrette Lake and Big Mountain Lake, but substantially less of it.

A system of filtration ponds now filters the water so it can be re-used in the slurry process. That closed loop means the same water is used again and again. And any remaining water is used to irrigate the slurry fields, which will eventually go back to grass and vegetation.

There was a time when Unimin pumped 1.2 million litres of water out of Big Mountain Lake daily. That number is now down to 450,000 litres. And because rainwater that gathers in the huge open pit mine is pumped back into Barrette Lake in a two-stage process, the net effect there is an addition to the lakes system: on an average day 361,000 litres are pumped out and nearly 900,000 litres of rainwater go back in.

The entire mine site covers 3,000 acres but just 10 per cent of it is actively in use, including the 400-foot deep pit mine, slurry fields, roads and the Nephton and Blue Mountain processing plants.

One section of slurry field is now in the last stage of reclamation.

“We’re doing the final elevation and reclaiming it right now. Were putting down the final layer of grass and sod and we’re going to have a nice hill for the kids to play on,” Clarkson says.

Or maybe another option.

“They’re talking about a golf course. It would make a great golf course.”

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner.  By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, June 18, 2016.

Composting at 100 per cent at Food Forest

It’s the end of the lunch rush and Food Forest Cafe is buzzing with conversation, so Adam Deck and Katie Tuma suggest we do our interview out back.

Turns out they were speaking literally. We head outside to an open area behind the Water St. restaurant. Three mismatched chairs, which I later learn likely came from a thrift store, are waiting for us.

Next to the chairs are a few orange, five-gallon pails. Katie says there would usually be a lot more. The pails hold food scraps that farmers and gardeners pick up and use for compost, returning the pails later. During an average week Food Forest gives away 18 pails of the stuff, or 90 gallons.

Deck waves toward a brick wall that separates the courtyard area behind this section of Hunter St. buildings from those along Water St.

On the other side of the wall is a large dumpster bin that other restaurants in the block share and pay to have hauled away.

“Because we’re a plant-based restaurant 100 per cent of our food waste can be composted,” Deck says. “So, at the end of the week we have less than one garbage bag.”

That’s less garbage than most households produce. It goes to the curb for pickup by the city, a big cost saving for them and a load off the landfill site.

Food Forest is vegan and gluten free. It’s no coincidence that the plant-based nature of their menu produce minimal garbage. Deck and Tuma are health and ecology advocates first and restaurateurs second.

They met while studying ecological restoration at Fleming College in Lindsay. Inspired by what they were learning. they looked for a way to make a difference on their own. A vegan restaurant run on strict environmental principles was a natural outlet.

Tuma describes their relationship as “partners in life and in the restaurant.”

Food Forest opened three years ago in a smaller George St. location just north of downtown. A year ago they expanded to the 32-seat Hunter St. site, where they have 10 employees.

The restaurant’s fun, quirky feel fits its clientele and its owners’ personalities, but it was put together with intent.

Pine boards used during the interior renovation are all recovered scrap, most of it sourced from Deck’s father, who owns Deck Transport, a third-generation local trucking firm.

“We also do a lot of thrifting,” Tuma says. “Most of our small pots and cups and teapots are from the thrift store. . . . We aren’t really fans of buying all new.”

When possible they go beyond re-use to “don’t use.”

They don’t give out cutlery as part of their busy take-out business. Take-out containers are made from cane juice pulp, not paper, but they would rather you not use them at all. They charge 25 cents per container and encourage customers to bring their own instead.

“After doing a couple hundred of those orders that saves a lot of waste,” Deck says.

“And gets the conversation going,” Tuma adds. “We have really strict policies – our non-straw in house policy; we don’t give out take-out cutlery – things like that those create conversations, which makes some people uncomfortable but it allows us to explain why we’re doing it and that causes them to think about things in a different way.” They buy their organic vegetables locally whenever possible – Jenny Ross of Earth Nook Farm is their main local provider – and manage the entire business with a mindset of being sustainable, waste free and low carbon.

But the key element, they say, is serving only plant-based food.

“In regards to climate change, wth animal agriculture, especially the intense factory farming that goes on, the greenhouse gas emissions are more than all transportation combined,” Tuma says.

They see no endpoint to their sustainable journey.

“It shouldn’t just stop at a green promise or something like that,” Tuma says. “We kind of assess what we can improve on and how we can get the community involved. It’s fun … fun having that role.”

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner.  By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, June 18, 2016.

Siemens is cutting its carbon footprint, locally and abroad

Sometimes, meeting a green goal is a simple as handing out a coffee mug.

Not just one mug, though.

Three years ago, an in-house team at Siemens that works to ensure the environmental footprint laid down by the Technology Dr. factory is as small as possible realized that their cafeteria went through a lot of paper cups.

“Employees were using a lot of paper coffee cups, and they were bringing them into the facility from Tim Horton’s etc., so we handed out reusable coffee mugs,” recalls Lori MacLeod, the plant’s environmental, health and safety manager.

“We also went a step further and said, ‘If you’re going to buy coffee in the cafeteria and use your reusable mug you get five cents off the coffee.”

Each of the 325 employees got a thermal mug. The result: in addition to whatever dent they made in paper cup consumption at local coffee shops, the cafeteria now buys 60 per cent fewer cups.

Similar employee participation initiatives help the local Siemens plant meet energy and waste reduction targets it gets from its national head office. But the impetus for green performance is ultimately driven by the international parent company.

Siemens AG, based in Germany, has 350,000 employees in 187 countries. One of its goals is to be the first world’s first major industrial company to reduce it’s output of carbon – the primary source of climate-change inducing greenhouse gas – to net zero.

The target date for a zero carbon footprint is 2030.

Scott Hoy is the facility and maintenance manager at the Technology Dr. plant. Since coming to Siemens from GE-Hitachi eight months ago he’s been responsible for a project to replace the large air handlers that heat and cool the 180,000 sq. ft. building, along with some of the rooftop HVAC units, with more energy efficient equipment.

“We can recover heat within the building, too,” Hoy says. “A lot of our processes give off heat, which would just be sent outside. We’re looking at a recirculation method and heat recovery to reduce that so we won’t have to use the gas fired heaters as much.”

Smaller efficiency measure are often suggested by employees through the company’s 3i program – ideas, impulses and initiatives.

“We had one employee up in the offices and one employee downstairs put in a 3i idea and I’ve approved it and it’s going through. It’s putting in motion sensors in the copy room and the coat room upstairs,” Hoy explains.

The sensors will turn lights on and off depending on whether someone is using the space.

“We could do that in the kitchen, too,” Macleod says, adding one more entry to the 3i file.

Macleod notes that the ubiquitous wooden pallets that arrive when equipment and supplies are delivered had been a problem.

“We had a real struggle finding someone who would use and recycle them. In the last two quarters we’ve actually diverted six tonnes of wood scraps into recycling.”

The skids are now recycled in Lindsay, an arrangement set up by Greenspace Waste Solutions, a Brampton based company that for the past year has mangaged the waste from the plant.

Following an extensive renovation of the plant’s offices, Greenspace is finding a home for less conventional “waste” that would otherwise end up in a landfill, Hoy says.

“We’re working with Greenspace and another company called CSR Ecosolutions. They will come in and take all the old office furniture, refurb it, fix it up, and then they donate it to charities that need it.”

Projects like that have helped push the plant’s waste diversion rate up to 73%, Macleod says. Ten years ago that figure was 61 per cent.

In January the plant received this year’s Environmental Excellence Business Award from Otonabee Conservation, recognizing Siemens employees for having planted 1,200 trees and shrubs around the city and county over the past five years.

Workers get paid time off to take part in those Earth Day tree planting projects, another example of Siemens’ commitment to a green agenda.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner.  By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Monday, May 23rd, 2016. 

This is a greener General Electric Peterborough

There was a time when the machine was everything in industry, and everything was designed around the machine.

Not today. The machine is one piece in a process and everything about the process is important.

That focus on the entire work environment – and its effect on the natural environment – is evident during a tour of GE Canada’s venerable Park St. plant.

Raul Ceron, the plant quality and process improvement leader, leads the way to Building 16 and a bank of ovens where huge stators are baked to harden their coating. A stator is the stationary section of a motor. The 20-foot-tall ovens can accommodate a 30-tonne stator.

Russell Nash, the advanced manufacturing engineering leader, says the new, largest ovens were installed during Project Caribou, a comprehensive overhaul that began three years ago.

“These other ovens were retrofitted with RTO, regenerative thermal oxidizers, and we were able to get some incentives from Enbridge Gas on that,” Nash explains. “Essentially what it does, the heat that you are generating in the oven goes through an oxidizer and that subsequently reclaims the heat and it goes back into the oven.”

Carbon filters added to the top of the emission stacks mean they also burn cleaner, reducing their environmental impact.

Enbridge is also a player in week-long “eco-treasure hunts.” Hunt teams includes specialists from other parts of the GE operation as well as suppliers such as Enbridge and Peterborough Utilities Inc. They look for ways to improve environmental efficiency.

Projects identified during a hunt are followed up on, “then we come back in a few years and do another one,” Nash says.

Involving suppliers is key, he says, “because things are always changing, things are always improving. So they are coming to us with different ideas, different ways of doing things, different products that we can use.”

Project Caribou had a larger scope. The $26-million investment involved tearing down 300,000 square feet of old, unused building space – equivalent to 60 football fields – and redesigning other buildings.

Building 16 is still vast, with 30,000 sq. ft., of floor space, but the main workspace ceiling was lowered to 20 feet. Towering skylights in the peaked roof remain, providing natural light that employees asked for. All surfaces are white and the space feels very modern.

A single steam boiler system that served the entire plant is also gone.

“Now we have distributed heating systems. We have high intensity, low intensity radiant heaters and we have two smaller boilers,” Ceron says.

The project reduced energy use by 15%, an annual saving of 45 million BTUs. Scrapping the old steam heat system cut water consumption by 60%.

Consolidation also brought more efficiency to the work process. Stators, for example, are now built and baked in the same building.

“Imagine moving 30 tonnes of weight on a transfer cart between buildings during the snow time,” says Ceron. “I mean, it was a lot of movement and a risk to quality.”

Moving heavy machinery also involved injury risk for workers and made a lot of noise.

“We reduced the amount of noise, externally to our neighbours, with not having to transfer equipment back and forth,” says Steve Masciangelo, environmental health and safety manager.

“Removing the buildings helped us with the noise as well, so around the facility it’s quieter.”

The improvements save money and make the plant greener, both part of GE’s vision for a competitive future, says Rahim Ladha, GE Canada’s communications director.

“Our customers are looking at that sort of thing as well. Increasingly it’s becoming part of their evaluation of their supply chain, their attention to environmental performance and their footprint.”

Ceron, who transferred to Peterborough from a GE operation in Monterrey, Mexico three years ago, hopes the improvements bring new work to the plant.

“There are opportunities … but we don’t know it yet. We are working with the global team.”

Once thought to be in survival mode, GE Peterborough is now on a global treasure hunt, dressed in green and looking for jobs.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, May 7, 2016.

Tourism goes green at Elmhirst’s Resort

KEENE – Describe something as organic and what comes to mind is chemical free or “all natural.”

Our fascination with natural versus bio-engineered has obscured an older meaning of organic: something that has developed as part of a natural course of events.

Elmhirst’s Resort is organic in both senses.

Across the course of five generations a family farm developed into a thriving hospitality business that wraps together the farm, a resort and conference centre and the Rice Lake shoreline.

Greg Elmhirst, the current general manager, easily reels off the farm and family history. It begins with his great-great-grandfather, a farm and some cottages; sons who took over responsibility for the separate operations; a grandson who bought the resort. Segue to great-uncle Harold who inherited some of the property and later sold it to Greg’s father, mixed in with other family ties and transactions.

The result as it stands today is the resort with its main building, guest centre and conference room, 30 cottages, spa, pool and waterfront area; and the adjoining 210-acre farm, where Greg’s father, Peter, raises beef cattle, ducks and turkeys.

Eighty per cent of the beef served in the resort’s two restaurants comes from those grain-fed cattle. The meat is processed 20 kilometres away at Hilts Butcher Shop and the poultry at Morrison’s Custom Poultry Processing in Omemee. Every slice of duck and turkey Elmhirst’s serves comes from the farm, including the duck topping for poutine at the Wild Blue Yonder Pub.

A large garden near the resort entrance produces up to 8,000 pounds of vegetables and herbs for the restaurants each summer: “Lots of tomatoes, some squash, a tiny bit of corn, sort or ornamental, heirloom style potatoes,” Elmhirst says. “And lots of herbs, basically all the herbs we use.”

Guests appreciate the commitment to locally produced food, he says: “We have more people at Elmhirst’s because of it.”

Guests would be less aware of other ecologicallyvfriendly aspects of the operation.

Not far from the garden is a new, roughly 2,500-square-foot building, open at one end. Inside sits a giant pile of what appears to be wood shavings. It is known as waste wood, ground-up scraps from the production of wooden pallets, furniture and cabinetry.

The waste wood feeds a compact, high efficiency boiler in a separate room at the back of the building. Hot water from the boiler is piped to radiators. Fans blow air across the rads and that warm air heats all the rooms and common areas in the main resort building.

The wood heat system evolved over time – organically, if you will. Elmhirst recalls that it began in the mid-1990s with outdoor, wood-fired boilers where “you just threw a four-foot log in.” The forced air system came later. Switching to wood pellet fuel in 2004 upped the efficiency rating and ended the need to feed logs to the boilers in the middle of the night.

The waste wood boiler, installed last year, burns even cleaner and has reduced heating costs by 75%, Elmhirst says.

Six years ago 11 of the 30 cottages were retrofitted under the federal ecoEnergy Retrofit Homes program. An energy consultant’s report on one cottage showed the upgrades reduced annual greenhouse gas emissions by two tonnes.

Elmhirst’s is also switching to all LED lighting in the cottages and guest rooms. The boats that guests can use are powered by low-emission four-stroke motors. There are two banks of solar panels, ground-mounted at the farm and roof-mounted on the main resort building.

The management team also developed naturally. Greg, whose first position was recreation director fresh out of college, is the de facto COO and CFO. Peter ran the resort until 10 years ago but now concentrates on the farm. Peter’s life partner, Anne Marshall, handles marketing. Greg’s wife, Martina Linde, runs the spa. Steve and Caroline, his brother and sister-in-law, are also involved.

Greg and Martina’s 23-year-old son has indicated he plans to extend the Elmhirst involvement to a sixth generation. That’s the latest development in an organic business model, both old-fashioned and new-age.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, April 23, 2016.