The Decibel - Arsenic in the air divides a small Quebec city

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

The residents of Rouyn-Noranda, QC have known about the arsenic emissions coming from the local smelting plant for years. More studies are coming out about health concerns for the residents – but Glencore, the company that owns the plant, is still allowed to emit significantly more arsenic than the rest of the province.The Globe’s Eric Andrew-Gee went to Rouyn-Noranda and spoke with residents about the impact of these emissions and why it’s been allowed to go on for decades.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The residents of a small city in Quebec are waiting for a decision, set to come any day now. It will determine how much of the poisonous element arsenic the local smelting company, Glencore, is allowed to release into the air. Today, we're talking to The Globe's Eric-Andrew Gee, who recently went to this city, called Rune, Naranda. He'll tell us about the impact these emissions are having on residents and why this has been allowed to go on for decades. I'm Maina Karaman-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Eric, thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, my pleasure.

Just to start, can you tell me, what is Rune-Noranda like as a town? Can you describe it? Yeah, it's a town of about 40,000, seven hours north of Montreal by car. It's actually closer to Sudbury than Montreal. It's up near the border with Ontario. There's a real community feel there. There's a local theater company. There's all kinds of arts festivals in the summer.

And because of its distance from other places, it has a strong sense of local identity and a lot of local pride. People are proud and happy to be from there. There's lots of nice little restaurants and coffee shops. And it's quite a pleasant place, except for these heavy metal emissions coming out of the factory. It's a factory town, fundamentally.

I mean, it was built, as people point out, it was founded the same day as the mine. So it was established by Naranda Mining Limited, this mining company that had this copper mine and then a year later in 1927 built a smelter on top of it to process the metal that was digging out of the ground. And especially in those days, it was very much a company town. All the worker housing was built by the company.

I mean, Naranda gave the town its name. And the smelter is still this very looming, prominent presence. There's these big smokestacks that tower over everything. So let's just, I guess, focus on the plant for a moment here. You talked about the plant and the smelter that's there. What does it make? It refines copper. So for about 50 years, it processed copper that came out of the underground mine directly beneath it. And when that mine closed, it started taking copper from other mines around the world and recycling industrial waste. It siphons out the bits of copper that are left over in computer motherboards

and things like that and turns them into 99% pure copper anodes, these kind of smock-shaped, easily transportable slabs of copper that are then sent to Montreal for further refining. But it's the only copper smelter in Canada, and copper is an important metal and important industry. What exactly is smelting, Eric? You're purifying these raw products of mining by heating it up to 1,200 degrees and pouring it from furnace to furnace.

And in the process of that, there's a lot of nasty byproducts that leak out into the air. What kind of nasty byproducts are we talking about here? The most concerning one probably is arsenic. It's a naturally occurring heavy metal. It comes out of the earth in the mining process, but it's carcinogenic. And when we say a carcinogen here, what exactly does arsenic do to the human body? It's strongly associated with lung cancer and developmental problems in children. It is vaporized in the smelting process and leaks out through vents in the roof of the smelter. And when it encounters the cold open air, it solidifies, turns into a dust, and trickles down into the city as this very fine, odorless, colorless, tasteless dust.

And so how do people in the city handle this dust that's kind of settling there? How do they handle that? For certain people, particularly I would say for parents, it's terribly anxiety-inducing. I mean, it's in a way easy to forget day to day and was easy enough to neglect for decades. It's imperceptible. This is not like a visible dust raining down on the city or anything like that. But it changes the way people have to live, particularly in this neighborhood, Notre Dame, next to the smelter,

which is really in the shadow of the smelter. And, you know the public health recommendations are you know pretty clear you want to take off your shoes before you enter the house vacuum with a particular type of filter on your vacuum children are really meant to be careful when playing and outside in the dirt you know because this is it's everywhere or could be everywhere this dust and theory so some of the people I talked to, one of the mothers in an activist group locally said, you know, I think about this every minute of every day. Yeah, I mean, those are some pretty astonishing public health recommendations when you think about it.

But this plant has been around for decades, Eric. How long have people been aware of the pollution that has come from the smelter? So for a long time, the main local health concern with the smelter was this sulfurous gas that came out of the smokestacks, also a byproduct of the smelting process. And it was bright yellow. It smelled like sulfur. And it was visibly corrosive. People's car paint jobs would develop these spots on them. The company would have to pay out hundreds of people a year for the damage to their car paint jobs.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. So, sorry, this yellow smog that was coming out of the plant here was taking the paint off people's cars? Yeah. What's that doing to the human body? Oh, my God. Well, nothing good, yeah. And so, and this is, there hasn't been much of this for about 30 years because around 1990, the company figured out how to

stop producing this sulfurous gas. And so this bright yellow foul smelling corrosive gas stopped coming out of the smokestacks. When that era stopped, there was a sense that, okay, things are getting better. But really, right around the same time, the arsenic problem got much worse. So around the late 90s, the company, it's a different company now, it's owned by the Swiss mining giant Glencore. Then it was still Noranda, the founding firm. They started doping, as they say, the copper that they were processing with extra arsenic. With extra arsenic. It is about as bad on a health level as it sounds,

but the point was arsenic is very heavy, and it drags other impurities out with it. When you remove the arsenicic it's so heavy that it sort of helps purify the copper and so this caused a huge spike in arsenic emissions the late 90s early 2000s the to give you an idea the provincial standard is three nanograms per cubic meter of air and around the turn of the millennium, air quality stations near the smelter were picking up a thousand nanograms of arsenic. So... Wait, so the provincial standard is three nanograms of arsenic,

and this was putting out a thousand? Yeah. For a brief period, they subsequently stopped doping, as they say, the copper with extra arsenic, and the levels plummeted, but still the level is much, much higher than the provincial standards. And so how much arsenic is coming out of the plant now? The air quality station in the neighborhood next to the smelter registers an annual average of about 85 nanograms per cubic meter. So still about 30 times higher than the provincial standard. Eric, how is that allowed? How is 30 times provincial standard allowed to come out of this plant? The regulations on air quality and arsenic in the air were established only in 2011 because

the smelter predates the regulations by so many decades that there's a grandfather clause that exempted them. Instead, they, like many other industrial sites in the province, are governed by these ministerial authorizations that are given to sites that would have difficulty meeting the standards that are otherwise in place in the province. And so their level that's been set through negotiation with the government currently is 100 nanograms per cubic meter. The government is now obligating them to get down to 15 within five years. This is the agreement that's kind of in the works now. It's in the works and should be announced formally in the next couple of days, in fact.

So the reasoning is, you know, this is arsenic emissions are a natural byproduct of the smelting process. They take some steps to filter it out already. They're now expensively overhauling their process to the tune of $500 million in the next five years to make the process emit less arsenic. But nonetheless, the company argues 15 is the best we can do. It's still five times higher than the provincial average and not at all acceptable to a lot

of people in the community. And higher, as local activists hasten to point out, higher than a copper smelter in Hamburg, Germany that processes more copper than the Horn smelter in Rue in Aranda and produces 4.5 nanograms of arsenic per cubic meter of air. We'll be back in a moment. So maybe we can start talking about some of the more direct health effects that we know about here. There have been a few studies recently about the arsenic levels in Rune Aranda. What did they find? In 2018 and then again in 2019,

in order to find out whether the arsenic was actually staying in people's bodies, they took fingernail clippings initially from children and then from adults in the Notre Dame neighborhood next to the smelter. They found that they had, on average, four times as much arsenic in them as a control population in a neighboring town that was much farther from the smelter. Some kids were much, much higher.

There's one boy, Etain Valois, who is six at the time, is now eight. He's found to have the highest levels of arsenic in his fingernails of any child in Rue Naranda, 15 times higher than the average in his neighborhood, which itself had four times more arsenic in people's systems than a neighboring town. That must be really scary as a family if you find your kid has got levels like that. What impact did that have on his family? It's a source of major anxiety for the Valois family.

They uprooted themselves from the neighborhood they had lived in. They don't know what health effects this could have on their son, Etan. Do we know why his levels were so high compared to everybody else? No, no. There's various ways it can enter your system. His dad says he's replaying, you know, Eitan's whole childhood thinking, what could it have been? Did he play in the sandbox more than other kids?

We have a tomato plant outside our house. Is it contaminating the tomatoes? So this kind of anxious kind of soul-searching is definitely a part of their lives now. The other significant health finding about Ruin-Naranda is that last year, 2022, Public Health put out data showing that 30% more cases of lung cancer in Ruin-Naranda than in the province as a whole. So that must be, I guess, you see that in adults.

Like we've been talking about the impact on kids there, but adults, you're seeing higher lung cancer, higher rates of lung cancer. Yeah. You do not smoke at a higher rate, which would be one obvious other reason for it. So it's impossible to make a direct one-to-one link between arsenic and the lung cancer.

There's too many other potential factors, right? And it's a small population, but nonetheless, it's a pretty stark number. And many people in Ruin-A-Randa don't hesitate to make the connection themselves or at least think there's enough of a chance that this is connected to the arsenic that we need to do something here. You said these health concerns were coming out last year in 2022, but we know this plant has been emitting all kinds of stuff for decades now. It seems strange that this is now when health concerns are coming out after all this time. How much did the Quebec government know about the health concerns created from this plant? Yeah, so there have been some health studies over the years.

The more intensive studies related to arsenic do come out of this period around the turn of the millennium when there was this huge spike in arsenic emissions. That really shocked the government at the time and spurred them to action. In 2004, they actually recommended that the smelter drop its emissions to 10 nanograms within 18 months. So that obviously didn't happen. The smelter said, well, that's not possible, and they simply didn't do it. And then one of the concerns locally is when public health knew about the lung cancer rates. So Radio Canada reported last year, shortly after these data were published, that the director of public health at the time, Horatio Arruda, had personally intervened to prevent the publication of the lung cancer data in 2019, that it was already available then.

He argues that the data was not complete at the time and it was not relevant to the study that was being released then, which was about impregnation of arsenic in children's fingernails. And so he insists it was not a politically motivated decision, but nonetheless there is this gap of a number of years in which public health knew something significant about the rates of lung cancer locally, and people on the ground did not. And that is bitterly resented to this day. Yeah. And I would imagine that kind of,

that spreads mistrust too about the government and what people know or don't know about what's happening in the town. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the current director of public health, too, has alienated some residents by, among other things, marveled at how anxious, quote unquote, people were in the cities. They had never seen a population so anxious. And they say, well, sure, we're anxious. That's not the problem. The anxiety is not the problem. We're anxious because you're not doing enough. Who's responsible for the impact that the smelter and everything that's coming out of it is having on residents? Like, is it the province, Quebec? Is it the company, Glencore? Who's taking responsibility here? Well, it's a good question. A lot of people in town blame the government more than the smelelter i would say because they say well look companies are made to make profit glencore is respecting its obligations imposed on it by the government and there is also a really strong identification with the smelter in the town is it's the the business that made the town there would be no town without this business

and people have worked there for generations. It's right smack in the middle of the city. The street signs in Rua Naranda are decorated with copper anodes. I mean, the copper industry is just, it's in people's blood in a way. Just lastly here, Eric, I mean, really what this comes down to those is the people who are affected by this in the town of Rue Narenda. What does all of this mean for those individuals? What did you hear from them about how they're feeling with all of this? Huge amounts of anxiety.

I spoke to one mother of two young boys who moved to the Notre Dame neighborhood. It's quite a nice neighborhood. It's more space, lots of reasons to move there. A couple of years before the recent spate of health studies have, have highlighted the dangers and, and she now feels trapped. She said, I feel a little imprisoned in the summer. She is reluctant to open the windows. Uh, she may not let her cat out next summer to keep it from tracking in dust. Her son, her 11-year-old son, wants to move. And more than that, people are outraged and

very active. I mean, there's a quite impressive network of local activist groups. 50 local doctors signed an open letter last year calling on the government to impose a three nanogram limit on the smelter. There are also people who don't want to push the smelter too far, particularly employees of the smelter, but also folks who feel that these are worry warts, people who are overreacting and are risking the economic heart of the community. So there are big divisions in Rua Naranda. It's quite a tense place to be in some ways right now for all the lovely things about Rua Naranda. And for a town of 40,000, it's a culturally rich and vibrant place,

but it's going through a period of crisis, I think you could say. Yeah. Eric, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about this today. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.