Gaining Ground: Inco's environmental acuity has community seeing green.

Inco Ltd.'s Sudbury operations have reduced sulphur dioxide emissions by 91 per cent since 1986, and the company intends to trim emissions even further, according to Pat Thompson, manager of environment, health and safety for Inco's Ontario operations.

The company has invested over $600 million in its SO2 abatement program, much of that between 1988 and 1994, when Inco completely changed their smelting process, Thompson says. At the time, it was the largest environmental project ever undertaken in North America.

The company's reverberatory furnaces had no capture system for SO2 emissions. The furnaces were replaced with flash furnaces, and a capture system was built to send SO2 to an acid plant to make sulfuric acid and liquid SO2.

"The key component was putting in these flash furnaces," Thompson says. "A complete change of technique made us more efficient and reduced our environmental emissions. It was a complete updating of the process, especially in the smelting operation."

The improvement in productivity "didn't have a significant bottom-line impact from a strictly financial point of view, but we care about our place in the community," he adds.

"To be long-term sustainable, we need to ensure that we operate in a environmentally sustainable manner, but we also need to be economically viable," Thompson explains. "The anode project is a really good example of a case where that is taking place.

Inco is spending $31 million to relocate their anode casting operation from their copper refinery to the smelter in order to take advantage of the existing gas-capture system. The move will also make the copper-smelting process more efficient, Thompson says.

The SO2 abatement program is ongoing.

"The flash furnaces were the first phase, and the second phase is fluid bed roasters," Thompson says.

Inco has proposed a $100-million investment in fluid bed roaster off-gas scrubbing technology that will further reduce sulfur dioxide emissions at the plant by 35 per cent.

"We are installing water scrubbers that will capture SO2 gases and particles before they escape the emissions stack," Thompson says. "We plan to build and commission that in 2006 to be operational for 2007."

New regulations in effect by 2007 will require Inco to operate in Sudbury with an emission tonnage of 175 kilotonnes or less. The current emission limit is 265 kilotonnes. In 2001, the company's emission tonnage was 232 kilotonnes, and in 2000, 223 kilotonnes.

"For many, many years now we've operated below the provincial regulatory cap for us," Thompson points out.

Inco is also moving to reduce ground-level concentrations (GLCs) by 22 per cent to comply with a Ministry of the Environment control order, effective in April, capping GLCs at 0.34 parts per million.

"That requires us to continue to manage the process in a tight manner so we don't have ground-level emissions," he says.

"We're pretty pleased with our performance in the reduction of ground level emissions. We would have had hundreds of them in the early '90s, and in 2000 we had fewer than 10. It's our objective not to have any."

Thompson sees the SO2 abatement program as a significant environmental milestone for the company. He also cites wastewater improvement and reclamation projects as major achievements.

Over $20 million will be spent on water projects when all are completed in the next few years, Thompson says.

The company has seen financial, as well as environmental, benefits from their efforts.

"We have reduced greenhouse gas emissions and, from an economic perspective, we benefited through reduced energy costs.''

"We're one of the leaders in Canada in the reduction of energy [use] and the associated greenhouse gas emissions; if the Kyoto accord were implemented today, we would be in line with that."

Inco also considers its internal environmental programs significant.

"We have very comprehensive work-room employee monitoring programs to measure what sort of exposures are in the workplace and to put in place action plans where necessary."