Better safe than sorry

Over the Christmas break, we learned that the Durham York Energy Centre was not going to be given the green light just yet by the region. The issue at hand was not environmental concerns such as dioxins and furans – those test results were tossed after all – but that the incinerator was producing too much ash.

Under the contract between Covanta – the company that built and will be operating the facility – and the region, there was a limit on how much ash would be produced as a result of burning waste. According to the region, there was simply too much.

However, Covanta has a different story. They say that they, in fact, produced less ash than the guidelines set out in the contract, once you take out the two compounds it has to add in order to solidify the ash and make it safe for disposal.

So now, the parties involved will be entering negotiations to figure out where to go from here. Whether there will be another round of acceptance testing or if the region will give Covanta a pass is yet to be seen.

The region and other parties that have sunk millions of dollars – in the neighbourhood of $300 million, in fact – should take the safe route, and insist that there be another round of testing to ensure that the facility is operating as it should and that it’s getting its money’s worth.

Another side effect of further testing would be that it would give another chance to test out the AMESA cartridges and stack testing. The report that Covanta submitted as part of its acceptance testing showed that the results from the two testing methods – one long term and the other short term – were wildly different. With these stacks potentially pumping out dangerous substances such as dioxins, furans and more, it would be prudent to ensure that the methods used to observe what is coming out of the stacks is, indeed, accurate.