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As a girl Shannon Bard was troubled by the differences she saw on the beaches near her home in West Vancouver and those around the family’s summer place on Hornby Island, in the adjacent Straight of Georgia.
Where had all the life gone? When she became a Phd student at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a few years ago, Ms. Bard found herself in the position to answer the question that had troubled her as a girl. She started a long term research project to find out why some of Georgia Strait’s shorelines are relatively lifeless, and in the process has drawn attention to a problem of global importance. Pulp mill pollution, she has concluded, is stripping some shorelines of much of their life. A four-year study of the environmental impact of five British Columbia mills found that intertidal life declines as exposure to pulp mill effluent increases. Close to mills she found areas where there was virtually no life, other than drifting mats of floating green algae which smothered the intertidal zone. As she moved farther away, setting grids out on the shore and doing a detailed biological inventory, diversity increased steadily and dramatically. “That whole diversity comes out as you get farther away from mills,” she said. “It’s very, very apparent.” Ms. Bard’s study focused on the impacts of Howe Sound Pulp and Paper’s Port Mellon mill, the Woodfibre mill in Howe Sound, Fletcher Challenge’s Crofton mill, on Vancouver Island, MacMillan Bloedel’s Powell River mill and the Skeen Cellulose mill near Prince Rupert. All but the last discharge directly into the Georgia Strait, which lies between Vancouver Island and the mainland. “The Howe Sound mills were found to have the most detrimental and widespread effect on rocky shore beaches of all regions surveyed, followed in order of decreasing severity by the Crofton mill, the Prince Rupert mill and the Powell River mill.” Ms. Bard said pulp mill effluent creates three marine environmental problems:
•Organic nutrients are discharged in such volume that water is robbed of oxygen, suffocating organisms and increasing the toxicity of effluent; •Huge volumes of pulping chemicals and bleaching agents are discharged, some of which are known to damage livers, cause cancer and lead to birth defects in laboratory animals. The average B.C. pulp mill discharges 1,125 kilograms of organochlorines into the marine environment every day. Billions of salmon each spring pour into the Straight of Georgia from coastal rivers, including the Fraser. Studies have shown that tidal currents carry the young fish to the shallow waters around the islands in the straight, where they forage. The abundance of food in those locations plays a key role in the survival rate of the young fish. In her study Ms. Bard looked at 28 beaches, ranging in distance from one to 40 kms from pulp mills. Sites up to 20 kms from the Howe Sound mills, including Porteau Cove, Lions Bay and Tunstall Bay on Bowen Island, were contaminated with dioxins and furans. And pulp fibres were found settling on beaches up to 10 kms away. Ms. Bard observed 176 different species during the study, classifying them as either sensitive (45) intolerant (102) or tolerant (28) to pollution. Barnacles, isopods and mussles were among the species tolerant to pollution, while scallops, sea cucumbers, sea urchins and sponges were intolerant. By keeping track of the numbers of different species and the mix (some beaches had large numbers of a few tolerant species, for example) Ms. Bard created a bio-index scoring system. At high exposure sites Bard found from from three to 13 species. At moderate exposure sites there were up to 26 species found. And on beaches with low exposure, there were up to 75 species. Ms. Bard saidthe data leaves no doubt that as exposure to pulp mill effluent decreases, the beaches become increasingly richer in marine life. Her conclusion: “Pulp mills significantly affect intertidal diversity and community structure of beaches over 25 km from outfalls.” She said if the depleted beaches are ever to recover, pulp mill effluent will have to be removed from the marine environment. “The solution is to eliminate the source -- to not have outfalls,” she said. “That would be very expensive, but in the long run it will be necessary.”
Ms. Bard said across Europe pulp mills have been switching to a closed loop system, in which effluent is contained within an operation, leading to zero discharge. That, she said, must be the goal of government and industry in North America, if marine environments are to be protected. Looking at the shorelines now -- as a scientist not a little girl -- Ms. Bard is still troubled by what she sees. “The fact there are so many areas depleted -- it’s very upsetting,” she said. “It’s really shocking to go to a beach and not even find a crab.” Story by Mark Hume with Photography by Nick Didlick |
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On the island every fold in the rock seemed to pulse with life: there were green anemones, tongues of purple sea weed, red sea stars and dark skinned eels. Every rock, once turned, set free a scurrying army of crabs that had shells of orange, blue and green. By contrast the city shoreline was barren, almost lifeless. Under the brown stones, nothing moved and even barnacles were sparse. When the tide swept in it deposited carpets of limp, green sea weed that soon turned black and began to rot in the sun. The only things that seemed to thrive were sand fleas and anthropods.
•Wood fibre in waste water forms mats up to 15 meters thick that produces hydrogen sulfide gas and smothers organisms;
