Thestar.com Canada
Jan. 7, 2002. 01:00 AM

Kirkland Lake seeks salvation through PCBs
James McCarten
Canadian Press
 
First it was trash. Now it's toxins.
 

The debate of health versus wealth is back in the northern Ontario
mining town of Kirkland Lake, a community ready to welcome the
world's waste as its economic salvation.
 

This time, wealth seems to be winning. Where a national controversy
erupted in 2000 over a scheme to fill the Adams Mine with Toronto's
trash, a U.S. company's plans to build a $20-million PCB incinerator are
being welcomed.
 

"You'd think that the town would be up in arms, but not much is being
said," said Pierre Belanger, a local businessman and one of the
principal figures in protesting the Adams Mine plan more than a year
ago.
 

"It's a non-stop, full-court press to get a PCB incinerator in town."
Belanger is among some locals opposed to the new project.
Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have long been one of the most
vexing of the world's environmental ills. Used for decades as coolants
and lubricants in electrical equipment, they're hard to destroy, tricky to
store and pose a health threat when they burn.
 

Consequently, permanent, high-capacity PCB facilities like Canada's
largest ó a problem-plagued facility near the northern Alberta town of
Swan Hills ó are invariably met with massive public outcry.
Not so in Kirkland Lake, where the plant's capacity to treat 200,000
tonnes of contaminated soil a year would make it the largest in
Canada.
 

Kirkland Lake has access to markets, highways and railway lines,
skilled labour and a host of abandoned open-pit mines to hold the
treated soil, said Bennett Environmental Inc., the company behind the
plan.
 

It also has a chronically high unemployment rate, sinking income levels
and diminishing property values thanks to the demise of its
once-burgeoning gold mining industry.
 

"Over the course of the construction and development period, an
estimated 90 full-time equivalent jobs will be created locally and $12.2
million will be injected into the local economy," the company said in an
economic impact study released last year.
 

Some 35 people would work there full time, earning wages 20 per cent
higher than the average. That would spell an extra $3.3 million in local
spending. The company also plans to donate up to $2 million a year to
the town's community development fund.
 

The numbers may seem small. But in an economically marooned town
of 8,000, they're being largely welcomed.

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