“It’s very discouraging,” the 72-year-old says as she sits at neighbour Ken Warren’s dining room table, stacks of studies piled high. “How is this happening again?”
The provincial Environment Department recently approved a one-year pilot project that will allow Lafarge Canada Inc. to use scrap tires for fuel in its Brookfield, N.S., factory.
Just weeks earlier, the province’s waste diversion corporation, Divert NS, also confirmed it’s shifting distribution of at least 280,000 scrap tires a year from a recycler to Lafarge, a French multinational that will receive a provincial subsidy of about $1.05 per tire.
The two decisions have reignited a dormant Canadian debate over the safety of the emissions from tire burning and the wisdom of incinerating rubber for industrial fuels, rather than recycling a spent product.
At the Lafarge plant, manager Frederic Bolduc says he expects test results will show burning tires in the kiln will produce fewer greenhouse gases and pollutants than burning coal and petroleum coke.
However, tire burning was dealt a blow a decade ago by environmental groups arguing the opposite.
