Gunns: arrogant unprofessional cowboys

Dr Warwick Raverty

With the single exception of the individual that I mentioned earlier, everyone of the hundreds of friends and associates that I have in the Australian and New Zealand pulp and paper industry has congratulated me on the stand that I have taken, not trying to stop the mill, but having it relocated to Hampshire where odour will not create the same problems. Readers will search in vain for any statement in the press by any of the 6 major pulp and paper companies in Australia supporting Gunns’ present proposal. There is silence from PaperlinX, silence from Amcor, silence from Visy, silence from Norske Skog, silence from Kimberly Clark and silence from SCA. Many of these companies would benefit from a new local source of bleached kraft pulp to replace their present imports. Ask yourselves why these companies are not publicly supporting Gunns. The only conclusion that I can come to is that they see the same risks associated with sulfur odour in the Tamar that I do and they are well aware that controversy and mismanagement by one member of an industry casts a dark shadow over the rest of it – an industry that has spent the last thirty years (to my certain knowledge) spending billions of dollars making its environmental footprint as small as humanly possible. The risk of this well-deserved reputation being spoiled by a pack of arrogant unprofessional cowboys is simply unacceptable to me and to the vast majority of my friends and peers.

4. A sustainable solution: I remain convinced that Long Reach is a site that has an unacceptably high risk associated with it for siting a million-tonne kraft pulp mill. Fugitive odour and clouds of steam from the pulp dryer (131 tonnes of it every hour) causing ‘white-out’ conditions and road deaths on the East Tamar Highway on cold winter mornings are the two major risks that I can identify.
TONY SADDINGTON has asked me to comment on some of the assertions made in this thread — Comments: Launceston … — and to correct some of the confusion and misinformation that inevitably creeps into complex topics like this. To take the points in order of importance:

1. Air quality in Launceston and the potential impact of the proposed kraft mill at Long Reach: Garry Stannus’ photos show smoke and other particulate matter above Launceston on 11th Feb and there is no doubt that the levels of particulate matter in this airshed, contributed mainly by domestic wood heaters and automobile exhaust, need to be reduced. Independent and reliable modelling by CSIRO of the projected future emissions of particulates (PM10 and PM2.5) from the pulp mill stack show that (quoting CSIRO’s published Report of 9th May 2007) ‘…the background PM10 concentrations at Rowella are less than 40 μg m-3 and the data in Figure 2 suggest that this is probably representative for the region, except possibly at George Town. The modelled maximum impact of the mill (listed in the above dot points) is 2 μg m-3, so that it appears unlikely that the PM10 criterion would be exceeded.’ In other words, if the contribution to PM10 at Rowella is only 2 ug/m3, then the contribution above greater Launceston is unlikely to be measurable. Similar conclusions are drawn in the Report for the finer particulate matter (PM2.5). On this basis, it seems highly unlikely that the air-borne particulate matter from mill, if operated strictly according to the regulatory limits, would add significantly to the load in the Tamar Valley close to the mill, let alone 35 km up stream over greater Launceston. I have had strong counter views expressed to me by several expert respiratory physicians who say that even adding 2 ug/m3 to a level of 40 poses unacceptable risks to people with respiratory ailments, such as chronic asthma and, personally, I find the arguments of the medical experts compelling.

2. If indeed the smoke plume shown in Garry Stannus’ photos does come from a Gunns-owned facility in Lindsay Street and if that facility, as suggested in the thread, contains a ‘fluidised bed burner’ of 2001-2002 vintage fuelled with sawdust, then that fact alone is of considerable concern because it indicates that Gunns staff cannot even operate a simple fluidised bed burner in a small sawmill ‘strictly according to the regulatory limits’, let alone a huge complex chemical facility like a kraft pulp mill. A fluidised bed burner is a device for burning, sawdust (or coal and other organic materials) that comprises a bed of sand heated to 900-1000oC sitting on top of a permeable plate with a high intensity fan underneath it. The fan forces hot air at high velocity through the permeable plate and into the sand causing it to act rather like a boiling liquid (readers can simulate the effect next time they are at the beach by poking a drinking straw into some dry sand a blowing gently). In essence, in a normal fluidised bed burner, when sawdust is fed into the mixture of hot sand and hot air, it burns smoothly and uniformly and the hot combustion gases can be used to heat steam tubes as in a conventional coal-fired boiler. The main challenge with fluidised bed burners is that all the wood ash becomes entrained in the high velocity combustion gases and must be filtered out using electrostatic precipitators (like the ones proposed for the pulp mill), or bag filters, or a combination of these devices. The fact that such a dense plume of particulates was visible on the morning of 11th February 2008 is indicative that whichever gas filtering device the Lindsay Street facility uses was not adequately maintained on that occasion.

3. Experience of Gunns staff and transfer of pulp mill expertise from APPM to Gunns. When I commenced my former role with the RPDC in early 2005, I had little experience of Gunns, or their staff. The impression that I quickly gained of the Gunns people responsible for preparing the draft IIS during the course of the next 20 months was one of people who were completely out of their depth with the technology, in deep denial about the complexity of the project that they were engaged in, poorly organised, prepared to accept the advice of their major consultants without question and without seeking second opinions, giving very little attention to important details and prepared to attempt to bluster and intimidate into submission anybody who questioned what they proposed. Given that it is worldwide experience that professionally and well-run kraft pulp mills involve frequent and constructive dialog between the people running the mill and people living around the mill (readers can contact almost anyone living in Tumut, or Traralgon to confirm this assertion) my impressions of Gunns’ staff and their arrogant neglect of this vital aspect of their project had given me grave concerns for the future well-being of the Tamar community by the time that I was advised to resign from the RPDC Assessment Panel by Julian Green in December 2006. These concerns were heightened even further in September 2007 when I was accosted by the Gunns General Manager for the pulp mill project, Mr Les Baker who screamed abuse at me and used the foulest language imaginable while I was passing through Canberra Airport. Mr Baker generally conducted himself like a four year old child having a tantrum and only backed off when I threatened to call the Federal Police. His last words to me were along the lines of, ‘…you’ve lost all your friends, they’re all laughing at you! You are going to LOSE this fight and you are going to be a LOSER for the rest of your life.’

Quite apart from the fact that this is not the sort of behaviour that I have ever witnessed in any senior executive of any well-run company, readers may note the similarity between what Mr Baker yelled at me in September and the comments of the nameless correspondent ‘Lister’ who asserts that, ‘I can assure you that not many of Raverty’s peers consider him an “expert” in modern craft (sic) pulp mills.’ (Comment 15).

Well Lister, at least I can spell kraft correctly and I am forced to the conclusion that you are also probably a member of the Gay family, where dyslexia is apparently genetically endemic, as evidenced by father John’s frequent and public confusion of the word ‘affluent’ with ‘effluent’, as in, ‘The affluent isn’t going to harm anybody.’ I can well understand why members of the Gunns family now regret allowing their family name to be associated with this company.

Apart from one former pulp and paper colleague, who I no longer count as a friend, I am not aware of anybody in the Australian pulp and paper industry who does not consider me have considerable expertise in modern kraft pulp mills, and particularly in the analysis and control of odours at such facilities. I spent 3 of my career years with Amcor fine tuning and training people to use the odour abatement equipment at Maryvale Mill (equipment that is very similar to what Gunns propose), a year as Amcor’s corporate environmental manager and 9 months in 2002-3 supervising a team of CSIRO scientists at Tumut helping Visy identify the main source of the fugitive odour at their kraft mill. Readers, including Lister, may be interested to learn that I met the Swedish engineer who designed the odour control system for Visy at Tumut some years later in 2005 when I was on the RPDC assessment panel. Guess what! He had been hired by Gunns to design their odour abatement system for the Tamar and when I asked him what Gunns proposed to do about fugitive odour at Long Reach, he proudly told me that, ‘There was no odour at Tumut when I left in 2001!’ When I replied that there were several hundred people in Tumut who were willing to call him a liar, he arrogantly stated, ‘Well the smell was negligible compared to Swedish mills!’

That statement by the arrogant Swede underscores precisely what I have been saying on these pages for the last year – fugitive odour cannot be eliminated completely, even by the most experienced companies using the best available technology. In my view, ham-fisted arrogant goons like Gunns pose an unacceptable risk of destroying quality of life in the lower Tamar Estuary simply because they refuse to even accept that controlling point-source odour (the sulfur fumes that will come from the main stack) is only 2% of the battle in odour control (based on my personal experience at Tumut).

With the single exception of the individual that I mentioned earlier, everyone of the hundreds of friends and associates that I have in the Australian and New Zealand pulp and paper industry has congratulated me on the stand that I have taken, not trying to stop the mill, but having it relocated to Hampshire where odour will not create the same problems. Readers will search in vain for any statement in the press by any of the 6 major pulp and paper companies in Australia supporting Gunns’ present proposal. There is silence from PaperlinX, silence from Amcor, silence from Visy, silence from Norske Skog, silence from Kimberly Clark and silence from SCA. Many of these companies would benefit from a new local source of bleached kraft pulp to replace their present imports. Ask yourselves why these companies are not publicly supporting Gunns. The only conclusion that I can come to is that they see the same risks associated with sulfur odour in the Tamar that I do and they are well aware that controversy and mismanagement by one member of an industry casts a dark shadow over the rest of it – an industry that has spent the last thirty years (to my certain knowledge) spending billions of dollars making its environmental footprint as small as humanly possible. The risk of this well-deserved reputation being spoiled by a pack of arrogant unprofessional cowboys is simply unacceptable to me and to the vast majority of my friends and peers.

To return to the expertise in chemical pulping that once existed at Burnie Mill, some of it is there still, but it is unlikely to be available to Gunns. The one fact that Lister did get right in his otherwise ill-researched diatribe was that Burnie Pulp Mill was a chemical pulp mill, but not a kraft mill. It was in fact a bleached soda pulp mill from 1936 – 1979, and then a bleached soda-AQ mill with a capacity of 80,000 tonnes per annum (one fourteenth the size of Gunns’ proposal) until 1996 when PaperlinX closed the Pulp Mill and reverted to operating the Paper Mill only. As a soda-AQ pulp mill, Burnie had no odour abatement system (as many older Burnie residents will attest!) and I know of no-one with significant operational, or design experience in chemical pulp mills from Burnie who is now a Gunns staff member. They are, to a man and woman, either still with PaperlinX, Kimberly Clark, retired, or have sadly passed on.

4. A sustainable solution: I remain convinced that Long Reach is a site that has an unacceptably high risk associated with it for siting a million-tonne kraft pulp mill. Fugitive odour and clouds of steam from the pulp dryer (131 tonnes of it every hour) causing ‘white-out’ conditions and road deaths on the East Tamar Highway on cold winter mornings are the two major risks that I can identify. It is evident to me from the many conversations that I have had with ordinary Tasmanians on this issue and the polls conducted by TAP and others, that about 70% of Tasmanians would be happy to have a kraft pulp mill at Hampshire as long as it was fed with 100% plantation wood chips and met all of the State/Commonwealth environmental regulations. Even Gunns’ own estimates show that there will not be 4.5 million tonnes of woodchips available from Tasmanian plantations for many years. The logical solution seems to be to import the shortfall from either Portland, or Geelong to Burnie and rail them up to Hampshire for pulping. If woodchips from Portland, Geelong, Albany, Eden and Triabunna can be exported all the way to Japan and the Japanese can pulp them and turn them into high quality printing and writing papers profitably, why can’t they be imported into Burnie and be turned into pulp (and high quality printing and writing papers) even more profitably? It was to ask this question that I took leave and spent my own time and money travelling to the Federal Parliament in Canberra in September along with a number of prominent concerned Tasmanians. While I received a very sympathetic hearing from John Howard’s advisers (and a very unsympathetic hearing from Peter Garrett!), ultimately one of the ‘gopher version of Sir Robert Menzies’ last legacies to Australia before being voted out of office was apparently to force Malcolm Turnbull and the rest of his cabinet to reject any consideration of subsidising shipment of woodchips from the Mainland into Tasmania. Sadly it seems that the dark shadow of the CFMEU looms in too threatening a manner over Mr Rudd to enable some sensible and socially acceptable, job-creating solution to emerge from this mess. I fear that massive, but peaceful community protest is the only remaining option.

5. All of the views presented above are my own personal views and they do not represent the views of my employer, or any other organisation.