James Button The Age
ENVIRONMENT Minister Malcolm Turnbull says environmental standards at the Gunns’ Tasmanian pulp mill will be the world’s best, but some specialist observers of the cutting-edge Swedish pulp and paper industry doubt his claim. Two years ago, three Swedish pulp and paper mills found small traces of dioxin in production. Dioxin is the world’s most toxic chemical, potentially deadly to fish and carcinogenic to humans, and produced from bleaching processes that contain chlorine. The industry moved fast to adopt remedies. “It is unacceptable for us to have dioxins at pulp and paper mills,” environmental director of the Swedish Forest Industries Federation Christina Molde Wiklund said.
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Tasmanian officials sent the figures for comment to Erik Nystrom, a specialist in pulp and paper production at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. Mr Nystrom replied that the dioxin level that would trigger closure of the mill equalled the amount of dioxin emitted in a year by the whole Swedish bleached pulp and paper industry, which produced about seven times more bleached pulp than Gunns would produce. “I cannot understand how it would be possible to get to that level with modern (pulp) processing. Why they have set their levels at this level I don’t know. Any Swedish mill that saw such levels would be alarmed and act immediately,” he said.
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But Rune Eriksson, a longtime forestry consultant who has worked for Greenpeace and the WWF, read the chief scientist’s report on the Gunns’ mill for The Age. He said the mill’s standards on permitted levels of nitrogen and phosphorous were middle of the range and not world-class. He said there was no safe level of dioxin. Dr Alain Rajotte, a French-Canadian environmental consultant who worked for the OECD and wrote a PhD on Sweden’s pulp industry, shares the concern. “The precautionary principle applies, as persistent toxics should always be prevented if there is an alternative,” he said. “Why did it not consider a chlorine-free process?”
