SIX NATIONS – Is the Kearns disintegrator right for Six Nations? The proof will soon be in the pudding, as they say.
Air emissions quality testing has begun on the demonstration model of the Kearns International waste disintegrator located at the Six Nations landfill. Representatives from the Guelph based environmental monitoring company Rowan Williams Davies and Irwin (RWDI), arrived on site Monday to begin setting up monitoring equipment to evaluate the emissions from the stack of the waste disintegrator system. The tests will take three days to complete, and they will average the results from four hours of continuous operation each day. The results will not be processed and available until January or February.
There has been concern brought forth by some members of the community regarding the air quality safety of the Kearns machine. A group of protestors forced the shut down of the unit in May. Elected Band Council, which has a contract with Kearns International for a $4.3 million custom built brand new unit with twice the capacity of the current demonstration model, has ordered the tests on the 15-year-old demo unit to definitively prove the technology to be what Kearns says it is. Members from the Men’s Fire were on site to oversee the test process and the Elected Council has assigned a monitor as well.
“I guess we’ll all know pretty soon won’t we,” said Bill Monture.
RWDI engineer, Kirk Easto, explained the test process to the Two Row Times.
Pointing to two probes, which will be inserted into the stack, Easto explained, “These two test devices look very similar but they test for different things. One looks for metals in the emissions while the second one test for semi-volatiles.
“We collect a very large volume which takes about four hours to do each test to ensure that we get a good detection. If we don’t measure anything, we know that the amount is either very, very small or not there at all.”
Although his company has tested countless incinerators over the years, Easto says he has never tested this specific technology before.
Once the tests are done, the current plan is that the machine will be shut down, disassembled and removed from the site while retrofitting of the existing building will begin to make ready for the new, custom unit to arrive sometime in 2015.
