The Horne Foundry in Rouyn-Noranda proposes to limit its arsenic emissions to a threshold twenty times higher than the maximum Quebec standard, says Quebec.
Updated yesterday at 8:34 p.m.
The company would have indicated in the application for renewal of its ministerial authorization that it could lower the concentrations of arsenic in the air to 60 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3), Prime Minister François Legault’s office said on Tuesday.
This proposal “is still too high” in the eyes of the government, while the Quebec limit is 3 ng/m3 — the foundry has been subject since 2021 to a limit of 100 ng/m3.
“We’ve asked the company to go back to the drawing board and come up with a solution with a lower threshold than what’s being proposed,” he told The Press Ewan Sauves, press secretary for Prime Minister François Legault, reiterating that Quebec does not rule out forcing the closure of the plant “if the company is not able to reduce its emissions and get closer to the Quebec standard” .
The Horne Foundry responded in a statement that the target of 60 ng/m3 “represents the maximum threshold” of an action plan submitted last winter and claims to have indicated to the government when filing its request that it continues to seek other ways of reducing its emissions.
This was not the end goal.
Cindy Caouette, Horne Foundry
The request for renewal of the ministerial authorization of the Horne Foundry does not make it possible to determine what the Foundry would have proposed to the government – Quebec finally transmitted Tuesday to The Press a heavily redacted version of the document, after refusing to do so for several weeks.
Neither the Horne Foundry, nor the Ministry of the Environment and the Fight against Climate Change, nor the Prime Minister’s Office indicated where the company’s proposal appeared.
The ministerial authorization, formerly known as the “remediation certificate”, is the mechanism that makes it possible to derogate from the Environment Quality Actwhich prohibits, in principle, pollution.
That of the Horne Foundry, which was issued for the first time in 2007 and renewed in 2017, expires in December.