Sydney Tar Ponds
The Sydney Tar Ponds, located in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, are a significant hazardous waste site that emerged from nearly a century of industrial activity at a former steel factory. Established in the early 1900s, the plant was a major producer of steel, but its operations resulted in the accumulation of toxic by-products, primarily from coke burning. The site contained over 700,000 tons of sludge contaminated with harmful chemicals, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy metals, and other hazardous substances.
Despite the identification of environmental hazards as early as the 1980s, cleanup efforts were prolonged and complicated by bureaucratic challenges, public protests, and various setbacks. The Canadian and Nova Scotia governments initiated a formal cleanup agreement in 1986, but it took more than two decades to develop and implement a viable plan. This plan, managed by the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency, included strategies like solidification, bioremediation, and the construction of protective barriers.
The cleanup project officially commenced in 2007 and concluded in 2013, culminating in the transformation of the site into Open Hearth Park, a public space that aims to revitalize the area and mitigate the environmental impacts of past industrial practices. The legacy of the Sydney Tar Ponds remains a poignant reminder of the challenges associated with industrial pollution and the importance of community health and environmental safety.
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Sydney Tar Ponds
IDENTIFICATION: Hazardous waste site located at Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada
The site of a former steel factory, the Sydney Tar Ponds represented the largest toxic waste dump in North America, containing toxic by-products amassed from almost ninety years of coke burning. Attempts to clean it up were fraught with false starts, missteps, and delays.
The Dominion Iron and Steel Company began construction on a steel plant in June, 1899, in Sydney Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada. After its completion in 1901, this steel plant was the largest in North America. The Sydney plant used ovens to burn so-called slag mined from local coal mines to make coke. Coke fueled the blast furnace that smelted iron ore mined from Bell Island, Newfoundland. In 1903 a company called Domtar Incorporated began operating a refining plant and storage facility located directly adjacent to the coke ovens that processed the coal tar, the products left over from coal burning, and transported it through pipes to storage tanks.
By 1912 the Sydney plant was making half the steel used in Canada, and it continued to do so for almost a century, until its closure in 1988. Domtar abandoned its Sydney operation in 1962, leaving the storage tanks filled with coal tar, a waste disposal lagoon where overflow coal tar had been dumped, and the company’s buildings, pipes, and equipment.
In 1982 Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans detected the presence of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which result from incomplete coal burning, in lobsters caught in Sydney Harbor. This finding indicated that the contaminants from the site were into the surrounding ecosystem. Because to particular PAHs can cause cancer and birth defects, the South Arm of Sydney Harbor was closed to lobster harvesting.
The Sydney Tar Ponds (STPs) contained more than 700,000 tons of toxic sludge. Furthermore, the network of approximately 161 kilometers (100 miles) of pipes beneath the coke oven, according to former coke oven workers, was never purged. The volatile chemicals in these pipes were potentially explosive. Soil sampling studies established that the STPs possess high concentrations of toxic chemicals—arsenic, lead, benzene, naphthalene, PAHs, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and many others. These toxic contaminants leaked into areas bordering the STPs, where homes, schools, playgrounds, and stores are located. Sydney residents were found to have shorter life spans and higher rates of cancer than nonresidents, and infants born to women who lived in Sydney showed higher rates of birth defects.
The Canadian government and the Nova Scotia provincial government signed the first agreement to clean up the Sydney Tar Ponds in 1986. Establishing a workable cleanup plan took more than twenty-two years, however, and the effort was marked by multiple failures, false starts, delays, and public protests. In 2001, Nova Scotia created the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency (STPA) to manage the cleanup. The STPA eventually settled on a ten-year plan that was supposed to go into effect in 2004; however, the plan dfid not offcially begin until 2007. The plan’s combination of treatments included solidification, or stabilization, in which contaminated soil is mixed with Portland cement to prevent further leaching; bioremediation, which involves treating the soil with hydrocarbon-eating that degrade the toxins; and construction of an impermeable encasement to contain the site. Landscaping of the site will further prevent dispersal of the contaminated soil. The Sydney Tar Ponds and Coke Ovens cleanup project concluded in the summer of 2013 with the unveiling of the Open Hearth Park.
Bibliography
De Sousa, Christopher. “Brownfields Background.” In Brownfields Redevelopment and the Quest for Sustainability. Boston: Elsevier, 2008.
Dodds, Linda, and Rosann Seviour. “Congenital Anomalies and Other Birth Outcomes Among Infants Born to Women Living Near a Hazardous Waste Site in Sydney, Nova Scotia.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 92, no. 5 (2001): 331-334.
Guernsey, Judith Read, et al. “Incidence of Cancer in Sydney and Cape Breton County, Nova Scotia.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 91, no. 4 (2000): 285-292.
"Remediated Sydney Tar Ponds Unveiled as Green Space." CBC/Radio-Canada, 30 Aug. 2024, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/remediated-sydney-tar-ponds-unveiled-as-green-space-1.1304232. Accessed 24 July 2024.