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The Aberdeen
Proving Ground, a US Army base that lies in a patch of Maryland forest about
65 kilometers from Baltimore, has been in the news a lot lately. Allegations
of harassment and sexual abuse at the base emerged early in November 1996,
prompting the military to suspend 20 people from duty while it
investigates-and, in the process, making Aberdeen the most notorious post-Tailhook
symbol for sexual misconduct in the military.
But Aberdeen
already had another, less publicized kind of pollution to deal with. The
base’s Edgewood
area is one of eight sites across the US at which the army developed and
tested its arsenal of chemical weapons. Once a trump card in the Cold War
balance of power, chemical warfare agents—largely mustard gas and nerve
agents—have become massive problems for their owners. In November 1995 the
US signed a treaty with Russia mandating the destruction of chemical warfare
stockpiles in both countries. The deadline for compliance is 2004. The
current method for destroying chemicals is incineration, which is slow,
expensive and a public relations nightmare. So army engineers have thrown
open the doors to new ideas.
One of those ideas
comes from Douglas Hallett and his company, ELI Eco Logic Inc. of Rockwood,
Ont. A scientist with a PhD in analytical chemistry and toxicology, Hallett
left his job after 17 years with the Canadian government in order to design
and build the SE25 ELI Destructor, a toxin-eating machine that is portable,
energy efficient and clean — it produces no emissions. The Destructor was
designed to handle mainly toxic waste from industry, and the machine has
already proven its mettle by taking the toxins out of a Michigan landfill
and by turning Hamilton harbor’s poisonous sludge into innocuous mud. Now
Hallett’s company is bidding to rid the world of some of the ugly, lasting
leftovers from the Cold War.
“We’re talking
about chemicals that kill people,” says Hallett, who even in his days as a
bureaucrat brought an activist’s zeal to his work. “I still remember one
woman from Love Canal
[the town in New York State
that sat next to a leaky dump owned by the Hooker Chemicals and Plastics
Corp.]. Over six years, her husband and all her children died of cancer—her
whole family. Their sump system would flood and chemicals would be coming
in. It doesn’t take much of this stuff to kill you if you’re breathing it
every day.”
But alongside his
lofty motives, Hallett has every intention of turning a profit. In Canada,
there are more than 3,000 polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) storage facilities.
The number of contaminated sites in the US belonging to the Department of
Defense alone is estimated to be 24,000, 7,000 of which need quick
attention. And the opening up of Eastern Europe has unveiled hundreds of new
environmental disaster sites that also need urgent attention. Hallett
believes the Destructor can cure them all.
Eco Logic started
with a dream, one that awoke Hallett suddenly at 2:30
one December morning in 1985. “Musicians dream in melody,” he says. “I’m a
chemist, so I dream in equations.” This dream was about a chemical equation
for eliminating toxic waste. “I thought, ‘Organic hazardous waste molecules,
such as PCBs, can be broken down with the addition of hydrogen, and hydrogen
can break the carbon/chlorine bonds in a molecule. And that releases energy
and makes the whole process efficient: I wrote it all down.”
Hallett’s dream
capped almost two decades of grappling with toxic waste as a senior
scientist for the Canadian government. With a master’s degree in cancer
research from McMaster University
in Hamilton and a PhD in analytical chemistry and toxicology from the
University of Ottawa,
Hallett went to work for Environment Canada (then the Department of Energy,
Mines & Resources) in 1969. One of his earliest research projects, studying
cancer-causing agents in the
Great Lakes region, alerted him
to the mounting chemical calamities surrounding Lake Ontario.
By the early 1980s,
Hallett was a senior scientific adviser overseeing all of Ontario for
Environment Canada, as well as chair of a joint cross-border committee on
the Great Lakes.
His dedication in running his own department won him a silver medal for
environmental stewardship from the United Nations. But by 1985, Hallett’s
zeal was curdling into frustration. Even with budgets from three government
ministries and a slot in the department just two steps away from the
nation’s environment minister, Hallett believed his drive for a solution to
the toxic waste problem was producing only indifference.
He persevered for
another year or so, then quit. Rolling his son’s crib down the hall (so his
boys could share a room), installing a second telephone line and buying a
computer, Hallett set up Eco Logic, his own consulting company. Three days
after leaving his government post, he had lined up a year’s worth of work
for corporate and government clients. “We weren’t an ‘us or them’ group,”
Hallett says. “We assessed PCB and dioxin contamination in a large fire in
Oakland, Calif. We did the analysis for Fisheries
& Oceans Canada that closed the shellfish industry in the Strait of Georgia.
We did all the analysis and the toxicological consulting and were
responsible for the decision to close the aquifer in Elmira [Ont.] — we also
defended that decision in court. We did the insurance industry’s assessment
on the Hagersville [Ont.] tire fire....” At its peak in 1991, Hallett’s
home-based consulting business was generating revenue of $3.2 million and
employing 28 consultants.
Hallett was still
employed by the government (although he had already given notice) when he
dreamed his toxin-busting equation. While working as a consultant, he
researched the equation to see if anybody else had come up with anything
similar. Nobody had, so he patented it. The next challenge was to build a
machine that would apply his idea. Through a mutual acquaintance, he met
Kelvin Campbell, an engineer from BC who was then testing stack emissions
for another firm. “The chemistry was pretty straightforward, once you got
your mind around it,” says Campbell, now Eco Logic’s vice-president of
engineering. “Most of the construction work would revolve around
process-temperature, compression. Detail work, not hard engineering.”
When Hallett first
conceived the idea of the Destructor, there were still only two ways to deal
with toxic waste: store it or burn it. Storage inevitably means leakage and
contamination. Incineration multiplies the problem: toxic furans and dioxin
float out of smokestacks; filters and scrubbers are packed with poison;
there are mounds of ash to be disposed of the process requires massive
amounts of energy; and it’s expensive. Canada’s main incinerator, the
Alberta Special Waste Treatment Centre in Swan Hills, charges up to $3,000 a
tonne to burn toxic waste, plus an additional amount per tonne for shipping.
Hallett’s process is called “gas phase chemical reduction.” Waste is forced
through high-pressure nozzles into a sealed chamber heated to about 850°C.
Hydrogen is added to the mixture, which forces the toxic molecules to break
apart. Hydrogen chloride and water are then “scrubbed” from the methane gas.
The methane is used to heat the unit and keep the process going. The water
is pure enough for irrigation. The hydrogen chloride has a number of
industrial uses and willing buyers. And, because it is a reductive process,
any remaining contaminated material is then a manageable fraction of its
original volume.
Hallett and
Campbell figured a functioning prototype of the Destructor would cost about
$500,000. (The final cost was $650,000.) Canada’s National Research Council
kicked in $100,000, but no bank would touch the project, patent
notwithstanding, and Hallett’s former employer, Environment Canada, told him
to get lost. Then Hallett discovered that “95 percent of the research money
available in Canada is spent on defense.” So he became a defense contractor.
“I got a letter from a general on US Army letterhead that said, ‘If this
works, we want it.’” Thus, Canada’s Department of National Defence became
the Destructor’s major source of funding.
By 1992, Campbell
and his team of five engineers had a functioning pilot unit. At about eight
meters high and 15 meters wide (the full SE25 unit is five times the width),
the Destructor looks like a tangle of parts from a gargantuan plumbing
supply house or a Brobdingnagian wind instrument. In 1991 the Destructor was
transported on two flatbed tractor-trailers to Hamilton
for its first test: toxic sludge dredged from the city’s harbor. It worked.
Toxic sludge became plain old mud, free of PCBs, and recovered pellets of
iron ore became reusable. The federal and Ontario governments sponsored the test,
but took no action afterward. “They’re concentrating on trying to do things
that are cheaper,” Hallett says of Environment Canada. “Of course, they
haven’t gotten any of them to work, and the harbor isn’t cleaned up yet.”
Hallett found the
Destructor’s next test in Bay
City, Mich. A hill of soil rises
15 stories on the southern city limits, an anomaly in the flat country
between Saginaw and Midland on
Lake Huron’s south shore. Ten
years ago, it was a site where industrial materials had been illegally
dumped. But as industry drifted away from Bay City, the dump fell into
disuse — shutting down in 1985. Scientists figure parts of the hill are 40
percent PCBs.
“We could’ve
shipped that waste to Utah or Arkansas,” says Ed Golson, Bay City’s
environmental coordinator. “But under US law, we’re still fully liable for
any damage, illness or effects of that toxic waste. Incineration was an
option, but that’s about as popular as a screen door in a submarine.”
Michigan managed to find some federal money to pay to run part of the
landfill through Hallett’s machine, and the US Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) agreed to put up about US$3 million for independent testing and
verification.
The results were
unprecedented. According to the independent laboratory that tested processed
samples from the Bay City dump, Eco Logic’s Destructor had a consistent
efficiency rate of “six nines”: 99.9999 percent of the toxins contaminating
the dump’s dirt had been eliminated. It was like witnessing the test run of
a machine that stopped aging or repealed the law of gravity.
“We’re sort of like
Consumer Reports,” says Gordon Evans, who works in the EPA Ohio office that
monitored the Bay City test. “We don’t endorse things. We test them and
report what we find out. Eco Logic has a viable process. It does what they
say it’ll do.”
After the
successful Bay City demonstration, Eco Logic has signed up bigger clients:
General Motors of Canada Ltd., General Electric Canada Inc. and the
Government of Australia. And the company continues to test its machine on
other kinds of waste. So far, the Destructor has successfully processed
dioxin, pesticides and industrial waste. The US Department of Energy has
Hallett working on a pilot demonstration project, decontaminating a mix of
low-level radioactive waste, propellants such as rocket fuel, PCBs,
dioxin-contaminated soil and munitions (such as shell casings and napalm).
And Eco Logic has just finished another pilot demonstration under the
watchful eye of the EPA, this time on PCB-contaminated sludge in New
Bedford, Mass.
Along the way,
Hallett’s chemical process has won converts even among environmentalists.
“The technique Hallett developed is stunningly and elegantly simple,” David
Suzuki wrote in his column in The Toronto Star on Jan. 30, 1993. “It seems
too good to be true.” In November 1996, Eco Logic was given the go-ahead by
the Ontario Ministry of Environment & Energy to set up a Destructor in
downtown Toronto, where a defunct General Electric factory has left behind
some stored PCBs. The requisite permit was recommended by Greenpeace
International. “Environmental groups worldwide will support this
technology,” Hallett says. “We’re not a pariah like everybody else has
been.”
Of the three
companies bidding for the US$750million opportunity to destroy chemicals
weapons at Aberdeen and the army’s Newport chemical depot in Indiana, Eco
Logic was easily the smallest. Each of Hallett’s competitors had allied
itself with established US defense contractors, including aerospace giant
Lockheed Martin Corp., as partners. In July 1996, Hallett and two other Eco
Logic executives drove eight hours to Pittsburgh to meet with
representatives from Westinghouse Electric Corp. It proved to be a good fit.
The army knows Westinghouse; the company is already at work on a
US$570-million chemical-weapons incineration job in Alabama. And
Westinghouse knew Eco Logic: engineers from the company had seen, and been
impressed with, the Eco Logic process at industry trade shows.
Testing on
Hallett’s process began at Aberdeen in March 1996. Army personnel in
chemical-proof suits fed canisters of nerve gas and chemical agents into a
pilot version of the Destructor. According to Hallett, the Destructor passed
the early trials with efficiency rating of eight nines, destroying 99.999999
percent of the toxic agents.
Of course, landing
a big US army contract has to do with more than just test scores. There are
a lot of factors that weigh in the final decision, many of them political.
The US National Research Council filed its report on the Edgewood trials to
the Pentagon and Congress on Jan. 17, about six weeks ahead of schedule. The
winner of the contract wasn’t any of the commercial companies but the army
itself, for one of two processes it had proposed. Eco Logic is still in the
hunt for many of the smaller contracts — in the US$20-million range — that
the Department of Defense will be tendering next. Hallett says these
contracts “don’t involve the US Army, so it’s beyond the army’s range to
choose its own technology at the end of the day.”
While it waits, Eco
Logic is focusing on niche markets, such as municipalities looking to deal
with PCBs in industrial landfill sites and utility companies with
PCB-drenched equipment. The company has entered into an agreement with GTS
Duratek Inc., a firm based in Columbia, Md.,
for a pilot test of the Destructor on high-organic radioactive waste. There
is also interest in Hallett’s process — and preliminary discussion — in
Spain, South Africa and at least one nation in the Middle East. “Where
there’s oil, there are petrochemicals, and where there are petrochemicals,
there’s a need for Eco Logic,” Hallett says.
Most of the 121
people who work in the Eco Logic head office in Rockwood, near Guelph, Ont.,
are concentrating on the operation of two existing Destructors. (Hallett had
wrapped up the Canadian consultancy business by 1996.) Destructors are built
as needed by contractors to Eco Logic’s specifications and under its
scrutiny. One basic commercial-capacity Destructor costs $10 million. The
rates for running it depend on the size of the job and the kind of toxin.
PCBs can cost as little as $400 a tonne; high-level radioactive waste as
much as $100,000 a tonne.
“Usually, high-tech
types don’t know how to build a business,” says Jim Beatty, the president
and CEO of Bay Street’s Trinity Capital Corp., which raises money for
high-tech businesses. “They’re often very brilliant, creative people. But
when it comes to running a business, ego can get in the way. Doug is
different. He’s one of those people who wants to succeed, so he’s listening
to what the directors on his board tell him.”
Hallett’s company
will have billed about $5 million in 1996, and he expects to do four times
that this year. After going public in March 1994 at $3, Eco Logic’s share
price went up to $22.75 by August 1995 before dropping back down to the $5
to $6 range. Beatty blames the drop in share price over the last half of
1995 on “investor impatience and an insufficient number of contracts.”
Maggie Treanor, Eco Logic’s head of investor relations, says that Canadian
investors still lump the company in with toxic waste producers instead of
viewing it as a leader in a separate sector, which is eliminating waste.
Project by
project, contract by contract, Eco Logic is changing that perception. “What
we’re doing in one year with Eco Logic would have taken 10 years in
government,” says Hallett. “There’s this assumption that industry makes
pollution and government cleans it up, and that that’s just the way it is.
But government can’t really solve these problems, and we realized
objectively that it’s not government’s job to get rid of this stuff. An
industry needs to form to get rid of this stuff. It’s an important mission.
And that’s exactly what we’re doing.” |
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