SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AT INCO

The mastery of fire has set man apart from every other species. Had he not succeeded in mastering it, it is doubtful that man would have survived. Peking man is believed to have used it as long ago as 500,000 B.C., but it was around 7,000 B.C. that Neolithic man developed techniques for making fire.

By the 18th century, man was ready for a move from the agrarian-handicraft type of economy typical then, to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. The industrial revolution was truly launched when coal gas was created and the first significant use of pipeline-delivered fuel had arrived.

The early part of that period was characterized by a drive toward mass production. As we moved into the 20th century, particularly the second half of it, productivity overtook production as the target. In post-Second World War free trade markets, preservation of the environment began to surface as an equally significant driving force.

These environmental forces began to coalesce and gain growing public recognition through the 1960s, reaching something of a watershed in 1972 when the Club of Rome published its paper, “The Limits to Growth.” The prediction was that the world would run out of resources and the conclusion, therefore, was that we needed to cut back or even shut down a wide variety of activities.

Zero growth was the new concept. But the concept of a world running out of resources is one that is unproven and unnecessary. Zero growth was the outcome of a somewhat academic, self-centred, developed-world debate in which the Third World (with 80% of the world’s population and with vast, undeveloped, non-renewable resources and endemic poverty) had no part and no interest.

For the sake of the Third World alone, growth (and, with it, the use of non-renewable resources) must and will continue. The Bruntdland concept of sustainable development is attractive because it offers that prospect.

The nickel-refining process as practiced at Inco Ltd. in Sudbury has been improved over the years so that it now is approaching that goal of sustainable development. In the 1940s, the capture of gas for production of sulphuric acid began. Initially, this was not an act of environmental control. Acid was a useful byproduct. Improvements continued over the years, in furnace technology and in reductions in SO2 emissions, but eventually the end of the line came for the reverberatory furnaces on which Inco Ltd. had relied for so many years.

The company recently developed a different technology, oxygen flash smelting, which takes advantage of the fact that finely divided sulphide concentrate, when injected into a stream of commercially pure oxygen, combusts spontaneously.

There is no need to add fuel units. Sulphur is the fuel. The heat generated by the chemical reaction smelts the metal. This is the most thermally efficient furnace in the non-ferrous smelting industry. Because it is produced in an oxygen medium, the sulphur dioxide is concentrated. This high-strength gas is ideal for collection and conversion to sulphuric acid.

The oxygen flash smelting process uses fire but preserves the land, the air and the water, and it provides for the recovery of a natural resource and, simultaneously, contributes to develoment in a sustainable manner.