B.C. Company Cleans PCBs On-Site

A parcel of land owned by Juker Holdings Ltd. on British Columbia’s Annacis Island is similar to many other brownfield sites across North America. The former industrial site on 4.3 hectacres contained 3,000 tons of soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from years of copper tubing and related industrial operations.

What’s different about the Juker site, however, is that it is getting cleaned up using a new treatment that is performed on-site in a mobile plant.

The international PCB cleanup market is pegged at $40 billion. At the same time, the United Nations Environmental Programme has made the elimination of PCB a top priority.

Incineration is the most common method for destroying PCB, but it requires transporting the contaminated soil to the incinerator — which can be costly and politically unpopular — and can result in the formation of carcinogenic chloro-dioxins and furans.

Sonic Environmental Solutions Inc., a Vancouver-based environmental remediation company, has developed a new approach — a system that literally vibrates the PCB out of the dirt and then destroys it. It is based on the ability of a sonic generator to de-agglomerate soil and enhance chemical reactions using very intense audio frequency vibrational energy.

In the portable decontamination plant, PCB-laden soil is mixed with a solvent. The generator applies sonic energy to the mixture, agitating it to such a degree that it frees the PCB from the soil, extracting and suspending it in the solvent. The clean soil is separated out, and the solvent is treated again with the sonic generator, which chemically destroys the PCB.

“The end result,” says Rod McElroy, Sonic’s chief technology officer, “Is soil that can be used as clean industrial or residential backfill. The chlorine component of the PCB turns into harmless table salt, and the spent solvent can be used as low-grade fuel oil.”

At the Juker site on Annacis Island — Sonic’s first commercial project, following successful demonstrations and field tests — the plant has been assembled and the process is under way. Over the next few months, some 3,000 tons of PCB-contaminated soil will be cleaned and returned to the site.

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