Ring of Fire developer faces smelter opposition: Noront CEO seeks to clear the air on smelter technology, environmental safeguards.

• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Ross, Ian

Erin Brockovich might be the most watched movie in Sault Ste. Marie these days. When Noront Resources president Alan Coutts grabs the mic at the Delta Hotel on Oct.23 for the first of, likely, many community presentations, he'll have to reassure residents that the Sault won't become Hinkley, Calif., and remind them that his company's proposed ferrochrome smelter isn't getting built anytime soon.

"We have no interest or intention of doing anything that could potentially harm the people of Sault Ste. Marie or our (future) employees," Coutts told Northern Ontario Business.

Five months after the Steel City was selected as the home of Noront's proposed $1-billion ferrochrome processing plant, opposition began to swell after a group of physicians released a letter to local politicians suggesting there could be an exodus of medical professionals from the community if the furnace were to become reality.

Within days, university academics, environmentalists, and concerned citizens gathered in a hotel ballroom to question whether the promise of 300 to 500 plant jobs was worth the risk of public exposure to hexa-valent chromium--chrome-6--a waste byproduct of ferrochrome production and a known carcinogen.

By early October, an online anti-ferrochrome plant petition had surpassed 8,600 names.

"It's a concern, as a physician, that we're putting that in the midst of our city," said Dr. Robert Suppes, an emergency room physician at Sault Area Hospital, who helped draft the letter.

In a blue-collar town where steelmaking has dominated the local economy for more than a century, Suppes said he and his colleagues "struggled" with voicing their concerns.

But Suppes said his group regularly deals with the human toll of the city's heavy industrial landscape, given the "off the chart" cancer rates in the Sault, consistently in double digit figures higher than the...