A new tower has risen above Morinville, one that the head of the town's pet-food plant says should solve the region's smell issues once and for all.
Contractors used a large crane to install a new, taller smokestack on the Champion Petfoods plant in Morinville Sunday.
The stack, which is a little longer than two Greyhound buses arranged end-to-end, is one of the last improvements the company plans to make to the plant to dampen the smell from its kitchens.
"This isn't going to be odour elimination," said Champion CEO Frank Burdzy, as getting completely smell-free is physically impossible, but it should significantly reduce the smell's intensity.
Plant tour
Burdzy and his employees led town residents on tours of the plant Wednesday as part of an open house.
The plant processes about 100,000 kilograms of fresh meat a day, Burdzy said, including beef, pork, lamb, boar, bison and fish. It all has to be cooked, which is what causes that greasy odour to wash over the town.
The company installed a $500,000 plasma injector in 2010 to roast the smell out of its exhaust. That didn't work, prompting numerous other changes to the plant's operations.
The first big change was in the packaging and delivery zone, Burdzy said. Before, there was no separation between the packers and the delivery dock, which made it tough to maintain proper pressure in the building to blow smells up and out. So last fall workers walled off the packaging zone completely, connecting it to the delivery area with two fast overhead doors that act as an airlock, keeping the building pressure up and heat losses down.
Consultants also told the company it was using too much heat in its dryers, Burdzy continued. Champion has now lowered the dryer temperature by about 40 per cent, cutting scent production and energy use. This and the new airlock have cut the plant's smell by about 20 per cent since April 2011, he said.
Crews dug a large pit in the middle of the plant for the new stack, which is about twice the height as the current ones.
The 35-metre tall stack arrived in four chunks at the plant on Sunday and was assembled on site. A large crane lifted the assembled sections into place atop "kitchen two" towards the back of the plant.
The new stack replaces the four that used to be atop kitchen two, and is about the same height as the ones atop kitchen one towards the front of the plant.
The bottom of the stack is about three metres wide and features the plant's new liquid-cyclone Venturi scrubber. (Champion doesn't plan to put one of these in kitchen one, Burdzy said, as it's not the main source of the plant's smell.) The stack narrows to one metre at the top, creating a jet-effect to shoot out the exhaust.
The stack should reduce the intensity of the plant's smell at the nearby Tim Hortons – one of the closest buildings to the plant – to about three odour units per cubic metre from its current 60, based on the company's modelling, Burdzy said.
Odour units are a standardized measure of smell, according to St. Albert air quality consultant David Spink. A smell that's one odour unit is benign (undetectable half the time), while a smell of 50 units is intense (requiring 50 tanks of air to disperse).
Champion has spent about $5 million to get to this point and has moved as fast as it could, Burdzy said.
"We have people from all around the world saying we've done it faster than [almost] any other project they've seen," he said.
Champion will shut down its plant for about a week towards the end of June to finish calibrating its new smell-control measures, Burdzy said.
Smells from the plant have been "pretty pungent" at times, said Joel Chevalier, who owns Investors Group in Morinville and toured the plant last week.
"I've had times when we've went for a drive instead of staying in the backyard," he said.
The smell has gotten a little better since the fall, he added, dropping to a five out of 10 from a seven on his personal smell-o-meter.
Chevalier said he didn't think the plant would ever be odour-free, but was impressed by the steps it had taken so far.
"I hope they pull it off," he said.
Questions should go to Champion's smell hotline at 1-855-784-0340.
