K.C. Jordan, LJI Journalist
In July, THE EQUITY reported that Litchfield’s Pontiac Industrial Park could become the home of a land-based salmon farm sometime in the near future. (Litchfield may become home to salmon farm, THE EQUITY, July 3, 2024)
Samonix, the Outaouais-based company that is proposing the project, intends to use innovative technology to farm Atlantic salmon in land-based saltwater pools instead of in natural bodies of water.
Using technology to raise the salmon would allow them to more closely control their environment. In an interview earlier this summer with THE EQUITY, Samonix’s senior director of business development Rémi Bertrand said salmon require very specific conditions to thrive.
“It’s the fish that’s the most vulnerable to its environment, so a dramatic change in temperature will affect its life cycle, and a variation in any of its environment could alter its life cycle,” he said.
The project would fill the pools with water sourced from the Ottawa River, and then add salt to it.
Any wastewater would be treated at a plant before being released back into the river.
But one local organization is concerned that the wastewater might have harmful impacts for the river and the organisms that inhabit it.
On Monday, Larissa Holman, Director of Science and Policy with Ottawa Riverkeeper, answered our questions about the organization’s concerns.
What are the primary concerns with this new project when it comes to the Ottawa River?
With the effluent that could be coming from the facility, and the fact that the facility requires a seawater environment for [the salmon] to be able to mature. And the fact that [the Ottawa River] is a freshwater environment raised some questions for us around what does that affluent look like from the site?
Our concerns are really aimed at the effluent and the fact that there will be chloride from the salt that is required to create the environment for these fish.
What could be the impact of saltwater entering the freshwater system?
Road salt, when it becomes dissolved in water, has two main components, but it has a chloride component to it. And chloride is toxic to aquatic environments, and that’s why we focus on chloride itself, and through our work over the last five years understanding the impact of road salt that’s being used on city streets, and through that work have learned the implications for the aquatic organisms that are present in those streams.
It’s written on your website that the Samonix project should aim for an “effluent release target of less than 120 mg/L of salt.” Can you explain to our readers how you arrived at that number?
The Council of Canadian Ministers of the Environment have created a document that outlines the scientific criteria for chloride. So in that document they discuss at what point the concentration of chloride becomes harmful, either chronically toxic or acutely toxic.
For acute toxicity, an aquatic organism only has to be exposed for a brief moment of time to have a permanent impact on their ability to survive predation, reproduce, generally grow. It can have a very significant impact over a very short exposure time.
Chronic toxicity means that it has to be exposed for a long time, but the same types of things can occur, and can affect the organism’s ability to breathe underwater, but also to reproduce. And so that’s one of the reasons that we looked at that lower threshold.
The facility would operate throughout the year, and so it would be releasing affluent every day of the year, and that’s why the chronic toxicity is the one we’re using as a threshold for what we feel should be considered acceptable for this facility, because any of the species that live in the area where the effluent is going to be released, they’re going to be exposed to it ever day of the year.
Have you heard from Samonix about whether they intend to aim at or below this number?
We’ve had some really wonderful conversations with Samonix and they’ve been very open about what they’re hoping to develop in the Pontiac region and the facility itself. They did a presentation directly to myself and my colleagues about what their plans were, and we were able to ask lots of questions.
I think the next step is: we discuss with them our concerns around chloride being released in the effluent and how that will likely have a negative impact on that part of the river. A salmon farm is not present currently, there is clearly some things to take into consideration about how this will have an impact on the river.
Whenever a new industry is being introduced to an area, we do really need to think of what is the impact on the ecological health of the river, and does that negatively impact it? And so we’ve had that additional conversation with them, and we remain in contact with them. I don’t know what the final plans for the final project look like or how close they are to getting there, but we were clear about what we would like to see.
Other than the salt content, what other concerns do you have about the project?
Because it’s a land-based project there are certain aspects of this type of fish firm that would be different than one that is in a natural environment. Some of the concerns have to do with antibiotics that might be given to the fish.
Since it’s a closed system, there’s a lot more controls over any possibility of disease or different pathogens coming in so they can have a lot more control over the environment that the fish are raised in, as well as around the sludge that might be coming from the facility in terms of fish excrement, which will be able to be removed in a way that is not possible in the natural environment. So those are some of the concerns we’ve talked about.
Some of the other parameters that would be present within the effluent such as phosphorus, pH and temperature, these can also have an impact on a natural ecosystem, and there’s a lot that can be done to help to regulate that before it’s being released.
But the piece we haven’t had the same assurance from is the chloride levels, because it’s more difficult to remove it once it’s introduced into an aquatic environment, and it also persists for quite a long time, it doesn’t naturally get eaten up by something else.
Is there anything else you would like to say?
There’s innovative projects that are being developed, and these can be really exciting and there’s lots of interesting industries that can be established in different parts of the watershed. But for us as an organization that is really trying to understand what is best for the river, I think whenever there is a new innovative industry that’s coming in, it requires a bit more consideration and trying to understand its full impact on the overall health of the river system and all of the organisms that live there.