Hello everyone,
I hope you all had a chance to look at week 1’s content, where I dove into one of the annual events we have in Whitecourt, Alberta, that bring the forestry industry and community members together.
This week I will walk you through a day in my life of getting samples at Millar Western. However, not all samples and their transpiring locations will be shared today, as there are too many to put into one blog. Do not worry, though, because I will make the second and final part of all the samples I collect on my daily endeavours here at Millar Western next week.
Attached is a drone picture of the entire mill site, and circled in green is the area where I will collect my samples in this week’s blog. What I love about this area of the mill site is that it has a fantastic view of the river, and the trees alongside it house various wildlife I am lucky to see daily. My favourite wildlife is the foxes, as we currently have a family of 4 here.
The first location I want to share with you is the secondary building where I collect three samples: Waste activated sludge (WAS), Return activated sludge (RAS), and influent comp. WAS eventually turns into sludge which we will talk about next week, and the RAS is returned to the basin, which is the “pool” like structure in the drone image above.
The second location I travel to is the basin, as seen below. There are various points of the basin I take samples at, including 215, 216, 212, and 210.
If you look close enough, you can see some solids floating at the basin's top. By the end of the mill waste process, we aim to eliminate these solids safely, so we are only releasing safe effluent into the Athabasca River. To ensure this goal is reached, the lab undergoes various tests sending out our samples to commercial labs ensuring government standards are met.
The last location I will discuss today is the 218 building, where the sample is free of solids and safe to release into the river. There are two stages of effluent treatment, and in the lab here at Millar Western, we monitor this daily, sending samples to commercial labs weekly and always having environmental specialists on call in the case of an event.
That is all for this week, everyone! I hope this gave you a bit of an idea of what a day in my life looks like taking samples and provided further insight as to what measures we take to ensure we are reducing harm to the environment in any way we can while abiding by government regulations. See you next week.
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