Trail Smelter dispute

The Trail Smelter dispute was a trans-boundary pollution case involving the federal governments of both Canada and the United States, which eventually contributed to establishing the Harm principle in the environmental law of transboundary pollution.

The smelter in Trail, British Columbia is operated by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (COMINCO) and has processed lead and zinc since 1896. Smoke from the smelter caused damage to forests and crops in the surrounding area and also across the Canada–US border in Washington. The smoke from the smelter distressed residents, resulting in complaints to COMINCO and demands for compensation. The dispute between the smelter operators and affected landowners could not be resolved, resulting in the case being sent to an arbitration tribunal. Negotiation and resulting litigation and arbitration was settled in 1941.

The Trail Smelter is located in Trail, British Columbia in the south-eastern corner of the Kootenays, which is known as a mineral-rich area. The smelter was initially built by American mining engineer and magnate F. Augustus Heinze in 1895 to treat lead and zinc ore materials from nearby mines. Prior to building the smelter, agents for Heinze signed a contract guaranteeing 75,000 tons of ore would be provided by Rossland's LeRoi Mining Company. The smelter and the freight railway to the Rossland mines were bought by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) for $1,000,000 in 1898, when tracks were being laid into the town and during the construction of a competing smelter in nearby Northport, Washington State. The Trail Smelter became a factor in the Canadian government's efforts to establish a smelting industry in Canada, which had sent ores to American smelters for processing in the past. The Trail Smelter operation grew, adding other local mines to the portfolio, and were incorporated as the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (COMINCO) in 1905, with continuing support from the CPR. When completed in 1895, the smelter could process 250 tons of ore daily and had smoke stacks 150 feet high to help disperse the fumes. During the arbitration that followed the dispute, the Tribunal commented that by 1906 Trail had 'one of the best and largest equipped smelting plants on this continent.'" By 1916 the Trail Smelter was producing monthly outputs of 4,700 tons of sulphur, but with post World War I expansion and technological improvements to the smelting process, the company doubled the smelter's output throughout the 1920s and was producing 10,000 tons monthly by 1930.

...
Wikipedia