Is the sulphur industry doing its environmental best?

[By our guest columnist, 'Thiophilos']

As we are daily reminded by the media and many others how dirty and polluting the lives we lead have become, it seems only fair that we pause amidst the muck for a moment and examine how much, if anything, we in the sulphur business have done to clean up the mess in, say, the last couple of generations. Not withstanding the black picture painted by the Greens, it turns out that, by and large, we have not been altogether asleep at the switch. It is more a matter that the faster the industry has become cleaner, the more the people who produce the emissions have grown larger in numbers. The result - more emissions.

In the specific case of elemental sulphur, the world’s annual production of the yellow stuff has blossomed from around 3 million t/a in 1940 to well over 50 million t/a in 2010. To be fair, that growth in sulphur is offset by a reduction in the amount of iron sulphide (pyrites) that is roasted to form sulphur dioxide; that source has been displaced by burning elemental sulphur to produce the same gas to feed sulphuric acid plants. But it is still a huge increase, and one that was enough to get Rachel Carson all upset in the 1960s about the negative effect that all of that fugitive sulphur dioxide was having on Mother Nature.

A good swift rap on the knuckles or boot in the pants never did much harm, and Rachel’s cry for decency on behalf of the industry had a salutary effect. Sulphur recovery plant efficiency rose from a 70-80% level in the 1960-1970 era to near 99% in the early years of the twenty-first century. Not a bad record, but still not enough to satisfy the bright Greens.

To make the challenge to the industry to clean up their act a bit more ‘persuasive’, the folks that design and manufacture analytical testing equipment have moved ahead, by a few orders of magnitude. The sensitivity they can achieve when it comes to detecting the “stuff that got away” has skyrocketed. PPM limits have now become PPB and, at least in the nuclear world, PPTs are now the fashion and eminently measureable. What levels of what emissions are hazardous to your health? It is becoming close to a case of: “if we can measure it, it must be harmful”.

And then there are the bureaucrats who keep adding new regulations to old rules that were based on common sense. Recently the International Maritime Organization (IMO) told us that the cargoes of formed sulphur that we load by the millions of tons for ocean transportation must be “non-combustible”, or nearly so. This notwithstanding the fact that the first thing the buyer does with 95% of the stuff on receipt is to BURN it! Other regulatory bodies see fit to argue that storing formed elemental sulphur in open air stockpiles exposed to wind and rain is no less environmentally friendly than storing it under cover and protected from the other kind of ‘elements’. Who and what is a poor sulphur marketer to believe? The best of intentions may be the very stuff that public criticism is made of.

But there is one thing that sulphur peddlers can be assured of: if you stop trying to be good neighbours the criticism will only get louder. And there is much yet to be done by way of improving sulphur’s image in the eyes of society. Sulphur is a bit like the sun - everybody enjoys its benefits, but they can be brutally antagonistic when exposure to too much of it hurts. It all depends on how the sulphur or solar message is spun by the messenger with the story to tell. Winter holidays under a sun-filled sky are very much OK, but the fact that you are sitting under an unshielded monstrous nuclear reactor that is pouring out harmful radiation is seldom heard. With sulphur the soil acidifying evils and air polluting sulphur dioxide gas emissions are well publicised, but relatively little is heard of the critical role it plays in producing the fertilizer that grows the food which billions eat each and every year of their lives.

And there is even more opportunity for sulphur in the “better life” of the future if we the people would only take time to be more conscious of the chemistry that lies hidden within this common element. Mother Nature has made it a very central component of her photosynthesis systems where she captures all these nuclear sourced rays from the sun and uses the energy to build new living substances. The muscles in your body would not work very well if there were no sulphur-sulphur bonds to make and break in biochemical processes.

It all seems too heavy stuff for the ordinary bloke to be concerned about, but somebody will latch on to some aspect of the story that can be spun into a negative image. Maybe in this official World Year Of Chemistry, we in the sulphur business can do a little teaching of the truth about thios as part of our effort to persuade society that the industry is doing its best to protect the environment, not withstanding the tales of terror told by the television.

‘Thiophilos’