Lara Abrams Communications

My CleanTech Tour With The Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

It was with a seeing-eye dog that I attended the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade’s first ever clean tech media tour several weeks back, and the irony of having an animal share this cleantech tour with us has not been lost on me. Here we are - a global society trying to better learn and connect to the rhythms and teachings of the natural world, and who accompanies us? A dog. Man’s best friend indeed. Let me tell you - that dog went places with us that no dog has ever gone — a water treatment facility, a solvent reclamation plant, the underbelly of a university - specifically the geothermal plant part — anyway…you get the picture.

So back to the point. Though it’s taken me a what feels like a long while to put my thoughts together for a blog after having gone on this trip, I’m finally making some headway, and have decided after staring at what has become a 13 page draft blog over the past several weeks, that I’m just going to do this piecemeal, and blog about things piece by piece. So I’ll start by sharing with you one of the companies we had an opportunity to meet with, and continue to do the same in subsequent posts. I’m also going to be sharing with you some further insights into Toronto’s own cleantech endeavors, not just the companies themselves, including a visit to North America’s largest brownfield remediation site.

The first company I want to talk about is a company called Fielding Chemical Technologies, Inc. It’s not everyday that I get a trip to a solvent recycling and refrigerant reclamation facility, and I can say I’ve now had a chance to look at the innards of a company that, in its business, was the first in North America to be registered to ISO 9001, the first in the world to be registered to ISO 14001 Environmental Management System, and the first dedicated solvent and refrigerant recycler in the world to be a member of Responsible Care. Add to those accolades, btw, that it’s one incredible woman (Ellen McGregor) who’s running what was her father’s company today.

So - on Fielding:

Fielding is Canada’s leading solvent recycler, and a company that’s been in operation since 1955. They make a living pulling value out of otherwise spent solvents, emphasizing reuse to ensure the most economical and environmentally sound treatment available. The company offers solvent recycling and toll processing, as well as QA and analytical services, with a state of the art lab onsite dedicated to solvent and refrigerant analysis, which includes a gas chromatograph, mass spectrometer, COD, pH meter, inductively coupled plasma spectrophotometer, and wet chemistry instrumentation.

Fielding’s onsite storage capacity tops 3 million liters, with fractionation towers, thin film evaporators, vacuum trucks and stainless steel tankers. All Fielding refrigerant products meet ARI 700 specs - the same standards as virgin products. In addition, the company is a service provider to Refrigerant Management Canada (RMC), operating the largest collection center in the country for CFCs destined for safe destruction. Fielding handles most common solvents and their mixtures, including spent gun wash, acetone, ethylene and propylene glycol, MEK, MIBK, IPA, NMP, toluene and xylene. Lab services are available for all CFC, HFC and HCFC refrigerants. Fielding is Canada’s leading refrigerant recycler. As such, they offer a Buy-Back Program for used refrigerant, leveraging a national network of wholesale distributors in Fielding’s Refrigerant Reclamation Service. Refrigerants of
interest include R22, R134a and R123.

As a member of the Ontario Environmental Leaders Program, Fielding is implementing something called a Provincial Priority Reduction Plan (PPRP) to address VOC emissions, energy, hazardous waste, waste water and non-hazardous waste reductions. Just to give you an idea of the kind of things Fielding is doing to tackle the targets it’s set out in its PPRP, Fielding is installing vapor return lines on loading/unloading stations; eliminating emissions from product transfer; and, to reach its target of a 5% reduction in energy consumption per liter of material processed in the first year, the company is upgrading insulation throughout its facility, designing and installing a new boiler control system. Additionally, to deal with conversion of 750,000 liters of hazardous waste to a sellable product, Fielding is segregating candidate waste streams that is currently sends to primarily US cement kilns as alternative fuel and instead blending this to customer spec to sell the product as an ingredient for fence and barn paint. The company makes paint out of their own still bottoms, so wherever possible, their residuals become a product to further honor the waste management hierarchy.

As if this weren’t enough, the company has also developed and patented a technology it uses to extract water from its products. Fielding can recover spent IPA to 99.9%, and uses
the pervaporation plant to reach that specification. The technology is presently being spun off into a separate company called Drystill. Fielding maintains rights to license, sell or transfer the technology anywhere in the world for the purpose of recovering solvents. Drystill will introduce it in upstream chemical manufacturing processes to reduce energy and production costs.

On the 16th of June, Fielding was awarded a Technology Award from the Province of Ontario and the City of Mississauga. This marked the first time this particular award has been given. Ellen couldn’t be happier. “Finally my dad’s dream is getting recognition. He would have been so so excited,” Ellen recently wrote me.

We’re excited for you, too, Ellen. Keep up the good work.

Look for more on Toronto upcoming…

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Contact Lara Abrams

To contact Lara, please email her at lara@laraabrams.com or call 415 613 1704.