Clean the Mill - Pictou County action group - launches public service announcement video campaign

by Miles Howe

K'JIPUKTUK (Nova Scotia) - Pictou County action group 'Clean the mill', now approaching 5,000 group members of Facebook, has commissioned the first of several upcoming 'public service announcement' styled videos.

The video, embedded here, shows a young boy bicycling along a sunny street.

It could be a summer's day anywhere, that is until the smog-laden spectre of the Abercrombie Point Pulp and Paper Mill looms out of the background.

The boy reaches for a puffer, common enough in Pictou County where a 2008 Pictou County Health Authority study found that residents experience more respiratory ailments than the rest of the province.

A list of substance emissions and critical air contaminants, whose federal thresholds the mill has broken – sometimes to the tune of several thousand percentage points - then scrolls across the screen.

“We're trying to show what has become daily life in and around Pictou County,” says Matt Gunning, lifetime local resident and member of the town of Pictou. “We encourage people to watch and share and get in contact with their provincial ministers.”

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