Like most Canadians, residents of the city of Hamilton, Ontario, are well used to waking to find their yards and houses coated in a mantle of white. But when they left their houses on a recent morning, they were surprised to realise that it was not snow that had fallen in the night.
At first, Adrienne Van Halem thought the city authorities had accidentally sprayed salt across the road, sidewalks and yards of her neighbourhood.
“But when I got closer, I realized it wasn’t salt at all. There were white husks covering everything,” she said. “It was a snowfall of soybeans.”
She shared images of her car to Reddit and a neighbourhood group on Facebook, where some urged her to quickly contact the city. Others, however said that the occasional dump of soya bean husks was part of life in Hamilton, an industrial city an hour south-west of Toronto.
“Growing up [here] the snow was black and the car was dirty … living near any factory … be prepared to have pollution and fallout,” wrote one user.
Van Halem, who lives down the street from a soya processing plant operated by US-based Bunge, contacted the company to see if they had an explanation.
The next day, she received a voice mail confirming the soya husks had been accidentally released after a filter malfunctioned.
“While the hulls discharge posed no health or safety risk to either neighbours or employees, we understand that the residue was an annoyance for our neighbours,” a Bunge spokesperson, Deb Seidel, told CBC News.
Van Halem says she received a gift certificate for a local car wash’s cheapest cleaning package from the St Louis-based company, whose revenues in 2020 exceeded $40bn.
“I appreciate the gesture because my car is still dirty from it,” said Van Halem. “And I get that it’s one of the realities that comes with living in a semi-industrial area.”
She and her husband were aware that food processing sites had a history of accidentally releasing products into the air when they recently bought their house. In 2020, a factory accidentally dumped sugar on a neighbourhood.
“But it didn’t leave a great taste in my mouth that the company didn’t seem to realise it had happened until neighbours started complaining.”
