Canada's second-tallest structure is rapidly being demolished in Ontario

The second-tallest structure in Canada has already lost that title as demolition chips away at the massive Vale (formerly Inco) Superstack towering over the skyline of Sudbury, Ont.

Demolition of the former 381-metre-tall smokestack kicked off on June 1, and the imposing structure has gradually been losing altitude over the past couple of months.

Vale Base Metals, which owns the massive structure within its broader Copper Cliff processing facility, has been sharing regular updates on its teardown, revealing in the latest update from late July that the tower has already lost 64 metres of height, falling to 317 metres. 

Vale Base Metals

The Superstack was, up until a few weeks ago, the second-tallest structure in all of Canada, though the most recent height update brings the building well below the almost 352-metre height of Toronto's Pinnacle SkyTower, which has quietly taken over the title of the country's vertical silver medalist. 

Vale Base Metals released a diagram showing the Superstack's late-July status, highlighting the large portion removed from the top in under two months of demolition.

The Superstack was built between 1970 and 1972, and briefly held the title of Canada's tallest structure from its completion until the opening of the CN Tower a few years later. It retained the title of the world's tallest power plant from 1971 to 1987, when the Ekibastuz GRES-2 Power Station in Kazakhstan overtook it. It remained the title of tallest chimney in the Western Hemisphere at the time demolition began this past spring.

Vale opted to demolish the massive chimney following a $1-billion modernization project in 2020 that rendered the Superstack obsolete.

Initially designed to better disperse smelting gas from Vale's Copper Cliff Complex — improving Sudbury's then-notoriously charred landscape — the facility's recent retrofit eliminated the need for high-level dispersal, allowing Vale to give Sudbury's skyline a bit of a glow-up.

The company's plan to demolish the stack was first announced in 2024, aiming to begin dismantling the structure starting in 2025 alongside the already-active removal of the complex's much shorter Copperstack.