Editorial:       THE OTTAWA CITIZEN

No great rush for a pipeline

The Ottawa Citizen

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

The leachate that comes from our landfills is a sobering reminder that waste doesn't disappear as soon as the garbage truck is out of sight. A proposed pipeline isn't the only option the city has to deal with the leachate problem, and it may not even be the best one.

The pipeline idea has had residents of Barrhaven concerned for years. Many of them don't want a pipeline near their homes, carrying rain and melted snow that has become polluted after filtering through huge landfills of garbage. They worry about the risk of a pipeline failure.

But the leachate is there, and the city has to deal with it somehow. It currently trucks the leachate out of the landfill for treatment off-site. The trucking costs about $500,000 a year, and it isn't risk-free either.

There's another problem: The old Nepean landfill, next to the city's current Trail Road landfill, was built without today's landfill liners and environmental standards. It is leaking contaminated groundwater. The strategy so far has been to buy up surrounding land to contain the contamination.

Given rising fuel costs and the potential for accidents, trucking isn't a permanent solution. But a pipeline might not be either. At a recent public meeting, the city's consultants presented a summary of their findings. Out of eight possible solutions, they recommended "two closely competing" alternatives: the pipeline, or on-site treatment.

The pipeline came out the winner, according to the consultants, at an initial cost of $3.8 million. An on-site treatment facility, the consultants say, would cost more than $8.2 million. The annual operating costs of each option would be similar: about $600,000.

While the pipeline would consume less overall energy, the idea of on-site treatment facility is more in tune with the current prevailing environmental approach of dealing with pollution problems where they exist.

A pipeline would carry both the leachate and groundwater to the sewer system leading to the Robert O. Pickard Environmental Centre, to be treated and discharged in the Ottawa River.

An on-site treatment facility would treat the leachate (to a higher standard than the Pickard Centre would) and discharge it into the Jock River. It would also treat the groundwater and discharge it into the local watershed. The technology of waste treatment will continue to improve and become increasingly economical, making the on-site option more attractive.

Residents' concerns about the safety of the pipeline may be unfounded. But why build it unless it is necessary? The city's planning and environment committee will decide on the issue soon, probably Nov. 23. Instead of endorsing the pipeline, it should hold off on a final decision and explore the treatment options on the Trail Road site itself. In the meantime, trucking the leachate is a reasonable and relatively economical interim measure.

Ottawa residents should divert as much waste as possible from the Trail Road landfill, through recycling and composting. The longer the city can use the Trail Road site, the longer it can put off finding a new place to dump its garbage, and the nasty byproducts garbage creates.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2004

From...                            THE OTTAWA CITIZEN

Waste pipeline chorus still
off-key

Jeff White
Citizen Special

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

The city editorial of Nov. 3, arguing that there's "No great rush for a pipeline" for leachate from the Trail Road landfill to the city's sewer system, struck a familiar chord.

That familiar chord is part of the symphony played out at Munster Hamlet in the debate about its wastewater treatment solution: a pipeline to the city's sewage-treatment centre at exorbitant cost, which will eventually approach about $17 million or $18 million, while on-site treatment costs, at less than $4 million, (in two separate fixed bids) were dismissed by politicians, staff and their consultants.

Now we have the same consultants, same engineers, same staff, same solution and the same old pipeline tune proposed for handling leachate from the Trail Road landfill site. Leachate is the rainwater that trickles through mountains of garbage at the landfill and becomes a toxic cocktail, so must be treated.

I have been recognized as an expert in the field of leachate treatment and disposal -- for instance at a recent Ontario Municipal Board hearing on the Trail Road landfill. The following comments contradict the "consultant's conclusions and recommendations" in the city report recommending a pipeline to handle the leachate at the Trail Road landfill.

The process of evaluating proposed solutions for handling leachate is highly subjective. But consider that pipelines can break and the potential to inject a toxic cocktail into the groundwater anywhere along the pipeline route is virtually certain to occur. To recommend such a pipeline is not good engineering practice.

Also, the costs used in the city's recommendations are highly selective.

The pipeline is estimated to cost $3.8 million plus extra costs for unknowns such as rock blasting, drilling and pumping stations.

The on-site option is estimated to cost $8.2 million. The city's own consulting firm recently built a successful on-site system in London, Ont., for some $3 million for the same volume of treatment.

The R.O. Pickard Centre, Ottawa's sewage-treatment plant, is not designed to treat leachate at all. It will remove some of the organic material but will not handle the more poisonous aspects of leachate. They may as well pipe the leachate to the river by the shortest route and dump some 150,000 tons per year directly into the Ottawa River without any treatment at all. The effect will be the same.

The two local firms with competing on-site treatment expertise were not considered. They confirm that the on-site costs would have been $1 million less than the basic pipeline cost or less than $3 million each. Operating costs would be around $100,000 per year -- not the $600,000 projected by the consultant. Considering recent debates about the city's budget, one must question what is going on at City Hall.

One solution to the Trail Road leachate problem is the biological treatment of the leachate and, in a second stage, filtering the first stage discharge, then allowing it to be discharged into the Jock River. This discharge could also be applied to land, or to the solid waste deposits at the landfill, which would enhance biodegradation. The water portion of the leachate would be evaporated. No discharge to watercourses would be needed.

The consultants and staff have suggested that the need to handle a flow of three litres per minute precludes on-site treatment. This is a red herring. Storage of the leachate will be a requirement for any system because of the erratic generation of leachate proportional to the volume of rainfall.

That retention would eliminate the three litres-per-second concerns and average out the processing load, minimizing the treatment system size and thus the cost.

Water-quality experts within the Ministry of the Environment now say the long-term solution to landfill is increased recycling and the generation of energy through high-rate oxidation processes.

However, the local legacy of poor planning and status-quo thinking does not serve us well.

"The significant problems we have will not be solved by the same level of thinking that created them," Einstein said. In other words, outside-the-box thinking is needed.

Are there no leaders with the intestinal fortitude to give these consultants and staff the heave-ho?

Jeff White is an engineer whose expertise on water treatment and waste-management has been recognized internationally. He is president of Watertek Corp.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2004