Last column I wrote about HRM’s plan to sell our toxic crap to farmers, call it fertilizer and grow our food in it. The sludge from our harbour is a massive cocktail of mostly unidentified chemicals that pose deadly risks to farm animals and humans and huge financial risks to farmers.
I’ve heard better ideas, and this week I’m going to share some.
Maureen Reilly is full of better ideas about liquid waste. She has been researching the topic for 12 years. She expresses frustration that after a decade of fighting the application of sludge on farms, this bad idea keeps resurfacing like a stubborn patch of poo-encrusted thistle.
“It’s one big old boys’ club,” she says of the sewage industry—both its private sector and government manifestations. “There are so few sewage people with so much money, because most people don’t like to think about sewage.”
As a result, she says, the crap barons rub elbows a few times a year and celebrate every chunk of mud in the public’s eye and every new technology crushed. Yet new technologies do abound, with benefits for municipalitites sage enough to invest in them.
A few years ago, St. Paul, Minnesota, decided to buy an incinerator, romantically called a “fluidized bed gasifier.” While incineration may raise some green neck hairs, the emissions that result are lower than if the waste was land-applied, with no output of mercury or thallium. This technology reduced the city’s emissions by 90 percent, saved them $4 million annually and reduced neighbour complaints from 70 to two per year.
Yet Reilly recommends a different approach for Halifax. “A properly lined landfill with methane recovery is likely best for a city of Halifax’s size,” she says.
By mixing solid waste with sludge at a ratio of seven to one, leachates can be eliminated. Methane can also be trapped and used as a power source, saving energy and preventing greenhouse gas emissions (because it replaces the burning of fossil fuels).
Alternatively, sludge could be converted into synthetic fuel. Reilly estimates that sludge has about half the energy of coal. This could be sold onto the power grid,further reducing our suicidal climate change tendencies.
None of these ideas have been given much thought in HRM, so maybe it’s too much to ask that we go even further and consider how we could prevent the sludge dilemma upfront. As Reilly points out, the terrible technology of mixing fecal and industrial wastes has been with us for centuries, so maybe it’s too soon to hope for onsite septic systems that separate waste-streams.
In HRM, it’s hard to imagine the use of large-scale greywater re-use, solar-aquatic sewage facilities or planning systems that integrate green spaces and wetlands into sewage planning. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that a friend of mine has been trying for over two years to get approval for a smaller septic tank (to accompany his eco-efficient composting toilet) from inflexible bureaucrats with no policy and no clue about newfangled greenthink.
And any hope for phasing out the use of household and industrial toxins is blurred by the setting sun on a distant horizon. And so, for now, we’re left with a myriad of options that are better than eating our own waste, none of which are being considered bythe HRM.
If the city gets its way, thallium-enhanced milk will soon be available at your local grocer. All that’s needed is Canadian Food Inspection Agency approval.
Kate Billingsley, acting national manager of CFIA’s fertilizer section, couldn’t discuss Halifax’s application to sell sludge, or even whether we have submitted any of the tests required to gain approval of sale. “I can only tell you that the Halifax product has not receiveda ‘no-objection-to-sale’ letter from CFIA,”she says.
“CFIA acts like contamination levels are secret,” Reilly says. “So did you get your thallium today?” Nobody knows.
Reilly feels that if we are to get past the age of sludge-dumping on farms, the chemical composition of sludge needs to be made public. “We need baseline thallium tests on the milk,” Reilly says. “The public deserves to know the full cost.”
Maybe then we could get started on those composting toilets.
Send the latest poop to Chrisb@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2008.
Thank you for your articles about the HRM entity’s bizarre plan to sell toxic crap as fertilizer for local food crops and your remarks about the obsolete garbage dump technology the HRM is using. The municipal garbage dump and the harbour sewage treatment projects have put the municipality into debt for obsolete municipal infrastructure while the negative consequences were fully known by them. How shameful. Incredibly, both the ‘N-dippers’ and the Ecology Action Centre supported the Otter Lake Landfill and the Harbour sewage treatment plants. Very superficial and two faced thinking by these ‘green’ groups.Like many others, I have for many years been against allowing the HRM’s municipal toxic waste being used as a fertilizer in growing food. If this bizarre application to the federal government by HRM to use toxic waste as fertilizer is approved for use, I truly hope that the public is made aware of any food products grown in this poison. Halifax citizens are finding much is wrong with the HRM entity sewage treatment plan, as well. There will soon be a need for a $100 million dollar upgrade to this obsolete technology. What will that do to municipal taxes and the HRM’s growing debt, and water bills?With reference to your report on the garbage dump technology the HRM is using, this was a costly, poorly planned municipal infrastructure project that should never have happened. The site at Otter Lake is located on an aquifer, better suited for drilling a well. Despite knowing, well in advance, the huge costs of preparing the new municipal dump at Otter Lake, and knowing the dump location was highly unsuitable, the local municipal authorities, and provincial government, approved this project…..in spite of the costly artificial liner, and an engineered drainage system, the Otter Lake dump leaks toxic runoff into the nearby Nine Mile River.Premier Buchanan supported fluidized bed municipal incinerators, a technology developed right here during his government by Nova Scotians. It does not waste land like landfills do, and the technology is far cleaner, and ‘greener’ that the filthy mess land filling leaves. Think of the awful waste of looking for new garbage dump sites, as Halifax will soon have to do, if they don’t switch to green incineration. We wouldn’t have the pollution problem in Nine Mile River, had the city and province backed green incineration. Further, the municipal government might have implemented any one of a number of green sewage treatment technologies, including solar aquatics. Why were the green technologies dismissed, and expensive, obsolete technologies supported by the so called ‘green’ advocates and our government?