MLA Adam Olsen Pushes Back on Province's Insistence Biosolids Waste be Spread on the Land at Hartland Landfill
The Province’s Minister of Environment, George Heyman, set in motion the land application if Biosolids (spreading toxic sewage waste on the ground) at Harland Landfill in the Mount Work Park Region when he insisted the Capital Regional District (CRD) find a “beneficial use” for the biosolids waste produced by drying raw sewage at CRD’s new Residuals Treatment Plant.
The CRD’s plan was to ship the biosolids waste to a cement plant on the Lower Mainland where it would be incinerated. However, it turned out that this cement plant has an annual shut-down period, and thus, hundreds of tonnes of sewage waste would pile up at Hartland during that shut-down.
Minister Heyman forbid the CRD from landfilling this waste (in protected cells) giving the CRD a short deadline for coming up with an alternative ‘beneficial” solution. The solution they chose was to reverse their ban on land application of biosolids (banned because biosolids are known to be toxic) so that they could spread this waste on the ground in a sensitive watershed near regional parks, despite the uproar from CRD citizens and community groups.
Unfortunately, the plan to ship the biosolids waste to the Mainland for incineration has not come to fruition because the Residuals Treatment Plant has failed to produce ‘safe’ enough biosolids and does not meet requirements. This means the since the beginning of 2021, the CRD has been spreading (and landfilling) these toxic biosolids at Hartland.
MLA Adam Olsen (Saanich North and the Islands) is listening to his constituents raising real concerns for the safety of the environment, waterways, oceans, wildlife, businesses, and ocean and farmed food, not to mention the health of residents in the region.
In his letter to George Heyman, Olsen pushes back on the Minister’s insistence that the CRD spread biosolids.