MOUNT FOREST – Dealing with local landfill runoff could be costly no matter what option council endorses.
Delegating to Wellington North council at a meeting Monday afternoon, county environmental consultant Darren Dickson said building a force main or trucking leachate to the Mount Forest Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) are the preferred options for "safely" and "cost-effectively" treating and disposing of landfill leachate from the Riverstown Waste Facility (RWF).
Leachate is a type of liquid pollution that occurs when water filters through landfills and is influenced by several factors, including precipitation amount, the waste types received, the landfill area, configuration and operating procedures, and the various stages and durations of landfill development.
Leachate collection management is required to prevent and control any infiltration into the groundwater.
"(The force main and in-house trucking) are two options that came out significantly better financially than the rest...As soon as you start looking at other alternatives, the costing goes up," said Dickson.
A report on the project puts preliminary force main capital costs at $4.81 million with $219,000 in operating and maintenance costs. In-house offsite trucking with a 20 m3 capacity is anticipated to cost $1.06 million in preliminary capital costs and $750,000 in operating and maintenance costs.
Outside of the off-site options, Dickson said the county could build an on-site facility to treat the RWF leachate, which would have an estimated preliminary capital cost of $5.865 million and $701,000 in operating and maintenance costs.
When asked what chance there is of an accident occurring, Dickson said while there is a "much lower chance" when using a force main, there's a 100 per cent chance of an accident occurring at some stage if trucked.
"One of the reasons we love force mains is there's a much lower chance of a leak or a release...and generally in the very long-term they tend to be a high expense up front and then a low maintenance operation, as opposed to a trucking system which has a much lower capital but ongoing costs are very high on an annual basis," said Dickson.
Asking questions about the project's timeframe at the meeting, councillor Sherry Burke wanted to know why the leachate issue wasn't dealt with when the site opened in 2022.
Coun. Steve McCabe asked if Guelph is the only other landfill in the county that can accept the leachate.
The County of Wellington's Solid Waste Services manager Das Soligo said no other municipal treatment plant in Wellington County has capacity.
Dickson said discussions started, then when it was agreed with the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP) on an interim basis that the county could manage the leachate while they came to terms with a long-term treatment method, but that as the site grows the leachate is going to increase.
"These are only interim measures. The ministry put a timeline on it and we're running close to the end of the timetable so we really need to come up with some kind of agreement on a solution relatively quickly," said Dickson. "If we can't then it's gonna go automatically to trucking it wherever it can be taken...so that would be a very high cost in the short-term that all the taxpayers would have to carry while we consider a long-term solution."
According to Dickson, the Mount Forest WWTP should be able to manage all expected leachate-based parameters within normal operations fully. Impacts on the Saugeen are not expected to be "significantly different" than what already exists in the waste stream.
Dickson said while the MECP cannot comment on the application, the now-retired MECP Guelph district officer conveyed to him that "the best, most efficient and least impactful way to manage landfill leachate was to direct it to municipal wastewater treatment plants" and it's his opinion that the preferred way to deliver it for treatment was via force main.
The township's comments will be submitted to the county for consideration.
Isabel Buckmaster is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.
