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| Highly engineered landfills lined with clay and geomembranes are a main thrust of Ontario's proposed new landfill regulations. |
By: Steve Hollingshead, P.Eng.,
Senior Engineer and
Principal, Gartner Lee Limited, Markham, ON.
The current Ontario government is embarking on ambitious and sweeping reforms to the province's environmental legislation that encompass such diverse areas as spills, pesticides control, air quality, energy, water quality, environmental rights, environmental assessments and landfills. To address landfills, the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MOEE) released a document entitled Proposed Regulatory Standards for New Landfill Sites Accepting Non-Hazardous Waste in June, 1996. These proposed new regulations to Ontario's Environmental Protection Act have been under public review and discussion since that time, and have generated considerable debate.
The objectives that the government set for its new regulations were to reduce the time, cost and degree of uncertainty involved in gaining approval for a new landfill. In this article, we critically examine the proposed new legislation to determine if the government has delivered in these key areas.
Major components of the proposed new regulations are:
Industry, as well as some municipalities, have been pushing the government for some time to move away from its current performance standard approach towards a design standard. Under our current performance standards, landfill proponents have to come up with a design best suited to the characteristics of the site. Then they have to demonstrate to the government that their design would meet all of the province's environmental impact policies, such as the Reasonable Use Guideline and the Engineered Facilities Policy.
With a design standard, a proponent could simply select and build a landfill from an approved set of specifications. On the face of it, moving to a design standard appears to be the best way to meet the government's objective of reducing time, cost and uncertainty in the approval process. However, this also represents a fundamental shift in regulatory philosophy for Ontario.
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| Highly engineered landfills lined with clay and geomembranes are a main thrust of Ontario's proposed new landfill regulations. |
The MOEE's two "generic" landfills are a move towards a design standard approach, even though they are nothing more than two examples of designs that would otherwise meet the current performance standards on typical sites. The problem is that, in order to be conservative, the typical sites that were chosen truly represent worst-case possibilities. Some sites in Ontario may be this poor, but better locations can be found throughout most of the province. Some of the site features that the two generic designs do not account for are: the presence of fine-grained soils that provide natural attenuation of leachate beneath the landfill; the possibility of a site suitable for a natural or engineered "hydraulic trap" design; and locations where larger buffer zones can be supplied for leachate attenuation purposes. In these cases, and many others, finding a better site will mean that the MOEE's two generic landfill designs are too conservative, and too expensive, as we shall see.
Why did the MOEE not develop standard designs suitable for a wider variety of sites? Probably because these would require more sophisticated analysis to set up the standards, and more extensive and complicated siting criteria - complexity that would not contribute to streamlining the approval process.
A conservative, worst-case assumption about the type of site is the safest way to develop a standard design, but one of the key trade-offs is cost. By our estimate, the capital construction cost for the MOEE's single composite liner system alone is more than $800,000 per hectare, which is very expensive for a small to medium-sized landfill. For larger sites, the MOEE's double composite liner system capital construction cost works out to an estimated $1.2 million per hectare.
Costs this high may be ample justification for most proponents to by-pass the MOEE's two generic designs and invest in a site-specific design, hopefully for sites that are better than the worst-case sites assumed by the MOEE.
By specifying exactly how landfill sites should be tested and evaluated, the government is simply entrenching into regulation what was already good common practice under the former approvals process. It is unclear how this will make approvals much quicker or cheaper, other than for those who lack experience or expertise in good waste management practice. On the other hand, the prescriptive nature of the proposed new regulations (dictating the minimum number and depths of boreholes, for example) will limit the flexibility for experienced practitioners to carry out programs suited to the wide variety of site conditions found throughout the province. It will also hamper the Ministry staff in applying experience and judgment to an approval, as they previously could by using the flexibility inherent in working with guidelines rather than regulations.
Links to the environmental assessment process
In our view, the clamour for design standards may really have been a reaction to the frustrations that were rooted in the application of the Environmental Assessment Act (EAA) and the associated environmental hearings procedures, not the Environmental Protection Act.
While the EAA is a fundamentally sound and progressive piece of legislation, deserving of our support, there is no doubt that its original intent and scope have been badly misused. As a consequence, landfill site approvals have become lengthier, more expensive and less certain. The government is also proposing environmental assessment reform but, unfortunately, the new landfill standards do not appear to help much in that area. In fact, there is no linkage at all to the EAA that would indicate how the landfill standards would be treated in an environmental assessment process.
A good example to illustrate this point is to examine what might happen if a search were set up to locate a site for one of the MOEE's "generic" landfill designs. The use of these designs mandates certain site requirements; for instance, the ground water beneath the site must contain less than 50 mg/L of chloride. As the selection process advances through each stage, background chloride levels can be estimated based on regional information, but actual testing can only be afforded on a limited number of sites. Presuming that the MOEE's "generic" design cannot be altered, the entire environmental assessment process may have to be re-worked if the testing eventually shows that the chloride requirement cannot be met at the remaining site(s). Back-tracking in an EA is time-consuming and expensive.
The government faced a difficult challenge - to come up with a practical and affordable landfill design standard without compromising Ontario's already high level of environmental protection. By taking the safest route and aiming their "generic" designs at a worst-case site, an even more conservative standard has been set, one whose price tag few landfill proponents will be able to justify. Therefore, site-specific landfill designs will likely continue to be developed that better suit the wide range of conditions found throughout the province, following a process similar to what we already have now (but unfortunately made less flexible by the proposed regulations). As a consequence, the time and cost savings anticipated by the government may never be realized for most landfill proponents.
The government should be credited for making a serious effort at reforming a waste management approvals process that is currently taking too long, costing too much, and lacking any certainty to the outcome. Changes that are underway to the environmental assessment and hearings processes have the potential to result in significant improvements. Unfortunately, the proposed new landfill standards will probably prove much less effective.