TECH TAKES
TECH TAKES
Transforming Toxic Terrains: Ontario's Approach to Brownfields
In this episode of Tech Takes, host, Louis Savard, C.Tech., takes a deep dive into the world of brownfield regulations and remediation in Ontario.
Our guests, OACETT Past President Kim Pickett, C.E.T., and Eric Cowan, C.E.T., project manager at Vertex Environmental Inc., share their extensive knowledge on the subject and discuss the challenges and processes involved in transforming contaminated and underused industrial and commercial properties into safe and usable land.
Join us as we discover how sustainable remediation technologies are revolutionizing the cleanup process and reducing environmental impact.
Have a topic you’d like to discuss or comments about the episode? Reach us at techtakes@oacett.org.
TECH TAKES Episode 8
David Terlizzi 00:09
This is Tech Takes a podcast that explores the many facets of the engineering and applied science profession. It is brought to you by OACETT at the Ontario Association of Certified Engineering Technicians and Technologists.
Louis Savard 00:23
Hi, I'm Louis Savard, and welcome to Tech Takes.
Ontario has rules for cleaning up and redeveloping contaminated and underused industrial and commercial properties, called brownfields. According to the Ontario government, brownfield properties are vacant or underutilized places where past industrial or commercial activities may have left contamination or chemical pollution behind. Often factories, gas stations, and waterfront properties such as port lands, they can pose health and safety risks be costly for the communities where they are located, but can be redeveloped to meet health, safety and environmental standards. When brownfield sites remain vacant, toxins on the land continue to impact air and water quality and human health. In addition to the chemicals that remain after industry or business vacates the land, what is often a vacant lot can become a site for the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes. This creates a situation that deters economic development, decreases property values, and harms the aesthetic value of a community. It is estimated that there are more than 30,000 brownfields in Canada, many of which are in Ontario, one of the most industrialized provinces. There hasn't been a lot of work to reduce the number of brownfields in Ontario, the Ontario government amended regulation 150 304 to remove unnecessary barriers associated with filing a record of site condition. Also, environmental remediation companies are introducing more sustainable approaches to remediate contaminated sites. In this episode of techniques, we discuss brownfield regulations and Ontario. The investigation and assessment of contaminated sites and the various remediation solutions currently being used to remove multiple environmental contaminants making brownfield sites safer for redevelopment. Joining me today is always said past President Kim picot, si t l e t and Eric Cowan si t. Kim is currently a Project Engineer with grounded engineering. She has over 20 years of experience in the private and public sectors holds an undergraduate degree in geoscience from McMaster University and Environmental Engineering Technology Diploma from Confederation College. Kim is currently working on her master's of education and has an L e t license from professional engineers Ontario and is certified as a c t with OSA Eric Cowan CT is a product manager at vertex environmental incorporated with over 10 years of experience and expertise in environmental science. And in situ remediation. He holds a bachelor's degree in biology and sociology from the University of Guelph, and a graduate certificate with distinction in environmental engineering applications from conasauga. College. Kim and Eric, thank you for joining us today.
Kim Pickett 03:22
Thank you, Louis.
Eric Cowan 03:24
It's great to be here.
Louis Savard 03:26
Environmental contaminations and how we deal with them a little bit of a topic that holds a special place in my heart. I spent many years with one an institute here in Cornwall that worked on the St. Lawrence at Cornwall AOC. So a topic that I'm interested and excited about. So let's get going. Eric, how would you determine that a sign is a brownfield or contaminated site? Is there a difference between the classification of brownfield or contaminated site? And what are these sites typically reused for?
Eric Cowan 03:59
Thanks Louis. Yeah, it's a great question. So you mentioned the definition in your intro of you know, abandoned, idle, underutilized commercial industrial properties, where historic historical uses likely lead to environmental contamination. So that's describing a Brownfield, but the classification doesn't necessarily mean there's contaminants on site and that's what a brownfield is. And so, the difference for between a brownfield and a contaminated site is really that specifically a contaminated site has known contaminants in groundwater and soil or what have you. Whereas a brownfield is classified as what we defined it as, but we necessarily don't know if it has contamination yet. But it has the potential to have contamination and it has the potential to be redeveloped.
Louis Savard 04:54
Perfect, so, in essence, for our for our listeners, right, a brownfield is on Knowing if it's contaminated yet or not, but it's classified based on its previous land use absolutely perfect phases to remediate the property. Lets you know now that you've, you've acquired the site. It's got there's some work ahead of you. It can Could you speak to that?
Kim Pickett 05:15
Sure. Thank you, Louie. As you mentioned in the intro, Ontario regulation 15304 really provides a framework for how we go about conducting assessments on our brownfields. So typically, you would have a phase one environmental site assessment as your starting point. And that is a desktop review of historical documents. There's usually a site visit involved as well to take a look to see if there's any obvious evidence of former contamination or former impacts, there's interviews that you do with the previous owner of the property or the current owner if they have enough knowledge of the property. And then that phase one reports will either conclude that you can go straight to the record of site condition phase, which would happen if there were no real evidence of any potential contamination. And then if there was the potential for contaminating activities on site, such as a gas station, or a dry cleaner, or even something as simple as de icing salts in the winter can have an impact on properties. So if we have any of those sorts of items, although the government has recently, you mentioned reducing red tape has exempted salt impacts. So you wouldn't necessarily have to go to a Phase Two for that. But you would if you thought that you had other potential contaminants. And the difference between the phase one and the phase two environmental site assessment is an actual subsurface investigation. So you would do a series of four walls or test pits, and likely install some wells on the property to investigate further to see if there's any impact to the soil or groundwater from whatever previous activity had been happening. If you finish off your phase two, report, the analytical results come back and everything is good, there's no contamination, then again, you can move straight to filing your record of sight condition. But in some cases, and Eric can probably speak better to the phases afterwards. But in some cases, the chemistry comes back. And it shows that there is actual impacts on the property. So then you have to either clean up the property, or do what's called a risk assessment of the property. And once you either clean up the property, and confirm with confirmatory samples, that everything is clean, then you can file your record as a condition. Or if you're doing a risk assessment, you have to get the Ministry of Environment involved, and they'll go through the process with you. And once you have your risk assessment, then you can file your records that condition. So those are really the phases leading up to how we determine the level of contamination on a property. The extent of my expertise sort of ends there. And then I would work with people like Eric to actually clean up the property. So I don't know, Eric, if you have anything to add.
Eric Cowan 08:17
That was great. Kim, yeah, no, that really summarize the steps leading up to what I would do, where I would get all that information from the first phase phase one and phase two, specifically that phase two with a subsurface investigation. And if this property, you know, is deemed contaminated in as groundwater or soil contamination above standards, and there's readout, redevelopment needed or some other regulatory requirements to clean up the site, that's where I would get involved and, you know, put together remedial plan to clean up set.
Louis Savard 08:51
Interesting soap. So what I'm hearing is it's much more involved in buying the property, couple of shovels and starting to build right there's, there's a process to follow, because you want that classification or categorization done before you actually do the work and make sure you're doing it right. Eric is gonna loop back very quickly to you, you know, you've got the phase one, phase two that's been done. Now it falls into your, your plate is just sort of decontaminate or work with the site. But typically, what would do redevelopment look like? What type of properties are typically rebuilt on a brownfield site?
Eric Cowan 09:30
Yeah. So it gives you a wide variety, right? It's it's, they kind of categorize brownfields specifically into value, right? If it's a Toronto property in a busy area, there's a higher you know, value there to redevelop it for something for use, right, whether it be more industrial commercial work, or residential or mixed use or parkland, what have you, right? So it really depends on what the site is, but that does element is, is typically taking something that's a former industrial or vacant now and creating something of use out of it. And that's where the remediation needs to happen. So that we are meeting the regulatory standards. And you know, in essence the site is clean and safe to use.
Louis Savard 10:19
So essentially, demand might vary from community to community typically drives the redevelopment plans for those sites. Yeah. Thank you for that. And now that we've talked about, you know, how do you assess the property, you've got the experts cleaning the property? Well, where are these contaminants come from? What are those sources that would classify, you know, a brownfield as contaminated? Then we'll go to Kim on that one.
Kim Pickett 10:46
Thanks Louis. So when I think a lot of people think of contamination, what jumps to their mind our industrial factories, gas stations, and that would be the case in in this situation as well. So we can have contamination coming from a lot of various locations. And it's really project by project specific, but the main concerns and the greatest concern, in fact, when you're carrying out your phase one, environmental site assessment, the Ministry of Environment has flagged things like dry cleaners, and auto wreckers, and other industrial applications as being what they consider to be enhanced investigation properties because they have activities that go along with them, that can be problematic is not always problematic, but it can be. So certainly those types of applications would be a source, you can also have things that people don't necessarily think of, but agricultural property can be a large source of pesticide, potential contaminants in the shallow soils. So we look out for those as well. And really, things like spills. So when we're conducting our investigations, we search databases that tell us how many spills have been in the area recently, where are the spills occurred, what sort of previous land use was happening in and around the area so that we can take a look and catch those flags. Another source is landfills. Historically, landfills were placed in random locations often, I live in Simcoe County, often the joke is that people would drive up from the cities and just drop them somewhere on a concession road. And you know, in some of our municipalities, we have 50, closed landfill sites that are on the Ministry of Environment inventory. So the I guess, it's really dependent on what the historical uses have been in the area and how diligent you're looking at your historical records.
Louis Savard 12:57
The spills or spills are an interesting one that I want to touch on real briefly, because you know, you're right. You think contamination, I see the smokestacks, right. Like, that's what that's what people instantly think. They don't think about a piece of road that cars constantly break down and leak oil and whatever over time, has maybe not as big of an impact was still has an impact to drive that classification. Right. So it's interesting to me that you mentioned spills because I wouldn't have gone there. But I know it's bad. But I wouldn't have linked it to sort of together. Right. So that was interesting. Now, in the intro, I mentioned 30,000 sites in Ontario, that's a staggering number. You zoom back, you look at the size of the province you go up, it's not too bad. It's still a big number. Where do we typically find those brownfield sites? And we'll go to Eric first seeing how you're you're doing the boots on the ground type of work, where where do you typically find those brownfield sites?
Eric Cowan 13:56
Yeah, it's a good question. So we work across the country, but in Ontario, specifically, brownfields are primarily located in heavy urban or industrial areas, right, it's just more concentrated, there's just a higher statistical, you know, chance that that's where this would happen. And, you know, that could be primarily located in the GTA, but in other large population centers as well, base, but in my experience, it's contaminated sites can be anywhere where the historical uses, you know, like Kim was saying Are, are present and spills or what have you occur? Right. So that gets back to the definition of brownfields and whether it's defined in classified specific as one or just contaminated sites, because that was contamination was found, not necessarily a vertical.
Louis Savard 14:45
And Kim from your side if you want to add to Eric's answer, but I'm wondering, are you aware of an inventory in Ontario that you know, that holds that list of potential sites or known sites,
Kim Pickett 15:00
Not an inventory necessarily of brownfields, but certainly the Ministry of Environment. And forgive me, because I still call them the Ministry of Environment, they've changed their name a dozen times, they keep an inventory of the landfills that exist in Ontario. So both private and publicly owned. They also have PCB inventory lists that tell us where large quantities of PCBs were either used or stored. And then they keep a database of anyone who's filed a record of site condition. So it's not necessarily that you can go to Google and pull up a list of the Brownfields in Ontario, but you can certainly see which brownfields have been granted permission from the Ministry of Environment to change their land years,
Louis Savard 15:50
Interesting, so it's an evolving, just keeps things keep moving and keep changing. Absolutely. Perfect. So we sort of laid out the groundwork, right, we've got the assessments, the the phase ones, the phase twos, you know, some remediation if needed. Now, back to you, Eric, we're at the remediation stage. Now, what are some of the procedures involved in dealing with a contaminated site?
Eric Cowan 16:15
Yeah, It's a great question. So depending on what the real BDR of the contamination requires, there's a few different procedures, specifically with what I do, you need to have an environmental compliance approval with the Ministry of Environment, which is basically a specific set of rules, and that a company would have that you could then apply to the Ministry of Environment, to say, we're going to do this type of work on the site to that and clean up the contamination. So it's an ECA. So what Kim has done, you know, was talked about the phase one, phase two, you're doing the assessment where maybe a risk assessment, you look into whatever regulatory requirements, you need to get a record of site condition. When you flip to the remediation side, companies that are actually doing the work like my vertex, where I work, we require that ECA to to the type of work we're trying to do. And so what that involves is basically, a, you know, summary of what the actual work is going to be, you know, technical design, it's going to be a maybe a monitoring plan to say, here's what we're going to monitor for while we're doing it and the verification afterwards to make sure it's working. Maybe it's involving a, you know, operations and maintenance, that there's some sort of, oh, nm operations, maintenance for the type of work, we're doing just little things like that, so that the ministry ministry isn't having contractors go willy nilly doing whatever they can to try and clean up something and maybe making it worse, right? You're, you're doing something that's potentially harmful. It's like, here's what we're doing. It's backed up by science, it's, you know, have it safe. And we're notifying the ministry as needed in order to do the work. And that varies from site to site to site. So it's a little bit complex, but it's interesting. And I like what I do so.
Louis Savard 16:34
Well, that's the main thing, right? If you if you like what you do with it, it makes it easy to do what you do. Right. So that's great. Now, dealing with a contaminated site, I imagine there's a lot of tools and things that you can use to remediate. So when you think of tools, you think, you know, innovation can happen, new things, new techniques. Now, in terms of a phase one, phase two, or even a risk assessment. Kim, are there any? Has there been any changes evolution innovation in that side, the more paper recite of work.
Kim Pickett 18:44
Um, I think we're always evolving and finding, you know, efficiencies. As mentioned earlier, the the government sort of de listed de icing activities as a main concern, because there were a lot of properties in Ontario that had impacts from salt related impacts because of the application of road salts in the winter. So that was probably the biggest change that we've seen in in recent years. But certainly, as consultants and as professionals in the industry, we're always looking at ways that we can improve on our processes. But I think they're real innovation and Eric, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the real innovation is valid in the actual remediation. And what is done to try to clean up the sites once contamination has been found.
Eric Cowan 19:39
Yeah, definitely. And I think we're going to touch on that later. But it's come a long way, you know, decades since really, environmental remediation has been a free thing. Right. So, you know, 5060 years ago, it wasn't really a concern. And then it you know, in the 70s Raid, there was a bit of a push, push back there to get the clean I'm blanking on the US clean water activities in the 70s. Right? And then today, we're now it's technologies of advance to really push forward the innovation with remediation and think more about sustainability and effective ways of doing these, this type of work.
Louis Savard 20:19
Fantastic. Interesting. Gonna go back to Kim on this one, industrial and commercial sites, are there differences in in the realm of this conversation? Or are they treated differently
Kim Pickett 20:30
From the environmental site assessment perspective, for the most part, they're treated very similarly, until you get to the portion of your investigation where you're, you're delving deeper into the industrial side. And that's because industrial businesses and factories and manufacturers tend to use potentially chemicals that they store in certain areas, or they are using heavy equipment that has certain chemicals, or hydraulic oils and things like that in their processes. Whereas a commercial site, a commercial site, could be anything from, say, an Amazon warehouse to, you know, an accounting office. So they tend to not have the potential for storing of large quantities of chemicals or having processes that could potentially be doing something that could impact the property as much, they may still have some activities that could potentially be contaminating, but for the most part industrial lands is where you want to be focusing your attention to try to figure out if you can pinpoint where on the property those activities were, were taking place, for example, if it was a manufacturing facility, where were they storing their chemicals? Where were they storing their heavy equipment, when it wasn't in use? How did they maintain their heavy equipment? Did they take it off site? Or did they do their oil changes and things on the property and if so aware, so it helps, knowing the former use and the the category, whether it's industrial or commercial will help sort of funnel your, your assessment and the questions that you're asking yourself as you're going through the documentation to figure out exactly what the story was with the property in previous years.
Louis Savard 22:19
And Eric, from your side, when you get your at the site, you get a site to remediate or to work on industrial or commercial treated differently from your side of things.
Eric Cowan 22:30
Yeah, typically, with that classification difference, there's different standards for the remediation. And so if it's an industrial site, there may be a different set of groundwater soil standards that we need to meet. And same with and then commercial, and then more, stringently, would be residential, right, or some other type of use, and is more strict. And so it's very important for when we're designing remediation that we understand the objective and the end use, and especially if they're switching classifications, from industrial to residential, or any variation of that. It's, it's, you know, a pretty key key aspect of how we plan playing forward.
Louis Savard 23:12
So it seems like every sort of answer or discussion we've had so far, it's always been, it's multi layered, right? It's not just the black and white, go remediate. and off you go, It's wild. Is it going to be residential now or back to commercial or increased industrial? What? What do we have to do to meet those standards? So, hope our listeners are starting to grasp the magnitude of the work that needs to be done. It's more than just a Yep, it's contaminated. Fix it. There's a lot more. Go back to you, Kim, cuz I wanted to talk about assessments or risk assessments. GE, could you provide an example where an environmental company would need to determine a size environmental condition?
Kim Pickett 23:54
Sure. So when we are looking at brownfields properties, the and I think Eric touched on this a little bit, the biggest trigger is for changes in land use. So if you're wanting to maybe put up a residential condo, on top of a property that was previously a gas station, so if that's what the plan is going to be, then the environmental company would have to first determine which of the the nine tables of soil and groundwater standards you'd be looking at. And you're right in that every time, Eric and I provide you an answer. It is very multi layered. Where you fall in those nine tables depends on your proximity to a watercourse. It depends on whether you're getting your wet water from wells. So you can take a look at what's currently happening at the property and what's going to be happening at the property and you determine the criteria that you need to actually conduct your assessment. And once you've figured out what standards you're going to be applying then you You have to determine whether you're going to be doing a borehole investigation. So drilling holes into the ground, or if it's something that can be investigated with, say, a test pit program where you're using an excavator as opposed to a drill rig. And once we have that determined, then we figure out where the best places are to put the boreholes or test pits so that we can gather as much information about what's happening in the soil and groundwater, so that we can make an informed report and have informed recommendations. And then that goes forward to the Ministry of Environment for their final blessing. So a really good example is taking former gas station property and turning it into residential condos. It's especially right now with the focus being on housing shortages, it seems to be something that people are doing quite a lot right now is taking either gas stations or former manufacturing or warehouse properties and turning them into residential.
Louis Savard 26:01
Yeah, that's a lot. I'm glad we have experts late like yourselves to fall back on because it'd be it'd be, you'd be adding even more layers to that. If that wasn't the case.
Eric Cowan 26:14
That's that's why you have to hire someone like Canvas. That's the this complexity is?
Louis Savard 26:20
That's that. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's if there's no more degrees in the future, though, is going to be some time as Antibes in there. So follow up to that Kim, every site needs assessment.
Kim Pickett 26:32
Again, it's multi layered. And I think I heard a joke. Years ago, when I started my consulting career that if you ask the consultant a question, they're always gonna say it depends and then give you a really long winded answer. Every site that is changing its land use, is required to do at least a phase one environmental site assessment under the Brownfields legislation, or Oh, Reg, 15304. There, the reason I hesitate and kind of make a little joke is because there's also requirements that municipalities can put in place. So just because the regulation says, you're fine, because you're say, changing your property from agriculture, to residential, which, under the legislation, they're in the same category, so you wouldn't need to record a site condition. But the municipal Act gives the and the Planning Act gives the municipalities the opportunity to say, No, you do need to do one. So even if you are clear, in terms of the regulations at the provincial level, your municipality might still require that you do an assessment. And then the third layer is that if you're purchasing this property with the help of a lending agents, the banks can ask for an assessment as well. So by the time you've fallen into one of those three categories, or maybe all of the categories, there are a lot of properties that do need an assessment, but it's not necessarily every site.
Louis Savard 27:58
Okay, so basically, we're looping back to the the depends answer, but it's really it's the, the proposed final land use really drives the requirements of like you mentioned, lending institution, municipality province, and that will give you the yay or nay on the assessment requirement. Absolutely. Yeah. Perfect. Kim, we're gonna keep you on the hot seat. And Eric, I make yourself comfortable, because you're coming up soon. But what if the property owner can, can take care of the remediation who foots that bill?
Kim Pickett 28:32
So typically, in Ontario, the way the legislation is set up is, it's the property owner. So if a lot of the times, people like myself, and companies like mine get approached by people who are in their due diligence phase, their agreement of purchase and sale, and they asked us to do these assessments before they actually own the property, or at least do the desktop review, so that they know what they're getting into. But from time to time, there's people who, for whatever reason, have acquired a piece of property, whether it was really inexpensive, or, and they just jumped on it, or they inherited it in a, you know, family inheritance or another scenario scenario. And they come to find out that it's already contaminated. And they didn't know when they acquired the property, the law is structured so that that then becomes their problem. And then they would have to go back and sue the previous owner if they wanted to try to recoup the costs. But if the owner doesn't have any money, what typically ends up happening is they would default on their taxes, and then the municipality would end up with the property and they would be the ones that would then have to foot the bill because once they become the owner, then the law says that they would have to clean up the property. Our listeners might be familiar with the term Super Fund, which is something that the Americans have put in place and it's a large fund that is largely funded had through fines and violations from people who have done environmentally bad things. And that's what the Americans used to clean up things. If if our listeners have heard anything about a Love Canal, which is in Niagara Falls, New York, it was a community that was built on a toxic waste dump. And it needed to be cleaned up. And they were able to tap into the Superfund for that. But in Ontario, we don't have anything like that. So it falls to the owner.
Louis Savard 30:28
So do your do your research first?
Kim Pickett 30:31
Absolutely.
Louis Savard 30:32
All right, Kim, we'll give you a little bit of a break here. Eric, you're up biggest challenges with contaminated brownfield sites? Go?
Eric Cowan 30:40
Great, great question. So I want to split this up into three kind of sections here. And the first one being, you know, what's their challenges? Right, when you're trying to design a contaminated sites are designed the remediation, specifically in the first is the objective or the timeline. Right. So like we talked about, what's the end land use? What are the standards we tried to meet? What are the owners trying to do? Right, are these and who's enforcing this? Is it the municipality? Is it the province? Is that the bank? And so oftentimes, when we're dealing with stakeholders, the owners are who are trying to fund this, a joke that we have is that there's a decision triangle here, do you want it done? Right? Do you want it done cheat? Or do you want it done fast pick two, it's it, we really need to know what we're trying to do with the site. And if you have time on your side, you know, maybe there's a better option for you. But if it's a ministry and force thing, say there's a sensitive receptor, like you have contamination on your site, and it's going towards a lake, or residential, it's, you know, ministry saying, You got to clean this up now, or where you might get in some legal issues. You need to do something fast, there's different options. And so we're really in that sense of mine, they're trying to figure out, what's the objective? How much time do you have in how she wants to bet, depending on who's doing? The second, you know, challenge, then once you have that, that, you know, framework is the technical complexity, every site is different, like we're joking, you can have a question of this is contaminated, what do we do? And generally, and I say, well, we need to know everything we can know about the site. A term in the industry is called a conceptual site model. And essentially, what that mean means is that we want to have an understanding of all the different site conditions of the site can include contaminate characteristics in the extent like where is the contamination, you want to know what type of contaminated is, and so we mentioned gas stations and dry cleaners. There's different types of contamination there. Right. So gas stations are petroleum hydrocarbons, you know, gasoline, diesel, and they're called floaters, right? They actually are lighter than water, and so they float above the water too. Whereas dry cleaners have chlorinated solvents, PCE etc. And they're called sinkers. They're actually Dec denser than than water. So it's very important. We want to know what contaminants are there and how they hacked in the subsurface. Sorry, important. And then other things like site geology and the hydrogeology. Right, so we want to know, what are the soil types? Sorry? Is it a sand, you know, or is it a case? Really depends? What we do depends on that, or is it bedrock? And then hydrogeology, if we're trying to clean up groundwater is how fast is flow of water flowing on site? Where's it going? What are the preferential pathways, you can go on and on and on, there's a real background investigation. And a lot of what Kim's work would do as a consultant or other consultants would be doing a lot of that investigation before I get involved. And then the contractor would come in and review all that to put together the design. So that's the second challenge, just that technical complexity. And then the last one is the actual work the implementation, right? And so is it an act of gas station? Is there restrictions? Can we get to where we want to go? Is that or is it just a vacant lot? free access, right? That changes things? underground utilities, right? And if you're trying to dig up something or inject something to clean it up, you got to know where gas lines are got to know where electrical lines are. It's everywhere, and you don't want to hit them right? Or it could be as simple as your beside a yoga facility meditation facility and they beat silence at noon. That's a real story. You cannot do heavy machinery work, right? If somewhere have a neighbor saying you can't do that where it's impacting our business. So the actual last job was theirs doing the work implementing it within the constraints of pomp that same? So lots of challenges.
Louis Savard 34:55
Yeah, I know I'm not sure that I would have picked the the yoga vibration One to be quite honest with you. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it's it's, once you start thinking about it, it's there's a lot that could, that could pose those challenges. Now, if I put in my head remediation, an instant image is bulldozer bag, whole puff of black smoke when they start moving around, basically a dig and dump, right? Dig it out, go dump and somewhere else decide to clean. Could you speak to some newer sustainable remediation technologies that would actually, you know, potentially remove or reduce our, our impact to greenhouse gases?
Eric Cowan 35:38
Yeah, definitely. So you're right, the traditional cleanup method for years was digging dump. So you're physically removing with excavators, the contaminated soil and groundwater, and taking it off site in the case of soil to a landfill. And that method works in the sense that it's removing contamination from the site, and afterwards, it's clean. But you know, over the last few years or a few decades, you know, there's more of a focus on sustainability, climate change, and additionally, landfill fees to are rising because landfills are filling up. And so it's not cost effective to do that anymore. And so there's a big push. And that's what you know, I focus on in my line of work in remedial options that are not only more cost effective than digging dumb, but also innovative, that in the sense that they're more sustainable, there's not that the black smoke, there's not trucks on the road going back and forth landfills, it's something that we can do on site. And in, you know, many companies do this. Now, it's very common for the last 2030 years and remediation techniques that are reducing that footprint. So for example, what I mentioned in the intro is in what I do is something called insitu. remediation, and in situ is Latin for in place. So all that means is that we're completing remedial efforts on site without proving any of the soil groundwater off. And so an example of that would be, say, you're at a gas station, and there's, you know, gasoline or diesel impacts in the groundwater, you can install wells, or you can inject through, you know, temporary wells, some sort of remedial amendment to break down those contaminants. And that could be something as simple as hydrogen peroxide, you know, you know, off off the shelf from from the pharmacy, right, but we maybe would add a little bit more concentrated, more high strength, and that would oxidize or break down those contaminants. And so, like we discussed, there's a multitude of contaminants across all these different former uses, right manufacturing industrial commercial, that then there could be a multitude of remedial amendments that will be specific to those contaminants. And so the idea of in situ remediation is that we can utilize the chemistry that would have these remedial amendments that could break down whatever candidate contaminants you have, and you're not having to dig it up, take it off site and fill up our landfills. And this could go on and on and on. Right. There's there's an endless amount of innovation. And every, every day, there's something new that comes out for a different technology along those lines. Yeah, it's it's exciting to be a part of it.
Louis Savard 38:29
Yeah, it's anytime where you get to use new things or or innovate on the spot even sometimes has to be exciting. And I you mentioned insitu, you know, being the on site, nothing is moving, I'm going to make the assumption that ex situ is taken off site to treat.
Eric Cowan 38:49
So it could so exit you Latin for out of place, it could exit you technically would be taken dump, right? You're taking it out of the ground and getting rid of it. But we also were I personally work on xvg projects where you're cleaning up soil on site, but you're not taking to a landfill. But the only difference from into Situ is you're digging it up. Yeah. Or you're pumping water out, you're treating it on site with a treatment system or some sort of technology that can treat the soil, on the property, or maybe off site at a facility. But it comes back or whatever, but it's not going to a landfill. So an example annex city remediation technique for soils is for example of something called Bio piles. And that in that sense, you're utilizing biodegradation, to break down contaminants in soil by D of that soil, stockpiling it adding nutrients or even adding microbes that break down the contaminants, you know, letting that happen, that process happening on on the surface, and then you can actually test the soil, you know, it's clean, hopefully, and then reuse that soil on the site or actually reuse it somewhere else that that needs it. There's a lot more detail and, and Kim can speak to maybe some excess soils or maybe you don't want to talk about it. I try to avoid it. But there is a lot that goes into that to make sure it's properly being tracked and managed to go into where it needs to be. But in essence, it's, it's not going to go away Avilan it's, it's more sustainable. And it's, it's still exit you.
Kim Pickett 40:23
I'll jump in with a comment about excess soil, but I'll keep it brief. So in 2019, the legislation came out 406 19, which tightened up the sampling requirements and the rules around how we move soil in Ontario. I will keep it brief because it basically the whole industry is still working our way through exactly how everything needs to be tracked, and the process and the databases. And you could probably do another tech talks on just Oh, Reg 406 19. So in the interest of time, I will tell you that grounded does a lot of work with excess soils, we have a guru on our staff, and there are other consultants out there and all of us are help happy to help anyone who has access to oil to navigate through the legislation that went into effect recently. But yeah, it's a lot of people are avoiding talking about it, because there are a lot of people who are confused by the requirements. But definitely consultants can help you. But I'll leave it there.
Eric Cowan 41:32
Yeah, if you want to see a group of environmental engineers get really animated, go to a conference where they discuss excess soils and trying to get specific answers. Because it gets very, you know, everyone's confused still. And it's but it's it's trending in the right direction. There are answers coming out.
Louis Savard 41:53
Well trending and provocative and informative. Sounds like the producers should take note and maybe we bring this on this podcast in a future episode. I'd be interesting. Hamilton and Collingwood. They were listed as areas of concern by the International Joint Commission. We'll start with you, Kim, could you tell us a little bit how they're transitioning to contaminated sites?
Kim Pickett 42:16
Sure. We'll start with the Hamilton I'll just hit the highlights. Basically, the main issue with Hamilton and their harbor was that the development in the area grew. Due to the Industrial Revolution, there was farming, there was sewage, there was raw sewage actually being dumped into the harbor directly for about 150 years. So that caused high nutrient levels, it caused excessive influencing influencing sediment. Then carp was introduced in 1911, which kind of took over the feeding and spawning grounds of other fish. It wreaks havoc on the aquatic plant life that because of the increased nutrient levels, the Cootes paradise specifically, portion of Hamilton harbor went into a eutrophic situation and because of the decreased light pollution and the increased algae, and that caused even more sediment in the water, which then caused even more problems, and then in the 1800s. They also disrupted the water levels, and they changed the way they were courses flowed. So it resulted in a real reduction of nutrient loads and particulates and increased particulates in the actual harbor. So Hamilton went about creating a Hamilton harbor remedial action plan, which reduced the external phosphorus loading in their wastewater treatment plants. If you recall the the raw sewage that they had been putting into the harbor, the phosphorus loading was quite significant before they put in the remedial remedial action plan. They also started planting more native aquatic vegetation to bring back the aquatic plant life. They put in a fish weighing so that they can control the exotic carp. The fish way was constructed in 1997. And it was about two and a half million dollars and basically it allows the smaller fish to get in and out of the Coos paradise area and into the harbor but it won't allow the larger carp to come from the larger body of water into the smaller areas so it'll prevent carp from taking over even further. So the 20 year anniversary of their remedial action plan was in 2016 and after 20 years of progress between 1996 and 2016. The water clarity improved their aquatic plant life improved from no hectares of aquatic plant life to 80 hectares. Their wetland plants increased from eight species up proximately at the worst, up to 28 species in 2016. They created emergent Marsh vegetation which is like the cattails and other plant life that partly live in the water and out into the air. And the native fish population increased six fold. So it's really a great success story. And they've expanded on what they're doing in Hamilton beyond just the Coos paradise, sort of Overbye, McMaster University area and they're recreating and beautifying their waterfront all the way down along the whole harbor. So if they can take this as success as they had between 96 and 2016, and continue to run with that momentum, I think they will do really well. And then similarly, in Collingwood, Collingwood was a shipbuilding community historically. So they had if you can imagine building ships right in the water, basically, the heavy metals that they would use in the paints and in the manufacturing processes. Back when the harbor was at its peak shipbuilding, really caused a lot of environmental damage in the immediate waterfront area of the Collingwood harbor. It actually was the very first Canadian area of concern to be delisted by the Joint governments between the United States and Canada. They improved their municipal sewage treatment facility, they cleaned up 7300 cubic meters of sediments that were contaminated with copper, lead, zinc and chromium. They changed a lot of their local policies to protect the 96 hectare Collingwood wetland complex, which is that wetland area that you see if you ski or go up to the Collingwood area, you'll know the the area by the green terminals, and they created over five kilometers of streams and shoreline habitats, and re habilitated 20 hectares of wetlands and fish spawning grounds. All of this work started in 1994. Again, as a result of a remedial action plan that was put in place. It was a joint effort between many levels of government, the municipality, the province, and currently now they're actually continuing on their path to beautify the waterfront. And there is a public consultation process that they just were going through with the plans for the green terminals to be turned into a combination of condos slash hotel while maintaining the face of the actual green elevators. So it's both of these examples are a little bit different than most of the examples we have been talking about. But they are they're brownfields in contaminated sites nonetheless, and I think it speaks to the success that we can have if we put our mind to it.
Louis Savard 47:49
Yeah, once in a while a feeling good story is a good story. Right? So this is it's really nice to see when plants come together and actually, and actually work. Eric, is there any time where you had a challenging case, fall in your lap? And then you got it to a place where you were able to clean it up?
Eric Cowan 48:05
That's a great question. Yeah. So that's, I'd like to say that most of my sites are simple, but really, in this line of work, it's every site is complex. And there's challenges with each site. In the two examples that Kim was just talking about with with Hollywood and Hamilton really show the the large scale kind of team work with all these different stakeholders levels of government for these large scale our remediation projects, which is great. But like she said to Yeah, a lot of the stuff that comes into our a framework or is, you know, smaller scale, smaller properties for groups of properties, but nonetheless very complex, and still involve a lot of the levels of government or stakeholders in that that sense. So one that comes to mind that I've been working on since 2016, I would say, is a site in the GTA that was a former chrome plating facility. And so one of the use of typically obviously an industrial site, it's actually an app. Sorry, it was in that it's an active chrome play facility and the contaminant of concern there would be hexavalent Chrome, which is a byproduct of the chrome plating activity. So the the issue, obviously, there is if it gets into the groundwater, it's a risks to human health in the environment. And based on some of these investigations, the phase one and phase two, it was determined that this is actually traveling to neighboring sites. And so it was actually and also traveling to a residential area in the groundwater. And so, I got involved in 2016 to do some remedial design work, and also some lab scale treatability testing To determine the proper remedial amendments to use to clean up hex Chrome. And so hex Chrome is pretty nasty. If you see it, if there's a large enough large enough concentrations, it actually turns groundwater yellow. So you could have a well on the site, sample it, and it's like beyond yellow. And that's, that's what we had at that site. And so that's all a big challenge, right, you have residential properties as a sensitive receptor, you have neighbors, that are, you know, potentially suing the, you know, the source property. And then because of the residential, you have the Ministry of Environment involved to say, you know, you need to stop this. And so 2016, we put together a remedial plan, we did the testing, and it worked great, we have a plan to go forward. And then years go by, and this is the challenge. And I'm sure Kim has dealt with sites like this to where you think that remediation. And when I ideally got into the industry, and maybe thought differently, that, hey, we got a problem, we got a solution, let's get out there and clean it up, you know, as soon as possible. And space it sometimes that happens. But with the legal and regulatory requirements, that it just doesn't happen that way. There's a lot of different people that need to get involved, especially when there's potential legal ramifications right from your, if you're contamination from your site, it's going on to a neighbor, you know, they they have a right to say, or to sue. And then also, maybe they can work with the source properties to put together a plan to clean up their sites. And so that's what was happening here at work work, there was a lot of back and forth with lawyers, a lot of back and forth as a ministry, and to finalize this remedial action plan. And that was a big challenge. But then luckily, in 2020, we went out there to do a pilot test. So we took the information from our lab tests, we found out that we do we confirm that remedial amendment, zero Vale and iron. So Z VI, and essentially, it's just iron will actually transform hex CRO, which is a metals, you can actually break it down, right, it's an element. But you can transform that into a non toxic, non soluble so it doesn't float with groundwater, and clean up the site. And so in 2020, we're able to put a do a pilot test. And what that means is you're doing a small area of the site, and we're injecting this iron, and seeing that it cleans up as we expect it. But the kicker here is all this contamination was in groundwater in bedrock. And so very difficult. And I'm sure Kim knows this. But basically for the listeners is that bedrock remediation maybe 20 years ago was just deemed impossible or very difficult to say the least, you can easily dig it up as you can imagine you can but it's expensive. 20 years ago, injecting something into bedrock was really new and not known. But recently, and this is something I'm absolutely involved in is new technologies to inject real amendments into bed and clean up these difficult to access contamination. So 2020, we did the pilot test what gray is we're like, let's do this, right, we've waited four or five years, let's firstly protect a residential property boundary. And that is designed as a permeable reactive barrier. And so we designed a barrier of iron. And essentially what that means is long the property boundary, you you inject the remedial amendment, iron, and groundwater can flow through the but contamination will get stopped. It's a barrier to contamination, but it's permeable to groundwater, so you're not affecting the aquifer at all. And so we had that ready to go pilot tests that it looked great. Didn't get out there until 2023. Back to the, to the drawing board with with all the stakeholders, right? Getting everything approved by the ministry, getting the neighbors on board. And so finally, 2023 this last year, we got out there, we installed this PRB, which again, is and we could talk about this later, and new technology with sustainable kind of ramifications for remediation. And we you know, just get the initial results now from this program that everything downgradient of that prb is clean, and that the residential properties are protected. And the ministry you saying great, that's awesome. That's what they need. And now we're working with the neighbors to expand that cleanup to their sites as well.
Louis Savard 54:39
Awesome. Yeah, that's That's quite the story. And we were looking at challenges to, uh, yeah. Just again, the layers and the layers, right. If you want to very briefly touch on on that. That new technology. You just mentioned that new innovation.
Eric Cowan 54:56
Yes, that'd be great. So yeah, again, it's called The Permeable Reactive Barrier. And so in the name there is really explaining it. And so this is for treating groundwater that is traveling off site or traveling towards a sensitive receptor, and that has contamination. And so rather than clean up the source, if it's very, you know, costly, or you can access it, or try and clean up the old site, if you're trying to protect an off site receptor or sensitive receptor, you can install a permeable reactive barrier to allow for that. It can be either installed by a trench, you can excavate it legal long trench long boundary, or you can inject chemicals to create that barrier. And so again, it's permeable in the sense that groundwater can flow through it. It's reactive, there's some sort of amendment in the in the trench or in the injection that you're doing, that will treat contaminants to non toxic, less harmful forms. And then the barrier just means it's, it's blocking that contamination from going off site. And so the huge innovation here in in Kim can maybe speak to risk assessments here. But in the site assessments, if it's determined that, yes, there's contamination, or maybe it's a low risk, and risk assessment is done in that on site, there's not an issue to you don't need to clean it all up, because there's no risk to human or environmental health. But there is a risk that it could go off site. And you want to mitigate that you can utilize a peer review, to really, you know, minimize the costs for the owners, or whoever has funding it to say, more, we're mitigating all this risk from going off site. And we're using a PRP to do that. And so the innovation PRBS of it around for, you know, since the 90s, the University of Waterloo actually, you know, started this with the first zero, they on Iron walls, they call them iron walls. But in the last 30 years, it's now come, and that was for the treatment of CBOCs, and drycleaners. But now there's PRBS, for gas station sites, there's PRBS, for metals, there's PRBS, we can do in bedrock. And so there's this huge growing need for them. And there's a growing, you know, ability to do it. And so that's, you know, a lot of my work is involved with designing those, it gets complicated, but the general ideas is quite simple.
Louis Savard 57:20
Nice, exciting. Final words, Kim, what do you think society can do to help reduce or prevent contaminations on future sites?
Kim Pickett 57:30
Well, I think for the most part, we can continue to do what we've already started doing. A lot of the sites that Eric and I have been talking about today have become brownfield or contaminated because of their historical use. And we know so much more now about how things impact our environment than we did 50-60 years ago. So I think that the best thing that society can do, and as individuals, what we can do is make better choices. So when you're looking at, if you're a manufacturing company, if you're looking at your processes, is there a more sustainable product that you can use in your process, instead of using the traditional solvents or whatever you might have, making better choices in terms of finding those companies that are already making sustainable products and sustainable choices. So that we're encouraging people to prevent future sites and future contamination, there's, there's always going to be those one offs, those spills, but we're learning more and more how to clean them up more thoroughly than we used to. And even the products that we're using now are not as scary as some of the historical products, for example, we no longer put PCBs in our fluorescent lights, we no longer put asbestos in our buildings. So there, we're getting smarter with the products that we're using. And if we continue to do so I think it'll help prevent contamination on sites.
Louis Savard 59:03
Eric, final thoughts.
Eric Cowan 59:05
Yeah, that was great. Kim, it's funny, what do you think about that prevention, in that, in that Kim and I are in this you know, every day we we know how widespread things are now, really, the historical uses of many sites, you know, are unknown to the general public, right? You think about every gas station every dry cleaner there's in the red and the regulations you know, make those a higher risk site. And we talked about prevention but it's funny in my work is like, we are hired to clean up those things. And so the joke is like, there's more site there's there's more than enough sites that we can handle all of them they're there. They're there everywhere so you can always see like your bias like hey, more environmental issues more work for me, but in reality it's it's so widespread that we it's a part of our and speaking where me personally, I'm sure come to is like you got into this industry to try and clean up sights to help environmental issues be solved. Even with the bias of yeah, this is our work, and this is our livelihood. It's really not good. There's like, and there's new contaminants coming out, as you can imagine, emerging contaminants that we are currently using now that are hazardous or dangerous. And Kim, you probably have worked with P Foss, the Forever chemicals, it's been in the news. And they're an issue and there's no standards yet to for real, widespread, there are some, but they come out all the time. And so what we're using now, so even if we do like hints can say Be mindful, everyone's mindful that what we're using what's sustainable, it's it's kind of a scary thing to think about that there's things that we're using now, we don't know are an issue. And so my final thought on that is, is really the remediation that in the assessment has to keep up with that. And that and that needs to be thought of, in a more maybe nuanced way of like talking about with some of these bigger, multi stakeholder projects like Collinwood, and Hilton that everyone needs to work together is to not only clean up sites that are historical, and we know about, but what's the next thing and how can we create frameworks to make sure we're keeping on top of everything that we don't? And do I have an answer for that? No. But I like to think we can plan ahead and it makes some leeway with that with, you know, awareness. Right. Absolutely.
Louis Savard 1:01:25
Absolutely. All of this was a very enlightening discussion. I hope everybody listening in really learned or, or can really appreciate the complexity of, you know, from purchasing, to assessing to remediating as I have today, man, I thought I was coming into here with a decent understanding of the process because of a past position I place I worked at, but I have my pen was going all night, all night. So I've got notes. Kim. Eric, thank you for this great conversation.
Eric Cowan 1:01:59
Thank you, Laurie. Thank you, Kim. It's great talking to you.
Kim Pickett 1:02:02
Thank you. Dan was good to talk to you too, Eric.
Louis Savard 1:02:05
So as always, I want to thank our listeners for joining us. And remember, if you're interested in learning more about today's topic, or if you have a topic you would like us to feature in a future podcast. Please email us at techtakes@oacett.org That's Tech Takes, T E C H T A K E S at O A C E T T dot org. Till next time. Bye for now.