Residents raise a stink about sewage sludge

Residents weary of industrial odours are raising a stink about a sewage sludge experiment proposed near the end of Sherman Avenue North.

Terrapure Environmental, which also runs the Taro dump, wants to test-drive turning city sewage sludge into fertilizer at a currently closed waste transfer station on Brant Street.

The old waste transfer site still needs provincial permission to accept sewage sludge, the slurry left over after human waste is treated at a city sewage plant.

The neighbourhood shouldn’t be a “guinea pig” for the sludge recycling experiment, said Jochen Bezner, an organizer with Citizens Against Pollution.

The group panned the project in a recent release, citing the odour risk from offloading stillwet sludge into a building without stink-fighting measures like negative air pressure.

It also noted the company’s nearby hazardous waste processing facility on Imperial Street was fined $145,000 for separate incidents in 2016 that released potentially harmful gases.

The nearest homes to the proposed sludge recycling facility are about 20 metres away, said neighbourhood resident Kerry Bear.

“It should not be done so close to where people are living,” said Bear, who organized a community meeting with the company last week.

The citizens group is urging residents to formally comment in opposition to the requested amendment on the provincial Environmental Registry website. The deadline is Friday. Terrapure spokesperson Greg Jones said the company chose the closed facility largely because it already has a provincial permit to run a waste facility at the site.

He said the project is envisioned as a 12-month pilot that would only accept and process about 75 tonnes.

That would be two truckloads of sewage sludge per day.

Jones acknowledged resident concerns about smell, but added the company plans to “minimize the exposure” of the sewage sludge to air by directly offloading trucks into the processing equipment.

He added the province’s review

of its application will “ensure the existing and proposed operations are sufficient to manage the potential for odours.”

The company is contracted to dispose of Hamilton’s sewage sludge, but Jones said material from other cities could also be used. (The local contract will end once the city builds its own, privately run sludge plant on Woodward Avenue.)

The neighbourhood has already suffered through several summers of competing odour problems — most recently the infamous stink associated with the city’s own compost plant further east on Burlington Street.

Bear helped successfully spur a provincial review of repeated odour issues at Canadian Liquid Processors in 2017.

“There is already an overconcentration of waste facilities in this part of the city,” she said.

“I’m hoping the voices in our community are heard.”