Holding our noses

“Spring has sprung The grass is riz … I wonder where the dump stench is?”

All right, so that’s not the way that line of doggerel really goes.

But if you’re active on social media in the St. John’s area, you’ve seen it: the springtime bevy of questions about why, in the east end of St. John’s, you can smell the Robin Hood Bay Waste Management Facility so distinctly. (Disstink-ly?)

The dump has been there for a long time — that it smells is, sadly, no surprise.

The facility operates under a provincial permit, which includes its own range of air emissions requirements. As such, the provincial Department of Environment can take action if “odour impacts beyond the property boundaries are deemed to be excessive,” including requiring the City of St. John’s, which runs the operation, to provide “a plan to reduce or cease odour generation.” Complaints are supposed to be tracked and addressed. But there’s only so much a more than 60-year-old facility can deliver.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way, because, while the dump has always been there, its upgrade to a regional waste management facility was supposed to have taken it somewhere else.

Not-in-my-backyard was supposed to become not-in-anyone’s-backyard.

In the stinky dump mists of the distant past — 2002 — the plan was to build a completely new waste management site at Dog Hill Pond, on the Trans-canada Highway outside the city’s boundaries. (It’s hard to find the full details of that Cadillac of waste plans anymore; the electronic versions of the Dog Hill waste management plan have vanished into the mists of time and the lost land of Internet “Page cannot be found” mystery.) The site was to include full-depth buffer zones separating the site from anyone who could be affected. Land assembly started, but the project didn’t get much further than that.

The short version is that the $200-million price tag was just too much, and the province and city defaulted to a $40-million upgrade of the existing site in 2007. That was when the site also became the repository for garbage from the rest of the Avalon Peninsula and even beyond.

In a way, it’s meant that Robin Hood Bay has become a fiscal stop-gap. It’s tough to build a first-class facility on an unstable foundation. The site began as a virtually unregulated U.S. military dump site in the 1940s. It became the city’s dump in 1963, and for years, what went into the site was anyone’s guess. The province’s regulations say waste sites should be at least 1.6 kilometres away from “any residential area.” That’s clearly not the case with this site.

We had a solution.

We just didn’t want to pay for it. It’s come a long way — but it’s still garbage.