CRD halts hunt for new sludge technology

Directors, led by Victoria mayor, reject ‘integrated’ solution as too experimental

Despite the objections of several mayors — including Saanich’s Richard Atwell and Metchosin’s John Ranns — the Capital Regional District will halt its hunt for a new way to deal with sewage sludge.

CRD directors agreed to stop any move to buy technology for a plant to deal with the biosolids, or sludge, left behind when the new sewage treatment plant starts to operate. That’s expected to happen before 2021.

“To me, it’s scandalous to ignore substantial savings to the taxpayers,” Ranns said. “There are numerous technologies out there that can handle this stuff.”

The disagreement arose over a CRD decision to stop looking for technology to come up with an “integrated” solution to deal with solid waste, including sewage sludge.

Integrated resource management can involve mixing biosolids, garbage and food scraps, and processing that mix to generate electricity, which in turn produces revenue.

Atwell said he visited a small plant in Washington state that can reduce wet sewage sludge to “pure drinking water, electricity and some ash.” Furthermore, he said, the plant generates most of its own power by burning the material.

He also stressed the Washington operation is not the only one in the world.

“That’s only one of the technologies,” Atwell said. “But the board has not looked at any of them.”

But CRD directors, led by Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, decided the integrated approach to sludge disposal was too experimental to proceed to a procurement stage.

Victoria Coun. Geoff Young agreed with Helps and said it’s becoming clear that the best way to recycle and reuse solid waste is to separate the waste streams, right down to the type of plastic.

An integrated approach makes that impossible, he said.

The sludge is to be pumped 18 kilometres from the treatment plant at McLoughlin Point to a facility at the Hartland Landfill, where it will be dried and stored and perhaps sent off to be burned as fuel in cement kilns.

Kitchen scraps and garden waste, on the other hand, will be composted, preferably on Vancouver Island. Right now, organic scraps are shipped to Delta to be processed at a cost of $114 per tonne.