Outfall Fall-Out


On a sunny, windy afternoon, bull kelp bobs in the glinting waves off Macaulay Point. A woman in a red tank top labours up the path deeper into the park. A family out walking their dogs heads towards the military housing around the corner. A chain link fence, topped with barbed wire, protects a low, nondescript Capital Regional District building. If it weren't for the narrow "outfall" sign nearby, you'd never know a torrent of untreated sewage was passing below your feet and out to sea.
Nor would you know that this waterfront park, one of two places in town where the poop literally hits the screen, is about to be at the centre of a debate that's coming on like a bad case of-well, you know.
Thanks to provincial environment minister Barry Penner, we're only just having the first uncomfortable cramping now. Last week he ordered the CRD to set a fixed schedule for introducing sewage treatment, and to have a plan in place by June 30, 2007. It's a move that sets in motion a whole range of questions, not the least of which is where to start building.
"Macaulay Point is the default location in all the thinking of the CRD and probably other communities," says Jane Sterk, an Esquimalt councillor. As much as we need to treat our sewage, she says, she doesn't like the plan to use the park. "There's a huge proportion of Esquimalt that isn't comfortable with that location."
There are good reasons, she says. Fo one, we're talking about prime property next to the ocean. "I don't think it makes sense to use waterfront parkland for sewage treatment." Also, trucks would be needed to haul away the sludge, most likely to Hartland landfill. Who wants to smell the pumping and have those trucks rumbling through their neighbourhood day after day?
"I'm hoping we're going to have a really healthy debate," says Sterk. "It's actually our money that in the end will pay for this."
The other obvious location for a treatment plant is Clover Point, across the road from a row of million-dollar Fairfield homes on Dallas Road. If the people in Esquimalt are prepared to raise a stink, no doubt it will smell relatively pleasant compared with the hue and cry likely to come from Fairfield.
The CRD's current plan, approved by the province in 2003, is for treatment plants at Macaulay and Clover points, says Dwayne Kalynchuk, the CRD's general manager of environmental services. At both sites, he says, plants would be buried. It would cost $250 million to make them both primary treatment, and $450 million if it is to be secondary. A third site would be needed somewhere else, to treat the sludge that comes out of them.
Primary treatment, as defined in the July 12 Scientific and Technical Review Capital Regional District Core Area Liquid Waste Management Plan, involves passing screened sewage through large tanks and allowing its various components to separate. Heavy material sinks to the bottom where it becomes sludge, while oils and other light parts rise to the surface where they can be skimmed off. It would reduce the amount of solids in our wastewater by about 60 percent.
Secondary treatment breaks down the sludge futher. There are various ways to do it using micro-organisms: think of them like the critters that make your backyard compost work. It's possible, says the report, to break the contaminants down to the point where they are virtually eliminated.
Already, movement is gathering to push the CRD to get beyond primary treatment. Tourism Victoria issued a statement saying secondary treatment is the minimum. The federal government, which is updating its wastewater guidelines, is widely expected to soon require at least secondary treatment.
Saanich councillor and former CRD chair Judy Brownoff says considering the damage we've already done, primary treatment won't be enough. "Primary won't reduce those higher levels of contaminants from the sea floor," she says. "I don't want to continue to create a contaminated site because the cost of remediation could be very expensive for future generations."
Remember, it's not 300,000 people's urine and feces that's created contaminated sites at the two outfalls, but the copper, lead, zinc and other compounds that go down our drains (see page 9 sidebar). Just what is in that pink deodorizing puck dissolving in the urinal day after day? What do you clean your bathtub and toilet with? Do they have the same effect on ocean life as they do on bathroom mould? Is there a treatment method that will help with that?
Brownoff says she doesn't know yet what kind of treatment she'll support, but every possibility should be considered. "The options are bigger than just two big honking plants, which I don't think will work and I wouldn't support," she says. "We need to look at our waste as resource recovery, not just waste
. . . I think you reach and you use resource recovery to show the world how you can reduce greenhouse gasses, recapture water and make energy. I just think you reach."
But to do that, it becomes necessary to look beyond the CRD boardroom table, beyond the body's staff and beyond the various councils that make up the CRD. The politicians are swimming hard to pop up on the right side of the tide now, but they are largely still coming to terms with having to move forward at all. Among the politicians, says Brownoff, "Quite honestly, nobody has been pushing a vision."
From stain to halo
Stephen Salter piles documents on the Monday Magazine boardroom table. With his hair cropped close and his denim shirt open at the neck, he looks like a university professor on holiday. He doesn't consider himself an expert on sewage, he says, but he is a mechanical engineer who has been working for several years with the Victoria Sewage Alliance, a coalition of several environmental and labour groups including the Georgia Strait Alliance, the Sierra Legal Defence Fund, the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation and the Victoria Labour Council.
Mr. Floatie, the scatological mascot of People Opposed to Outfall Pollution, may get credit for turning public opinion about sewage treatment, but Salter has been quietly effective in his own right. He spent a month making spreadsheets and analyzing the CRD's data, he says, making calculations that showed the environment ministry that our sewage outfalls are creating contaminated sites. The ministry later confirmed his charge with its own study.
Now he wants to make sure we move forward in a way that gets beyond just cleaning up our effluent. Important as that is, he says, there are all kinds of opportunities to embrace here. "It's going to be a lot of money. Lets get the most environmental, social and economic benefit we can from this."
The thing is, when cities go shopping for a sewage treatment system, they can't simply sit down with a catalogue and choose. Even within the realm of "secondary" treatment, there are countless options. "It's almost infinite," Salter says. What we do have are examples from around the world, of various jurisdictions doing innovative things with their waste. "What we can't see is one plant designed from the ground up."
How we decide which system is best will depend on what we want to do.
For starters, do we want to recover water? Much of what goes down our pipes is actually drinking water-the same stuff we've gone to great lengths to trap in the Sooke Reservoir, then distribute through the city. To recover that resource, there are membrane systems, like those used in San Diego, that will filter out the water from our waste. You might not want to drink what comes out, says Salter, but it could be used for industrial purposes or to irrigate golf courses and parks. Think of it as a grey-water system, where water is reused on a regional scale.
And you could drink it, by the way. "One day we'll be drinking it because we'll be desperate," Salter says.
Putting in such a membrane system would have a cost, of course, but it has to be balanced against the cost of finding more water sources in the future. For example, how does the cost compare to purifying water from the silty Leach River, the next source in line after the Sooke Reservoir is maxed out? There isn't a clear answer.
The next step would be to capture the cooking oil and grease that currently go out to sea. If all we're concerned about is cleaning our effluent, then it doesn't really matter if oil and grease ends up in the landfill. However, says Salter, it would be cheap and easy to capture it and turn it into bio-diesel.
"It's not hard to do," he says. It could be sold, which would help defray the cost of treatment, or it could be used in public vehicles. There's enough oil going out with our sewage to run 200 buses. Or you could use it in whale watching boats, something that would send a message to visitors and locals that we're doing things differently. "Suddenly our stain becomes our halo."
Another consideration is how much energy we put into treating our sewage. Traditional methods suck power to pump sewage from one place to another, then use even more to infuse oxygen into the mix. Would an anaerobic system, one that doesn't require oxygen, use less energy? What about one that uses algae to break down the waste? Each of these is being used somewhere in the world, and could potentially be applied here.
A related question is how much energy we can get out of the treatment process. If we use an anerobic method, one of the main by-products is methane, a natural gas that can be used to generate electricity. Vancouver does this at its Annacis Island wastewater treatment plant, as does the city of Lethbridge. Salter says there are plants, such as one in San Diego, that actually put out more energy than they use.
Lethbridge also does a co-generation thing, where it uses methane to run a generator and create electricity, while at the same time capturing the heat from the generator. Other facilities, some in Washington State and others in Japan, use fuel cells which consume methane while generating both electricity and heat.
Another way of creating heat would be to use a heat pump to remove warmth from the sewage. What now goes out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca is about 16 degrees Celsius, he says, so there's lots of room to recapture some of that and use it for heating buildings. With the volume of sewage we produce here, there would be enough energy to heat several thousand homes.
But that's not all. After the sludge has been digested, says Salter, you are left with a residue that can be heated in a closed system. The process, called pyrolysis, breaks the molecules into smaller pieces and can be used to create either a gas or liquid fuel. When it's done, you are left with a glassy ash, he says, that can be refined in much the same way that ore is refined from a mine.
It's also possible to remove minerals from the sludge. In Sweden, for example, the government requires sewage plants to remove at least 60 percent of the phosphates, useful as fertilizer, from their waste. "If you recover phosphorus you don't have to make phosphorus," says Salter. "It avoids upstream pollution."
In total, according to a table Salter prepared, about $1.3 million worth of metals go out with our sewage each year, including significant amounts of aluminum, magnesium, potassium, silver and zinc.
In the future, there will be even more possibilities for treating our sewage. How about a microbial fuel cell, like the one being developed at Pennsylvania State University, that uses little critters that give off electrons while they consume sewage? In one step, says Salter, they break down sewage and give off useable electricity. Whatever we plan, he says, we should leave room to improve on our system. "We'll be replacing it as it wears out. There's always going to be better to come."
Another question is whether to build one or two large plants, or a distributed system where smaller plants are spread around the region. The CRD's Scientific and Technical Review panel argued there are economies of scale with large plants. Salter says we shouldn't overlook the possibility of creating small systems like the one going into the Dockside Green development (see page 8 sidebar).
Thinking outside the tank
The ideas Salter is talking about don't fit well into a debate over whether we should have primary, secondary or tertiary treatment. "It's actually kind of a lateral thinking approach altogether," he says.
While some of the options could be relatively cheap and easy, others will clearly be expensive. However, there are possibilities for making at least some of the money back through sales of gas, energy or water, and in some cases they will help us avoid having to spend on finding more water or cleaning up a contaminated site later. It's necessary, he says, to look at it holistically.
"Everyone's afraid of the cost and the stink," he says. "Let's get over the fear. Let's get inspired . . . This is the golden opportunity. Lots of regions are doing pieces of this. We can do the whole thing."
He adds, "We actually know how to solve the problem. We have had a leadership gap, and hopefully that's changing."
Salter and the sewage alliance are recommending the CRD put out a design competition that's open to all submissions. It's a suggestion that's been picked up by forward-thinking politicians like Saanich's Judy Brownoff.
"I think we need to challenge the greater world. There's tons of stuff happening everywhere but here," Brownoff says. "I love the idea of using Mr. Floatie to power buses . . . Don't you think it would be great if we could show some innovation that would lead others to show how it can be done?"
At the July 26 CRD liquid waste committee meeting, a motion to open such a competition was put forward, but it got tabled until after the committee members have a briefing in August. The members also rejected a proposal from the regional staff to go back to Stantec Consulting Ltd. to update the plan they'd previously drawn up for sewage treatment, as well as to engage a public-private partnership consultant for advice. Saanich mayor Frank Leonard was one of the people asking for that briefing. As he points out, the committee members have the 87-page document, An Evaluation of Sediment Quality Conditions in the Vicinity of the Macaulay Point and Clover Point Outfalls to ponder, as well as the 131-page Scientific and Technical Review: Capital Regional District Core Area Liquid Waste Management Plan. Even the letter from Barry Penner could use some clarification, he says.
While some have characterized the move as stalling, Leonard says it's only wise to go slowly and make credible decisions. "Sometimes we have to figure things out in front of the public and reporters," he says. "If you make a decision that appears to be biased right at the start, you can never put Humpty Dumpty together again."
In the end, he says, an open, public process will result in a better decision with more support from around the region. "If you do it right it's actually faster. If you don't have credibility and you make decisions without people knowing something's being discussed, these things take longer."
No doubt it's worth getting it right. There are already two contaminated sites that we've created and now need to do something about, but Macaulay and Clover points are also two beautiful waterfront parks that nobody wants to sacrifice. If there's a sewage debate to be had now, it's going to have to ask if we can find a way to do the right thing, without spoiling what we have left. M