“Wasted” Opportunity: More awareness needed around the value of resource regeneration
Peter Reid, CEO
It has been encouraging to see governments and regulators making commitments to combat climate change and create a more sustainable economy. The Canadian government and various provinces have pledged funding for the decarbonisation of large-scale emitters; energy transition; and greening the auto, airspace, agriculture, and agri-food sectors across Canada.
But there’s another huge challenge (or a huge opportunity, depending on your perspective) that bafflingly, continues to go unnoticed in climate change and sustainability discussions: excess soil management and reuse.
Some simple excess soil facts:
British Columbia moves 10 to 12 million metres of excess soil from construction projects each year.
In Ontario, that number is 25 million cubic metres.
As urban centres densify and grow, more and more excess soil is generated
What happens to all the dirt that gets dug out to make way for construction and development projects? That soil and rock from the deep hole where the high rise building and underground parkade were built? Almost all of it goes to a landfill, in thousands of trucks, each moving only 10 – 20 cubic meters at a time.
Landfill diversion has become a familiar concept, especially when considered from a consumer’s perspective—how many newspapers, cans and bottles is each person keeping out of the landfill now that we recycle? We’re even hearing increasing calls to reduce the amount of construction and demolition waste that goes to landfill. But opportunities for diversion are almost entirely overlooked for excess soil.
That’s because excess soil can’t usually be reused as-is. Most urban soil fails to meet geotechnical specifications and is often impacted by environmental contaminants. However, many Canadians (even those in ESG or cleantech) may not realize that most of that excess soil doesn’t have to be wasted. Over 90% of this resource CAN be regenerated and reused with the right process.
Meanwhile, all this construction requires massive volumes of clean aggregate. Major urban centres adjacent to the ocean need millions of cubic metres of soils to build dikes and other forms of flood protection to combat climate change and rising sea levels.
Aggregate Resource Regeneration should be the norm in Canada, and yet, there are only a small handful of facilities that enable soil reuse (e.g., GRTs facility is the only soil washing plant in western Canada), with little to no capital funding or grant programs available to support this transformation.
At GRT, our pilot Resource Regeneration plant has processed over 60,000 tonnes of soil since June 2021, keeping 58,000 tonnes of material from going to waste. Except for two IRAP projects and some SR&ED claims, all our work has been privately funded. We are now at the stage where we can scale up, but we need help— in the form of grants, loans and government recognition and support.
Resource Regeneration is a needle-mover in the push to sustainability. This process not only reduces material going to landfill, it also reduces the need for new aggregate mining and transportation. We’ve estimated that our process could regenerate enough material to build all the required flood control dikes in the Lower Mainland—at significant savings both economically and environmentally, and with a lot less dirt being trucked to some faraway landfill.
We can all remember the days when everything we no longer needed went to the curb for pick up once per week. But we are now striving for zero waste. Our metals, plastics, papers, and organics are all separated. Plastic bags are a thing of the past. We should be doing the same thing with our excess soil and stop throwing it in the garbage. Help BC and Canada become leaders in transforming excess soil management to its full resource regeneration potential. Please share this article and keep resource regeneration in mind for your next project.