Trashopolis
On a mid-May afternoon, the wind gusts over Beaver County, bending treetops and skimming dust from gravel roads. Despite the sunshine, a killjoy chill in the air threatens the unusually warm and eager spring
by Scott Messenger
The coolness could just be due to the altitude. The ten-storey table-top summit of the Beaver Regional Landfill, about an hour southeast of Edmonton, is the apex of 2.7 million tonnes of garbage, and a badly exposed place to try to avoid the elements. The view, however, is worth the discomfort.
“It’s like being on top of the world,” says the landfill’s director of operations, Owen Ligard, as he climbs out of the pick-up he drove up here. Whether it’s the world we’re on top of or just a pile of what it has left behind, it’s perfect for taking in an unexpectedly beautiful vista of farmland, stands of poplar and spruce, and lakes in every direction.
For the Beaver Regional Waste Management Services Commission, the landfill’s owner and operator, the most impressive sight sits at the foot of the landfill’s eastern slope. Far below, beyond the gulls languidly surfing swift air currents, is an open, rectangular pit – a cell, in landfill-speak – seven metres deep and big enough to fit as many soccer pitches. Inside, dozers move about like toys in a sandbox, spreading a layer of garbage across a plastic liner laid over the site’s fortuitously dense clay base at a cost of $1.8 million. As expensive as this is for a corporation comprising a few rural towns, it’s a small investment on a potentially great return.
Right now in Alberta, airspace – the tidy term the industry uses for available dumping ground – is soon to be at a premium. The City of Edmonton, set to close its main landfill at Clover Bar in 2009, has recently signed on with Beaver Regional. The counties of Parkland and Vermilion River are already shipping. And while the Commission keeps watch as the counties of Leduc, Minburn, and Wetaskiwin also approach their landfills’ capacities, they’re not ruling out solving trash troubles in Fort McMurray, Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto and beyond. The way the Commission sees it, they’ve got a lot to offer. Space is one thing; that new cell alone means three years of dumping. But as Ligard says of the landfill business, “It’s just not a hole and dirt anymore.” Landfill clients are still looking for economical, long-term solutions, but they’re also looking for well-managed sites, maybe to placate environmental or social consciences, maybe just to avoid future legal tangles. Either way, the Commission feels it can oblige. Without disregarding the advantage of natural, high-level containment provided by the underlying geology, the Commission thinks success is more than just long-term storage. Garbage, it seems, long thought of as the paltry leftovers of resource consumption, is a resource in its own right.
There’s another notable feature of the landscape to be seen from the top of the Beaver Regional Landfill: the village of Ryley, a couple kilometres southwest, population about 435 and holding. Like the other four co-owners of the landfill – Holden, Viking, Tofield and Beaver County – it might avoid the fate of many small Alberta communities and remain vibrant for some time to come, thanks largely to a growing mountain of trash made valuable by virtue of so few people wanting anything at all to do with it.
When Forrest Wright came to work with Beaver County in 1990, his assignment as the new economic development officer was to find a way to generate revenue in line with busy neighbours like Nisku, Camrose, Vegreville and Wainwright. The situation seemed a little bleak. Before his arrival, the County had lost a proposed hazardous waste treatment facility to Swan Hills (it has since “won” another operated by Massachusetts-based Clean Harbors Environmental Services Inc., next to the landfill). A TransAlta generating plant never got beyond planning either.
“Realistically, are you going to get a great big industry to come to Beaver County with 10,000 people?” says Wright, a man with a deadpan sense of humour and a penchant for Jaguars he’ll drive back and forth to the landfill as needed. “No, you’re not. So, I’m running around thinking, ‘Well, what am I going to attract?’”
The answer soon came to him: he would attract garbage.
Since the 1970s, Beaver County has been known to occupy the Bear Paw Formation, a 26-metre layer of very dense clay. Set a drop of water on it and after a century it might soak in two or three centimetres. To find naturally occurring water, go 90 metres deeper. Geologically speaking, there’s no other containment unit like it elsewhere in Alberta – and therefore, Wright understood, no better place to manage solid waste.
In the end, says Wright, now the Commission’s chief administrative officer, “We just lucked out.” When he learned the transportation giant Laidlaw Inc. was looking for new grounds for the commercial waste it was collecting from Edmonton area construction and demolition sites and private businesses, the opportunity for vast expansion of the site’s tiny, existing landfill became obvious. Former Viking mayor William Taylor, who then handled waste matters for Beaver County, agreed to have Laidlaw take over operations and shell out for expansion costs that, for meetings, approvals, and legal, geological, and design staff, amounted to what Wright will only guess at being $6 million to $7 million. On top of this expense, Taylor issued another caveat: that the project would ensure local employment, not completely destroy the environment and, in general, provide regional benefit – ideally more than just royalties on each incoming load.
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