Blue planet, green ideas | A park on mine tailings

How they walked from talk to action

(Bedford) The frogs are croaking, the red-winged blackbirds are fluttering and a few deer are grazing behind the mound… under which lie millions of tons of inert stone.

What could have been just a huge rocky mound, devoid of vegetation and lifeless, has recently become a “recreational tourism park” that is the pride of Bedford and neighboring municipalities in Estrie.

Inaugurated on June 21 after five years of work, the Heritage Park is built on the dumps of the Graymont quarry, which extracts limestone a few wingbeats away to make quicklime.

“Without the Heritage project, the plant would be closed today,” categorically states the company’s director of operations for the Eastern Townships, Alexandre Renaud.

Because to continue its activities beyond 2020, Graymont realized a decade earlier that it had to find a place to deposit 32 million tons of “non-recoverable stone”. This crumbly slate of poor quality, for which no use was found, lay above its limestone deposit.

All ideas have been studied, from the underground mine – deemed unprofitable – to shipping the stone to existing pits, located for miles around.

“We mapped the holes available [et] we had to go far,” says Mr. Renaud. Not to mention that such an operation would have required more than two million truck trips, with the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that this would have involved.

The idea of ​​creating dumps on the outskirts of the company’s property, on land belonging to it and on others belonging to the municipalities of Bedford, the township of Bedford and Stanbrige Station, was chosen instead.

And so that everyone can benefit from it, Graymont has proposed to develop a park there, the property of which it will soon transfer to a trust which will manage it.

10,000 trees

The first phase of the project, now complete, therefore consisted in laying out the first two mounds with approximately 20% of the total volume of stone.

Ten thousand trees have been planted there, hiking trails and an outdoor amphitheater have been laid out there, and a reception pavilion, water games and a parking lot have been built there.

A third mound, much larger, will be built over the next 15 years with the remaining 80% of stone; it will also be vegetated, but it will not be open to the public, serving instead as a screen wall with the quarry.

In total, the site will have an area of ​​70 hectares.

However, such a project is not without environmental impact, recognizes Alexandre Renaud, who maintains that the company has done its homework, in particular by compensating in situ all the natural habitats destroyed, in addition to recreating them elsewhere in the region.

Two streams were relocated, two more were created, and sedimentation ponds were constructed to manage runoff from the rock mounds.

Before building these mounds, which reach 45 meters in height, the “good quality” clay that was there was removed and stored, then used to cover the inert stone and promote the revegetation of the site, explains Maxime Descôteaux, the company’s senior health, safety and environment specialist.

Graymont is financing the entire project, which it describes as “titanic”, which should allow it to continue its activities for 20 to 30 years, but does not reveal the extent of the investment.

Regional appeal

The new park makes “a big difference for the community”, believes the mayor of Bedford, Claude Dubois – “not the singer”, he specifies -, who sees a regional attraction in it.

“People are already coming,” he said to The Press the day of the inauguration, when the premises were not yet officially open.

The solution proposed by Graymont makes it possible to “secure well-paid jobs” – the quarry employs some 70 people – while limiting nuisances and bringing a benefit to the residents of the region, he believes.

Above all, the project was carried out taking into account the opinion of the population; “there was a lot of public consultation,” he says.