Christmas story at the old dump

At the end of the year, I offer you a Christmas story, municipal edition. It will take a little imagination, but it will be worth it, I promise.

In this version, the Land of Ice is actually a former, highly contaminated dump.

Santa’s cart, a dump truck filled with crushed stones.

And the elves, blue-collar workers.

Fairytale, I told you.

As in any self-respecting Christmas story, there is also a miracle: an annual saving of $1 million for taxpayers.

No more suspense. I’m going to talk to you about contaminated soil management.

Not very festive, okay. But it is nevertheless one of the Montreal stories that have delighted me the most in recent months, through the proliferating homeless encampments, the OCPM spending scandals, enormous tax increases and the general gloom which seems to hover over the city.

The genesis of the affair dates back to 2019. At the time, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of Montreal published a damning report on the management of contaminated soil in the metropolis¹. Illegal dumping, intimidation on construction sites, the presence of organized crime: the story is not reassuring.

The illegal dumping cited in the report did not come from municipal construction sites, but the OIG still took the opportunity to make some recommendations to the City.

The main one: create your own sites to treat the soil coming from your construction sites, rather than having them travel tens of kilometers to subcontractors. Sometimes as far as Sainte-Sophie, in the Laurentians.

This is how a pilot project began, the results of which exceeded all expectations.

The borough consultation service, headed by Martin Savard, had the idea of ​​reusing the site of a former municipal dump closed in the 1960s, heavily contaminated, located near the Bonaventure highway, next to the MELS studios .

Starting in 2021, three boroughs began sending all soil excavated during their road work, such as repairs to the water distribution network. Five others have since embarked on the project, for a total of eight districts.

I visited the place on a freezing December day, and it doesn’t look like much, to tell you the truth. Mounds of pieces of cement and brown earth, piled up in concrete boxes.

However, this site and all the ways of doing things associated with it constitute a mini-revolution for the management of used soils.

I’ll explain it to you.

First of all, the storage of excavated soil is now 100% environmentally safe. This former dump has its own groundwater treatment system, built by the City in 2022 to capture and treat the “garbage juice” that flowed into the river². Everything is waterproof here, which was not the case everywhere in the old sites.

The ballet of trucks coming in and out is running like clockwork – there have been more than 10,000 trips this year. Each district has its own concrete “box”, where it deposits its used soil. Tests are carried out to detect the presence of contaminants, and this is the other very positive, even surprising, aspect of this project.

Whereas previously, most of the soil was simply sent to the outskirts of Montreal, assuming that it was contaminated, the tests carried out here showed that 85% of the soil excavated is in fact A/B quality.

In French, this means that they can be reused as is, after sieving, to make backfill in various municipal projects. Some 43,000 tonnes of A/B soil were used to create the new Frédéric-Back park.

The benefits are triple for the City – and in turn for Montreal taxpayers.

A) The City no longer has to pay to send its used floors to subcontractors; its employees take care of it.

B) She no longer has to buy new soil for backfilling, since she is reusing her own soil.

C) Tons of greenhouse gases (GHG) are no longer emitted by dump trucks, which now make shorter trips to unload their excavated soil AND leave with freshly sifted cargo.

“It’s a winner at the end », Martin Savard told me during the visit, listing a series of figures with enthusiasm.

Because the figures, yes, are impressive.

During the last year, some 55,000 tonnes of soil were transported here, and 85% could be reused, which represents a saving of approximately $700,000 for the City.

The site has also started crushing large concrete blocks, 6,000 tonnes this year, to make reusable gravel. Another $275,000 saved. We are thus close to a million in savings, with an overall minimal workforce: three blue-collar workers and a foreman manage the entire site.

Savings, in GHG and in dollars, which delight Maja Vodanovic, member of the Montreal executive committee responsible for consultation with the boroughs. “This is the way we have to do the environment in my opinion: it has to be a win-win for everyone, otherwise, no one is going to invest in something that is a loser,” she told me during our visit.

Demand exceeds the capacity of the Pointe-Saint-Charles site, to the point that certain districts have been refused to deposit their excavated soil there.

The City plans to open at least one similar center elsewhere on the island, perhaps more. The model could even be adopted outside of Montreal: delegations from several other Quebec cities and even Belgium have come to study the ways of doing things implemented here.

As for the million dollars saved, yes, it represents a drop in the ocean in the City of Montreal’s budget of 6.99 billion.

But the ingenuity and the efforts that made it possible to reach this million, frankly, must be saluted. And ideally, reproduced in all divisions of the municipal apparatus, to reduce expenses to a more digestible level for taxpayers.

From the bottom of my (stone) heart, dear readers, I wish you an excellent holiday season and a happy new year 2024.

Health !