The 8th Annual Excess Soils Symposium was a sold-out success thanks to our engaged and enthusiastic community of industry leaders, environmental experts, government representatives and various delegates. More than 350 people came together on September 26, 2024 at the Toronto Region Board of Trade Conference Centre.

The symposium is the premier provincial forum to share knowledge and expertise on the latest development, perspectives, and regulations pertaining to managing excess soils in construction and cleanup projects across Canada, helping participants optimize their resource recovery and stay in compliance. The agenda included hot topics, regulatory overviews, and industry insights on best practices and innovative solutions.

Representing the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, Parliamentary Secretary Andrew Dowie took to the symposium stage to provide welcome remarks.

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“The environment is a passion, and I certainly want to help protect our natural resources,” said PA Dowie, a civil engineer and the MPP for Windsor-Tecumseh, who was representing Minister Andrea Khanjin, currently on maternity leave. “The Excess Soil Regulation was a pretty seismic change and evokes a lot of discussion. It’s fitting that today’s event was held in Queen’s Quay, which was constructed in part using excess soils.”

Dowie discussed the importance of Ontario’s tremendous growth and how municipal policies are supporting this growth and the related management of resources. He pointed out that the first half of last year alone almost 500,000 people entering the province and that rate of growth is expected to continue.

With this in mind, Dowie explained how the Ontario provincial government is investing in people and communities, “to help keep costs down while building the infrastructure, housing and transportation needed to support this tremendous growth.” He cited initiatives such as cutting the gas tax and fuel tax, reducing small business corporate income tax rates, and accelerating write offs of capital investments to support businesses that are making eligible investments.

“Your industry is playing a vital role. Our government recognizes this, and we’ve been making changes to make it easier for you to manage the 25 million cubic metres of excess soils that are generated every year in Ontario,” said Dowie.

Supportive initiatives for the industry include removing reuse planning requirements at low risk sites such as agriculture. He highlighted how regulatory amendments for Ontario’s Regulation 406/19, The On-Site and Excess Soil Regulation — that were announced last year at the symposium — are helping to remove the reuse planning requirements at low-risk sites, provide greater flexibility for storage of excess soils at smaller sites, increase opportunities for the reuse of salt impacted soils in low risk circumstances, and exempt small projects from physical or electronic hauling records, as well as other clarification and corrections.ExcessSoils24-0459

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“But we’re not done. We know your industry has more suggestions on how we can make further improvements, and I want you to know that we are listening. We know you have concerns about the enforcement of our regulations on excess soils,” stated Dowie.

He left the room with reassurance on the ministry’s “proactive and risk-based assessment program” that is assessing compliance and conducting responsive inspections and site visits in response to pollution, spills and complaints from the public. The ministry staff is using various tools, such as voluntary compliance and issuing orders or formal prosecutions.

“Our government is grateful for all the feedback you provide on this issue and there is an ongoing need that the excess soil be readily reused, where appropriate, for beneficial purpose as we incorporate feedback from you and Indigenous communities. Our government looks forward to further dialogue and if needed, further regulatory amendments,” concluded Dowie. “Thanks for the work that you do every day to help build a stronger Ontario.”

The intersection of excess soils and ESG

Certified Specialist in Environmental Law Janet Bobechko, a partner at WeirFoulds LLP, delivered the keynote, an inspiring discussion of excess soils and the consequences in relation to environmental social and governance (ESG).

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“Today I want us to focus strictly on beneficial reuse as a concept, looking through the lens of environmental, social, governments, governance. Why is it important? Right now, the world is grasping complex concerns around climate change impacts and the loss of biodiversity,” said Bobechko. “As an industry, we see the need to consider broader and more creative options to use excess soil as part of a nature-based solutions to increase resiliency to climate change impacts and to improve soil health and to create nature corridors to increase biodiversity.”

She highlighted the need to move the needle and remember our commitments on a global stage, such as Canada’s signing on to the Paris Agreement in 2015 with the aim to limit the global average temperature to below two degrees Celsius, and to pursue the limit to maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius. She also pointed to Climate Week in New York City, which is adjacent to the UN General Assembly meetings.

“There’s a lot of buzz about climate change right now. Unfortunately, that buzz is not all good, because there are some drastic numbers and things that have to change,” she warned. “We are not meeting our targets to inhibit global warming. And in fact, 2023 was the hottest year on record, with a daily global average above 1.4 degrees Celsius. So, we need to change things.”

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She also pointed to Canada’s 2030 emissions reduction plan that was published in 2022, and establishes our greenhouse gas emissions targets to our 40 to 45 per cent by 2030 and it aligns generally with the United Nations Stock Take Report.

“Climate change is a reality. It continues to hit hard with unprecedented number of natural disasters across Canada, from wildfires to severe storms to droughts and floods. Like even last week, we had unusually hot weather for the end of September. We had the least amount of rain in Ontario that we’ve had in a long time. It is impacting us, and that is changing, or changing the way that we do our work.”

Bobechko explained how natural solutions are beginning to engage in to gain increasing importance and resilient strategies, and now “there is a role for excess soils to play a part of a natural solution” by supporting soil formation, nutrient cycling and oxygen production.

She also emphasized the importance of careful urban planning, enhancing native biodiversity, ecological connectivity and integrity, through, for example the design and engineering of urban parks to fight flooding, restoration of coastal wetlands to halt erosion, well planned reforestation of rural land restoration to prevent landslides on key infrastructures and watershed management to improve water quality and quantity for drinking water utilities. In many cases, nature, natural, nature-based solutions combined with physical infrastructure can increase the development benefits and reduce life cycle costs.

Comprehensive content and technical discussions

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Several symposium panels and technical sessions provided further exploration of the key issues, including:

  • Best Practices: “QPCO Management Practice Guidance for Reuse Sites”
  • Costs of Compliance: “The Devil’s in the Dirty Details”
  • Crushed Rock Controversy: “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”
  • Regulatory Roundup: “Liquid Soil Trickle-Down Effect Panel”
  • Reuse Receiving Site Woes and Solutions
  • Resource Recovery: “The 3Rs of Excess Soil”
  • Innovation: “Revolutionizing Materials Management with Digital Tools and Tech”

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There are panel slides available on the event’s Whova account for registered attendees. Environment Journal will be covering these issues in depth in the coming weeks.

The inaugural rant

Finally, to complete the comprehensive line-up, Peter Sutton, vice president of Environmental Services at Terrapex, provided the symposium’s inaugural “Rant” on “Ontario’s Excess Soil Quality Standards.”

Sutton took to the stage to rant about why the standards aren’t working and how we can fix them, with an emphasis on addressing challenges such as naturally occurring metal concentrations. “The reason the soil standards are too conservative is largely due to that one factor,” said Sutton. “The source volume of soil.”

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Sutton explained that the source volume “is simply a polymer” and “the risk evaluation models that we use for determining risk and which we have adopted for determining standards basically allows us to calculate, for a certain receptor via a specific exposure pathway, a risk associated with that concentration scene.”

He got into a very specific analysis about the complex procedure of calculating acceptable risk, incorporating a threshold at which we will not exceed that risk, for several receptors, with many exposure pathways, in order to get a data set of contaminant thresholds, and establish a standard.

“So why does this matter? Well, the source zone model has a critical assumption that is actually very, very conservative,” said Sutton.

“And what does that mean for us? Well, it means that our standards might be too, too low, so we might have soil that could actually be safely reused, that somehow can’t be reused because of regulatory standards, and we’re going to have to ship that to a waste disposal site. That’s not great. In fact, I would say it’s probably not what we want to have happen, and I think the ministry would agree.”

“I’m not saying the standards are broken. I’m not saying they can’t work. I’m saying they could work better,” he emphasized. “There was an enormous amount of stakeholder engagement and public consultation in setting the standards. They were published on the environmental registry. We all saw them. We have the standards that we have because we collectively decided that was what we wanted.”

So what does that mean for us? Sutton said he has become frustrated by the way the industry has collectively seemed unable to exercise professional judgment. “There are times when we as QPs can use our judgment, if we have a site, we have our assessment of past uses, or our Phase One environmental site assessment, and we know that, for example, petroleum hydrocarbons are not actually a contaminant of potential concern at our site, despite certain results,” concluded Sutton. “It can be bonkers.”

The Excess Soils Symposium organizers are already gearing up to plan for the next symposium line-up; Premier Doug Ford’s recently proposed project to build a 55 kilometre tunnel under the 401 is just one of the many items up for discussion! Stay tuned.

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Excess Soils Symposium 2024 at a Glance LINK TO VIDEO

Photo Gallery Available HERE

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For further information, visit: https://environmentjournal.ca/excess-soils-symposium

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