Landfill meeting with staff - the situation

This week I had a very productive and informative meeting with staff on the trail landfill odour situation. I am well aware that the last few years have been much worse than in the past and I appreciate your reporting of bad days to 311@ottawa.ca so they can track the feedback.

The open face (area of operations for waste disposal) is presently larger than it normally would be as they are opening a new area while having not yet closed off the current one. Also, there are several cells that were closed off under outdated environmental policies which mean that they were not ‘sealed’ and odours are seeping through the top soil. Over the past year staff have started the process of drilling additional wells that will siphon off the methane and other ‘garbage juices’ and allow them to be recycled into fuel or burn off. The heat map below shows the proposed well stations proposed for this spring, as well as the completion levels for the open face areas. Additionally, this summer/fall will see the retrofitting of a sealant system to the outdated cells. Both of these programmes should reduce the odours. For comparison, I met with Wayne French from Waste Management (the carp dump) and he indicated that these were the key solutions to the odour problems that they were having in Stittsville back in the 90s.

This will also cause some construction requirements along Borrisokane and Cambrian later in the summer, I will post specifics of that plan later once we have the exact details.

Please reach out to me if you have questions.