To whom it may concern: I…

To whom it may concern: I attended a Community Information Session held by the company York1, in the community of Dresden on 2024-02-10. That meeting was held to allow York1 (the Company) to present and discuss information, and answer questions regarding a proposed Regenerative Recycling Facility and Landfill that would be located on a property in Dresden, at 29831 & 29841 Irish School Road. In the following, I will refer to that proposed facility simply as “the facility”.

During the Question & Answer session that followed the slide-show presentation by a representative of the Company, it was made very clear by the Company that the property on Irish School Road in Dresden had been identified by them to host the facility for one single reason. That reason, as stated repeatedly by the Company, is the existence of two ECAs that allow for use of the property in part for landfill and in part as a waste processing site. It was stated repeatedly by York1 that it would be much simpler and quicker to obtain an amendment for that property than to identify a different property which might require an Environmental Assessment. However, that explanation is unsatisfactory for multiple reasons.

First, if the activities on the proposed facility posed no risk of harm to the environment, as the Company claims to be the case, then the Company should be perfectly OK with having an environmental assessment on any suitable property that they might identify. Their openly stated desire to avoid an Environmental Assessment is a red flag for the local community as it suggests that the details of the facility and its operations and potential environmental hazards are not being shared with the public.

Second, the existing ECA for a waste processing site dates from many decades ago and most likely does not account for the proposed activities to be carried out at the facility. Furthermore, recent disturbances of private water wells in the same municipality as Dresden (Municipality of Chatham-Kent) due to construction and operation of industrial wind turbine complexes have demonstrated that the local aquifer is very susceptible to damage from industrial installations. Many, many households depend on their private wells for domestic water supply and many households can no longer use their wells due to industrial interference. Please, see the link provided to an article from a local Postmedia newspaper, the Chatham Daily News, regarding the saga of water wells in the area. At the meeting that I attended, I raised the issue of the potential for activities at the facility to interfere with the aquifer but the Company seemed to show little interest.

Third, it would be far more suitable for the facility to be installed on a property which would be located much closer to the large urban centres that would certainly be the sources for the vast bulk of material to be recycled from construction and demolition sites. Such a location would vastly reduce the distances
of transport of the materials to be recycled when compared to the Dresden property.

Fourth, the Indian Road property in Dresden is not located on, or even close to any major traffic artery. In fact, the large amount of heavy truck traffic would be navigating multiple county roads and municipal streets to get recyclable materials to the facility. Those roads are not built to handle such traffic that would also represent a major nuisance and potentially a safety hazard for the populations living in the area.

In summary, from the above it is clear that the Indian Road property is entirely unsatisfactory to host the proposed facility because of its distance from the main sources of recyclable construction and demolition materials, because transport of the materials would require use of roads not engineered to support that traffic, and because the ECA upon which the Company wishes to rely for an amendment should be considered (in my opinion) no longer valid due to the original ECAs not having been provided for the type of facility that is proposed. Finally, the Indian Road property is not a suitable choice for the facility due to the risk of environmental damage, especially (but not only) to the local aquifer.