The initial experience with…

The initial experience with the Regulation to date has shown that soil contamination at levels exceeding the generic ESQS is far more common than was likely anticipated by the Ministry in formulating this Regulatory approach. This is consistent with many practitioners' experience that some level of contamination (often only marginally exceeding standards) is very common in urban areas across the Province, particularly older urban areas. A great deal of development activity occurs in these areas, resulting in the generation of significant volumes of excess soil.

The common occurrence of soil contamination combined with the application of very conservative ESQS will result in far higher volumes of contaminated soil being generated across the Province than was previously the case, and this can be said with a high level of certainty. It is expected that the volume of contaminated soil requiring disposal will far exceed the operational needs of landfills (e.g., as daily or interim cover materials), such that contaminated soil being sent to landfill sites in the Province will simply be consuming airspace and displacing waste disposal capacity for the more traditional waste streams that the landfills were intended for (i.e., MSW and ICI wastes).

As compliance levels with the Regulation increase, so will the volumes of contaminated soils requiring disposal. Landfills can thus expect to see waste volumes increase and remaining capacity decrease more rapidly than was previously the case, creating a significant problem for waste management planning across the Province. Displacing waste capacity in this way has the potential to be very damaging given the difficulty in adding new capacity.

Further consideration of this issue is required. While some partial relief can potentially be provided through development of site specific ESQS through applying either the BRAT or risk assessment approaches, these are unlikely to be adopted to a sufficient extent to make a large difference, considering project timelines and schedule implications, and the likely lack of sufficient QP capacity to allow the widespread adoption of these approaches. Even if these approaches were more widely adopted, this would likely not provide sufficient relief to address the problem.

Solutions to this issue likely will require some combination of:
- approaches that would allow for some further relaxation of the generic ESQS, either broadly or in some situations
- the ability to more easily increase disposal capacity for contaminated soils across the Province - this would likely require establishing processes for the development and more rapid approval of a new class of waste disposal site for contaminated soils.

Some of the currently proposed amendments are supported in that they will partially alleviate some of these concerns. However, further review of the waste management aspect of soil management is needed.