Over the past several years, there has been significant debate regarding sewage treatment for the Capital Regional District. The lack of effective sewage treatment in the CRD has been a topic of significant discussion well beyond Vancouver Island.
As an MP from British Columbia and as the parliamentary secretary for Environment and Climate Change (the department responsible for relevant wastewater treatment regulations), I believe it is time to move beyond this debate. It is time for the CRD to move forward in implementing effective sewage treatment.
Current federal wastewater treatment regulations require a minimum level of secondary sewage treatment be in place in designated urban centres by 2020. Secondary-treatment systems combine physical separation to remove solids from a wastewater stream with biological processes to remove dissolved and suspended organic compounds.
The requirement for new secondary-treatment facilities that must be built by 2020 applies to the Lion’s Gate Treatment plant in North Vancouver and to 14 other cities across Canada (note that the regulation itself applies to 2,546 wastewater treatment systems across Canada).
This 2020 secondary treatment requirement represents a minimum level. Over the past several years, a number of industrialized jurisdictions have been moving toward implementation of more stringent “tertiary” treatment systems, meaning systems that will take out virtually all chemical compounds (rather than 85 per cent that would be removed by a secondary-treatment plant). Such systems also increasingly incorporate “best available technologies,” including those relating to resource recovery and to greenhouse-gas mitigation.
Some have raised questions as to whether secondary sewage treatment will provide environmental value in the context of the CRD’s marine receiving environment (rather than fresh water). It certainly will.
Federal wastewater systems effluent regulations that require a minimum of secondary treatment specifically take into account local conditions. Each situation is addressed individually to establish the level of risk based on scientific criteria for site-specific effluent quality and quantity and the site-specific receiving-environment characteristics.
With regard to the CRD, the most recent site-specific science review by an independent expert panel, established in 2006 through the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, found that the reliance on the dilution and natural dispersion processes of the Juan de Fuca Strait is not a long-term solution. Further, the expert panel also said that “the addition of secondary treatment with extended solids retention times will result in a significant reduction in most emerging contaminants of concern in final effluents.”
I should also note that the CRD also submitted its own data and information to Environment and Climate Change Canada in 2014 under the federal regulatory requirements. This was used in a site-specific process to establish the level of risk and the corresponding compliance timeline.
The CRD has recently started to actively move toward commencing planning and construction of two sewage treatment plants. The district should be commended for the fact that it has decided to implement tertiary treatment systems. By moving to such a rigorous treatment standard, the CRD will ensure that it significantly limits negative impacts on marine life in the area.
Ken Ashley, a professor at the BCIT Rivers Institute and an expert on the effects of wastewater on receiving environments, underlines the importance of what the CRD is doing.
“Although the receiving water dilutes Victoria’s sewage to low concentrations,” he states, “the marine food web will re-concentrate certain pollutants via food-web bio-magnification to the point where southern resident orcas are at risk, and classified as toxic waste when dead ones wash up on our beaches.
“The increasing prevalence of persistent organic pollutants, pharmaceuticals, microplastics and endocrine disruptors in wastewater effluent requires new treatment methods to protect our marine food web, not to mention recovering commodities such as phosphorus, nitrogen, natural gas, heat and recycled water.”
Similarly, Don Mavinic, a B.C.-based expert on wastewater-treatment systems and technologies and a professor in the University of British Columbia’s department of civil engineering, states that: “modern wastewater treatment now must deal with more than just organic carbon, solids and nutrients — we have a multitude of legacy chemicals to deal with, toxic and bio-accumulative metals, energy-neutrality demands and the need for reduced carbon footprint. In developing and implementing wastewater treatment systems, the world must increasingly shift its attention to proper liquid-waste management and full resource recovery (including water reuse) — as CRD’s plan does.”
The CRD’s decision to move forward with development of tertiary wastewater-treatment systems is in compliance with federal requirements. It is also, however, a move that is informed by science and data, and will provide significant, long-term environmental and economic benefit.
Moving forward with this project will also address a matter that has been a point of national and international contention for a significant time.
Jonathan Wilkinson is the MP for North Vancouver and parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change.
