EXCAVATED WASTES, ODOURS & CORPORATE MOTIVATION

The EWWG (Excavated Wastes Working Group) after multiple trips around the continent both to Canadian and American sites failed to come up with a formal Recommendation to Uniroyal regarding disposal of the contents of the Envirodome/Toxidome/Mausoleum. This was hardly surprising considering the makeup of the handpicked by Uniroyal committee. The recently expanded Uniroyal Public Advisory Committee were in favour of some form of incineration albeit not unanimously. This would include the option of Thermal desorption. Dr. Henry Regier authored CPAC's Motion for the vote on the matter. Fred Hager, Ron Ormson and Councillor Ruby Weber favoured trucking Uniroyal's wastes to a secure landfill. Henry felt that a problem created locally should be dealt with locally not passed off to another community.

Susan Bryant commented in both the June 30, 1998 K-W Record and the July 8, 1998 Elmira Independent that now UPAC could get back to the more important business of dealing with all the rest of the toxic wastes still on site. She also commented that the process of secret, private meetings was unnecessary when she stated "There is no reason that it had to be in private. There were no negotiations". Those were interesting and honest observations. It's unfortunate that years down the road Susan and her friends continued to ignore her own advice and observations.

While the EWWG refused to make a Recommendation to Uniroyal they did after the fact support Uniroyal's choice of landfilling. Bizarre. Again the problem was at least partly the extremely limited choices they were given in the first place.

My comments at the time were that "Landfilling is not the worst possible solution for the waste, it is also not the best.". In theory at least there was 40 metres of clay allegedly beneath the wastes at Corunna, near Sarnia. Of course it was rather embarrassing a few short months after the Envirodome contents were completely transferred there that water and methane began to bubble up through the bottom of one of the disposal cells at the Corunna, Laidlaw facility. The public's fears were put to rest however as both the Ontario M.O.E. and Laidlaw's consultants assured us that it was merely a minor problem of little significance and the addition of three more feet of clay solved the problem.

Meanwhile the Envirodome/Toxidome/Mausoleum is still on site and is still empty. All attempts in the last seventeen years to fill it with DNAPLS and or other still buried wastes on site have been rebuffed. That said there has been some on-site remediation including creekbank clean up, RPE-3 excavation and GP1 partial removal. Those contaminated soils and wastes were also trucked off-site albeit without the same fanfare.