Ontario has launched a new website registry to ensure excess soil dug up during construction and excavation is properly managed and not illegally dumped in ways that may contaminate land and water.
Spearheaded by Ontario’s Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority (RPRA), the new website aims to keep tabs on the approximately 25 million cubic metres of excess soil dug up each year, all while reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transporting soil, preventing road damage, and limiting the amount of healthy soil going to landfill.
The website comes one month ahead of new legal requirements in Ontario’s On-Site and Excess Soil Management Regulation, in order to give the construction and soil management industries time to learn the system and file notices in advance of the new requirements. During this time, the RPRA hosted three online demonstration sessions to help industry learn about the registry’s functions.
Essentially, the new system can help to track the excess soil’s next step and ensure that each regulated project’s soil reaches its pre-approved soil reuse destination. The soil is also assessed and any potential reuse determined.
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“By allowing us to track the reuse and disposal of excess soil, we can make sure clean soil is treated as the valuable resource it is, while ensuring that contaminated soil is properly disposed of – reducing the amount of waste that goes to landfill and keeping our environment clean and healthy,” announced David Piccini, Ontario Minister of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, in a statement.
Fees associated with the registry cover the RPRA’s costs to build, deploy and maintain the registry, and provide ongoing support to registry users. For example, registering soil volume from 2,001 – 10,000 m3 would have a flat fee of $75.
Ontario’s third phase of excess soil requirements will launch in 2025 to further restrict the dumping of excess soil at landfills.
About time that they track excavated soils for contamination. One of the favourite ideas to find a lot and dump soil until there is a very large pile. Wait a couple of years and send in two excavators – one to churn soil and the other to place the churned soil as clean fill. This is being done on McNichol Ave in Scarborough. The excavation industry has had to improvise since the Heighington et al v Ontario legal wrote case law in Canada as it applies to waste on/in land.