RC105 MarApr2023 - Magazine - Page 24
REMEDIATION
ROCK STAR
TREATMENT
Quebec quarry introduces
new soil management model
for construction industry
by Mark Cardwell
RBAN ENVIRONMENT EXPERT David Garant isn’t surprised
by the operational success of a soil treatment centre
that opened a year ago in a spent sector of a large
limestone quarry in the heart of Laval, just north of
Montreal.
What amazes him is that the novel notion
and unique partnership behind the project—innovative
approaches that could change the way the Canadian
construction industry manages contaminated soils and
rehabilitates old pits and quarries—hadn’t been thought
of sooner.
“It just makes so much sense—it’s a no-brainer,” says
Garant, director of land and environment management at
CRH Canada, one of the country’s largest vertically integrated materials and construction companies. “It’s a winwin-win for the companies involved, the environment and
for society as a whole. We’re already looking at expanding
the model to other quarries.”
Opened in mid-September 2021, the soil treatment
centre is a joint initiative between quarry-owner Demix,
a subsidiary of CRH Canada that makes and supplies the
Quebec construction industry with a variety of aggregates
from a half-dozen quarries in the Greater Montreal region,
and Englobe, a Canadian leader in applied sciences, notably in environmental consulting and remediation using
biological processes to degrade, transform and essentially
eliminate contaminants from soil and water.
Located in the southern half of the 1.7-million square
metre Laval quarry, which is divided by the busy boulevard St. Martin commercial artery in the heart of Quebec’s
third-largest city, the soil treatment facility features a large
impermeable base or treatment pad that is equipped with
blowers to optimize and control the rate of biodegradation
of contaminated soils and sediments.
Soil from Demix customers who are working to redevelop everything from old gas stations to construction and
industrial sites in a roughly 100-kilometre radius of the
quarry are dumped in piles on the treatment pad.
Each pile is then covered with industrial-grade waterproof tarps and subjected to a low-energy; micro-organ-
Mark Cardwell
is a freelance
writer based
in the Quebec
City region.
24
RENEW CANADA – MARCH/APRIL 2023
ism-based bioremediation technique that Englobe
has developed.
This so-called biopile method leverages naturally
occurring biological processes to isolate, eliminate and/or
convert hydrocarbons and other organic and manmade
compounds like metals and pesticides into low toxicity
biproducts.
“It’s an outdoor process that takes four to ten weeks,
depending on the contaminants involved,” says Louis
Côté, Englobe’s general manager and vice president of operations for remediation and organics and soil treatment.
In addition to its 64 offices, the company operates
10 regional contaminated soil treatment centres across
Canada (plus some in Europe) and handles more than 1
million tonnes of soil and other materials annually.
Once the biopile treatment is complete, soils are
considered reclaimed and ready for reuse as landfill or
road-fill by everyone from real estate developers and
excavation contractors to municipal bodies and industrial companies.
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