Greening up mine tailings with municipal waste: Terrapure Environmental brings award-winning solution to Sudbury.

• Author: Romaniuk, Colleen

Terrapure Environmental and Vale Canada have now won so many awards for their innovative mine tailings rehabilitation project that their team members have almost lost count.

The Burlington-based advanced waste management and field services company broke ground when they approached Vale's Sudbury Operations in 2012 with an idea to solve a municipal and mining problem.

They wanted to apply treated biosolids to Vale's Central Tailings Area in Copper Cliff for reclamation and revegetation.

The result of the discussion was a wildly successful collaboration.

Last May, both companies jointly won an Environmental Leader Award for Project of the Year. By June, they took home a Tom Peters Memorial Mine Reclamation Award, among others.

To date, they have diverted over 100,000 tonnes of biosolids from disposal and treated more than 175 acres of mine-impacted land in providing a natural habitat to the surrounding area.

Their efforts have been recognized as a win-win situation for recycling municipal waste and finding a sustainable solution to tailings reclamation.

Biosolids is the name for different kinds of treated sewer sludge that can be used for nutrients in soil.

Essentially, the wastewater treatment process results in two different outputs: clean water, which gets discharged back into a creek or a lake, and solids, which are removed, treated and stabilized for beneficial use such as fertilizer.

During the summer months, biosolids are often spread on agricultural land. But they can only be applied to fields in a limited capacity.

From Dec. 1 to Mar. 31, farmers are prohibited from spreading the material. This is due to potential runoff and public perception. And it presents a challenge for companies like Terrapure.

The company has long-term contracts with different municipalities. They collect biosolids 52 weeks out of the year. During the winter months, the waste tends to pile up.

Storing biosolids can get complicated.

"In the past, we had a large storage facility, but we just closed it because of public encroachment," said Jeff Newman, director of business development at Terrapure. "We were in the Niagara region, and it just wasn't a good site."

If biosolids cannot be properly stored, they are incinerated or sent to landfills.

"They use reclamation in B.C. and down in the States, but in Ontario, no one had really been able to do reclamation on mine sites with biosolids," said Newman. "I looked at that as an opportunity."

Revegetation has been a...