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

• Date: 01 November 2019
• 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.

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