Why should the Ministry of the Environment encourage soil banking (stockpiling surplus soil for reuse), instead of labelling excess soil as “waste”? Guelph’s Laird Road / Hanlon Expressway interchange project is a good example of the many environmental and economic benefits from soil reuse. According to an editorial in the Guelph Mercury:
“The story of how 230,000 cubic metres of recycled fill came to be headed for the new roadway interchange at Laird Road and Hanlon Expressway is a good one…Kudos to the City of Guelph and Ministry of Transportation officials for making this come about.
To salvage and locally store surplus fill from 34 different Guelph road jobs over the last three years has prevented enormous waste, hauling expenses and a loss of a valuable road-building material. Were it not saved and stored locally, the same huge volume of material would have had to come from much farther away and most likely from an extractive quarrying operation.
In hard dollars, this long-term, carefully planned initiative will see the city save an estimated $900,000 in trucking and material costs. In softer economics, this saved much more, even in just shortening the distance that in-city road fill excess needed to be hauled and where it could next be harvested for this other local works project.
Seemingly capping this ingenious recycling story is the fact that the greenfield site used to store the material has been tested and has been found to not have been environmentally harmed in serving this function. Nor has groundwater in the area been adversely affected.
As well, the denouement of this story will see the site topped with earth and seed and returned to pristine condition….
This is the first time the city has carried out such a project to such a scale. It was a smart idea that appears to have worked. Perhaps it will serve as something other communities can learn from.”