Sewage treatment
Victoria and the Capital Region are faced with a major infrastructure project – we need to treat our sewage and stop using the Strait of Juan de Fuca as our toilet.
The province has already directed the CRD to make treatment a priority and is asking for plans. Consultant reports tell us that we can develop small, decentralized treatment plants and recover resources and energy from waste.
We already have local examples of pilot projects that prove that small, resource recovery models can work. At Dockside Green near downtown, a compact treatment plant is filtering water and channeling it through the development. Heat and fuel are being drawn from the system – homes and businesses at Dockside are heated and powered by some of the energy generated from this new model.
Victoria can adopt this model and establish plants that minimize impacts on neighbourhoods and capture energy and heat for use in the community.
The city cannot ignore provincial directives on waste treatment, and we will soon face federal regulations on sewage disposal. We shouldn’t waste tax dollars mounting legal or scientific challenges, but must get on with the task for designing and building systems that will stop the flow of untreated sewage into nearby ocean waters and extract resources from any new systems we build.
Finding locations, establishing small pilot projects and developing the technology necessary for a state of the art system will help us meet our environmental responsibilities as well as position the city as a leader in dealing with waste.
We must also resist the efforts to make this a public private partnership – P3’s expose us to excess costs to shore up profits for offshore developers, a lack of accountability and transparency for taxpayers, and the loss of control of our precious water resources to private industry.
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