Some call it "human manure." Others use terms like "municipal biosolids" or "fertilizing residuals."
Quebec's Environment Department describes it as "a valuable environmental resource" that can be spread safely and legally as fertilizer on agricultural lands.
Whatever you call it, the province's municipalities produce a lot of it: 914,726 tonnes of sludge was scraped out of 700 water treatment plants in Quebec in 2007, the most recent year for which these statistics are available.
About 42 per cent of the sludge was incinerated and 31 per cent was sent to dumps. But the remaining 27 per cent was "recycled" as fertilizer, mostly on farmland.
The movement to ban the spreading of cities' sludge on agricultural lands scored a major victory last week when Superior Court Judge Steve J. Reimnitz ruled the rural municipality of Elgin, 95 kilometres southwest of Montreal, had the right to pass a bylaw banning the transportation, storage and spreading of sludge within its territory.
"Now many other municipalities will pass the same kind of bylaw," Elgin Mayor Jean-Pierre Proulx said. "I know a lot of them were just waiting for this judgment."
In his ruling, Reimnitz noted that experts are not in agreement on whether sludge spreading is safe.
He referred to the 2001 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a Hudson town bylaw against the cosmetic use of pesticides. The ruling established that municipalities have the right to pass bylaws to protect the environment from the risk of irreversible damage, even in the absence of scientific certainty.
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Sewage Sludge: Oozing with Controversy
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Oozing with Controversy
By Michelle Lalonde
The Montreal Gazette - Canada, Oct 8, 2009
Straight to the Source
