The Victoria BC Case of Implementation of the 2012 Wastewater Systems Effluent Regulations: Evidence for Consideration

Issues Related to These Risk Classifications

I. The label of high risk is demonstrably inconsistent with reality and the Low Risk definition describes the CRD's system perfectly.

Effluent flow from the CRD is about 0.001% of the flow through the Strait of Juan de Fuca that it discharges into. The outfall discharges are 1.1 and 1.7 km offshore, at depths of 60 and 65 metres, into strong, turbulent, continuous currents in cold, oxygen-rich, microbe-rich seawater that rapidly oxidizes, dilutes and assimilates the effluent into the marine food chain. Dispersion is so rapid that provincial and municipal standards are achieved within about 25 metres of the outfalls as the discharge then fully disperses to natural background levels of organics always suspended in the ocean.

The assimilation is so effective that the Victoria waterfront in the vicinity of the outfalls is popular for aquatic recreation such as windsurfing, kite-boarding, kayaking, scuba diving, fishing, and (despite cold waters) swimming, and Public Health Officers report that there has not been a single case of illness attributed to the outfalls. BC and Washington State marine scientists in a joint study concluded that the effect of the outfalls on the marine environment is "negligible".³ A CRD study has shown that metal concentrations in the CRD's effluent are as much as 1000 times less than drinking water standards,⁴ and that's before the extreme dilution into the ocean. Contamination in Victoria's marine environment is so insignificant that marine ecological reserves have been established a few kilometres from the outfalls; Ten Mile Point Reserve and Oak Bay Islands Reserve to the east and Race Rocks Reserve to the west (downstream from the outfalls during flood and ebb tides, respectively). Clearly, the CRD's treatment system is actually low risk.

The Regulations mandate that high risk systems must comply with the National Performance Standards by 2020, and low risk systems by 2040. This erroneous assessment of high risk causes funds to be committed to infrastructure development in the CRD about 20 years prematurely, thus jeopardizing the funding of truly high risk systems. This thwarts what is deemed to be one of the most significant factors of the CCME Strategy, prioritization of the limited funding.⁵

II. The risk assessment procedure is flawed.

To illustrate, note first that the procedure assumes that, "... a larger flow inherently poses greater risk, from the perspectives of both volume and likely chemical composition of the effluent."⁶ This assumption is manifested in the procedure as five ranges of progressively larger flow volumes in five categories of facilities, from very small to very large, with respectively greater risk assigned.⁷' ⁸ Note also that facilities categorized as very small and small, and which have industrial input, get re-classified as medium size facilities (i.e. increased relative risk). Inexplicably, this sensible logic is not applied to any of the medium through very large facility classifications.⁹ Also note that the CCME guidelines promote source control as the strategy of choice for pollution prevention¹⁰ (i.e. risk reduction), and the CRD already has an exemplary source control program in place.¹¹

Now consider that BC's largest secondary treatment facility, on Annacis Island in Vancouver, services a population of over one million¹² and a large industrial base, and has an average daily flow that is almost 5 times the flow from the CRD's treatment facility, which services a population of less than 200,000 and only light industry. Each facility is in the very large category (flow exceeding 50,000 m³/day) and, in the Table in Schedule 2 in the Regulations (ref. 7), the procedure assigns each flow 35 points of risk.

To deem the relative risks of these two flows, so vastly different in volume, chemical composition, and receiving environment, to be equal is absurd. It contradicts the procedure's above assumption. It ignores the logic that industrial input increases relative risk. It ignores the reduction of relative risk that the CRD has achieved by implementation of the CCME's strategy of choice, source control. Consequently, the Schedule 2 Table is unreliable for assignment of relative risk.

A further reason the procedure gives such an erroneous assessment of the CRD's treatment system is that the guidelines and Regulations were developed primarily for protection of drinking water (fresh water)¹³ and yet barely differentiate between fresh water and seawater. A difference which needs to be noted here is that the assimilative capacity of the sea, generally, is significantly greater than that of bodies of fresh water. However, the Regulations do not allow that capacity to be utilized as a resource. This oversight is contrary to the guideline's statement that "Receiving watercourse concern considers the ability of that watercourse to assimilate the discharge from the wastewater treatment system."¹⁴ This statement is twice-reinforced in the following recommendations of the CCME Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) report:¹⁵

1. Hence, it is recommended that efforts be made to implement cost-effective treatment solutions that consider the capacity of the receiving environment to absorb sewage from a treatment system.
2. Thus, efforts should be made to determine if cheaper alternatives can be used to achieve the standard or if that the receiving environment could tolerate emissions from lower cost treatment options.

III. The ocean's natural assimilative capacity, called marine treatment, has been thoroughly considered internationally.

The World Health Organization,¹⁶ a British Royal Commission,¹⁷ the US Congress, and the US National Research Council¹⁸ have concluded that marine treatment, also called auto-purification, is a viable, acceptable, sometimes preferable, treatment option. Such conclusion is based on "sound scientific evidence that ... sea outfalls allow the sewage effluent to be subjected to the same processes of degradation and oxidation that occur in land-based sewage treatment plants."¹⁹ Natural sewage treatment is even recognized as a useful ecosystem service which contributes to human well-being.²⁰ Facilities around the world utilize the ocean's capacity to treat effluent to accepted standards, and the CRD's present treatment system is one such example.

Omission of due consideration of the ability of the ocean to treat effluent also plagued implementation of the US's 1972 Clean Water Act. US regulators insisted that standards for wastewater must be met only by all treatment occurring on land prior to discharge into surface waters, and were unwilling to permit coastal communities to continue to utilize the capacity of the ocean to treat their wastewater discharges. The ensuing lawsuits prompted the US Congress to commission the US National Research Council to review the Act, which led to official recognition that some regions of ocean can indeed treat wastewater to within accepted standards.

The Act was amended to allow several dozen US coastal communities to maintain their existing marine treatment systems rather than replacing them with land-based treatment systems. The US saved billions of dollars through avoided infrastructure development. They also avoided detrimental environmental impacts that the infrastructure itself would have caused, such as production of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of tons of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Avoiding injury, and even death, associated with construction projects is also a noteworthy benefit. Victoria is one Canadian city where continued reliance on marine-based sewage treatment could achieve the same benefits.

IV. It is no longer acceptable to simply assume that the benefits of a sewage treatment facility exceed its costs, and the CCME Cost Benefit Analysis report (ref. 15) emphasizes the need to thoroughly analyze the site-specific costs and benefits of various treatment options; i.e. the need to do a CBA for every location:²¹

Cost-benefit analysis is a widely used public policy decision-making tool to assess projects in terms of their potential change in the well-being of society. Cost-benefit analysis evolved based on the need for governments to assess and prioritize projects, and to allocate limited budgets and resources so that social well-being or welfare is increased with the minimum amount of resources spent or costs incurred.

Expert opinion is that the CRD's present treatment system has such low impact on Victoria's ecosystem that, when monetized, the benefits gained by implementation of the Regulations will do little to offset the cost of a replacement treatment facility. Hence, this investment would not achieve the Strategy's objectives of environmental effectiveness and economic efficiency.²²

An independent academic economist has shown in a published article that, following the CCME's CBA guidelines, the net monetized benefits and harms for the CRD's facility would be either zero or negative (net harm). The article also identifies 18 significant harmful effects, only 11 of which have been considered in CRD studies. Such risks as negative human health effects to plant workers and nearby residents, both during construction and permanently,²³' ²⁴' ²⁵ were considered, but such risks as injuries/disabilities/deaths associated with construction of mega-projects; explosion of anaerobic digesters; and GHG emissions, were not considered.²⁶

The need for a more-thorough impact assessment and CBA by the CRD has been underscored by their poorly-executed "Triple Bottom Line" analysis, which signally failed to include any criteria related to risk, threat, hazard, or danger, and which resulted in the costly CRD error of attempting to locate a hazardous anaerobic digester facility within 10 metres of residences.²⁷

Their analysis also excluded consideration of the present treatment system, which prevented determination as to whether or not the replacement system would provide any increased benefit over the status quo. This lack of determination prevented, in the case of little or no benefit, justification to consider whether or not to maintain the status quo (the no-action alternative). In the US, such lack of consideration is not permitted. US law mandates that an environmental impact statement include consideration of the no-action alternative,²⁸ even if no-action is counter to legislation.²⁹

Though the following CCME policy statement refers to environmental quality guidelines, it may also be sensible policy for environmental impact assessments:³⁰

Guidelines developed by other jurisdictions, such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA), may also be applied by provincial or territorial governments, if scientifically based.

V. The federal government can use the Fisheries Act to deem that the Regulations do not apply in a province.

In recent months, the Government of Canada has developed equivalency agreements with Quebec and the Yukon.³¹ For provincial laws that are "equivalent in effect" to corresponding federal regulations, the federal regulations may be deemed not to apply.³² The procedure in the Act is that, where a provincial law is equivalent in effect, it would remain in force and the corresponding federal regulations would be stood down.

The governments of Canada and BC are in the process of developing such an agreement. However, in CRD documentation, the only process identified is revision of BC laws to make them equivalent to federal regulations.³³ The CRD documents do not indicate any intent to follow the Act's process of identifying and maintaining BC laws that are equivalent in effect. This is disconcerting, given that there is a plethora of evidence that the CRD's present marine-based treatment system is essentially equivalent in effect to land-based secondary treatment systems, and meets provincial legislation to achieve this.

One example of equivalency in effect is that the CRD's system already meets the stated objectives of the Regulations, which are to decrease threat to fish, fish habitat, and human health from consumption of fish.³⁴ Another is that the impact on the organisms living in the sediments around the CRD outfalls is no more than that around the outfalls of secondary treatment systems elsewhere.³⁵' ³⁶ Hence, one would expect that, for the secondary treatment system mandated by the Regulations, the impact (effect) of its discharge on the sediments around its outfalls would be essentially equivalent to the impact (effect) of discharge of the CRD's present system on the sediments around the present outfalls.

VI. Major sources of GHGs are the manufacture of cement and the energy for the extraction and transportation of resources to construct, operate, and maintain infrastructure.

Land-based treatment facilities require infrastructure and the treatment processes are energy-intensive. Hence, any benefits of land-based treatment are reduced by the environmental impacts of the infrastructure itself and the energy required for that treatment.

In contrast, to the degree that a particular region of ocean is capable of treating effluent, correspondingly less treatment would be required on land and, therefore, correspondingly reduced infrastructure and energy requirements. The treatment process that occurs in the ocean is powered by the free, reliable, sustainable energy of ocean currents. Hence, a marine treatment system utilizing receiving waters that have high assimilative capacity generally has lower capital and operating costs, lower environmental impact, and lower production of GHGs than a land-based treatment facility that provides the same level of treatment.

Given the increasingly emphatic warnings about the harms that the trend of year-over-year increases of GHG emissions is causing,³⁷ a decision to implement more costly, more resource-intensive and energy-intensive land-based treatment, with its higher environmental impacts, instead of utilizing the natural resource of the ocean's capacity to treat, deserves to be interpreted as a violation of the basic principle of the Federal Sustainable Development Act:³⁸

s. 5 The Government of Canada accepts the basic principle that sustainable development is based on an ecologically efficient use of natural, social and economic resources and acknowledges the need to integrate environmental, economic and social factors in the making of all decisions by government.

References:

¹ CCME (Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment). Technical Supplement 1, p. 5, 4th para.; Appendix A, p. 20, 1st para. (http://www.ccme.ca/files/Resources/municipal_wastewater_efflent/mwwe_techsuppl1_economic_plan_e.pdf).

² Ibid., pp. 22-23.

³ Puget Sound Institute, The Shared Waters of British Columbia and Washington, p. 45. (http://blog.pugetsoundinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/SharedMarineWaters1994.pdf). This conclusion was reaffirmed in December, 2005, by Golder, of Golder Associates Ltd., in