Environmentalists vow to stop a plan to build a garbage dump in Ontario’s Tiny Township, famed for water as clean as any on Earth

Groundwater beneath Ontario’s Tiny Township has been called the cleanest in the world, as pristine as if it were drawn from ancient ice buried deep in an Arctic glacier.

The Ontario government is about to find out whether this super-clean water – found gushing out of artesian wells in a rural, farming area about 120 kilometres north of Toronto – can coexist with a notorious source of contaminants: a garbage dump.

If all goes according to plan, some time this year trucks will begin dumping municipal trash into a provincially approved landfill atop the unspoiled water, which won its reputation as the cleanest in the world after testing at a German university in 2006 found that samples had some of the lowest levels of trace metals ever observed.

The province says the location of the dump is nothing to worry about, but Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner is decrying the selection of the site. So are prominent conservationists, including Maude Barlow, the UN’s water adviser and head of the Council of Canadians, who calls the dump a “travesty.” She has vowed to “sit in front of bulldozers if necessary” to stop it. Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May also wants the dump shelved.

The presence of bountiful amounts of water is one of the reasons the site is attractive for a dump. There is so much hydraulic pressure under the proposed landfill that clean water will tend to naturally seep into the dump pit. The landfill will be equipped with pipes to collect any seepage, which will be trucked to a sewage plant for treatment because it will be contaminated with garbage residues.

The design is thought to be an improvement over dumps that leak into the surrounding groundwater.

Although a landfill designed to have water leak into it sounds counterintuitive, it is becoming common and has received the blessing of Ontario’s Environment Ministry.

The ministry and Simcoe County, which will operate the site, both insist it won’t pose a risk. “This site, when we build it, will be the most protective site in the county,” said Rob McCullough, Simcoe County’s director of environmental services.

The site sits over thick clay, which is an added defence against groundwater contamination, and it will have a plastic liner, another barrier.

Even before the chance discovery that it lies above unusually pure water, the dump had become one of the longest-running and strangest environmental disputes in Canada.

The Tiny Township site was selected in the mid-1980s, when municipalities in northern Simcoe County were looking for a new landfill to replace one that was leaking toxic chemicals into groundwater after illegal hazardous-waste dumping.

The choice was subjected to a provincial environmental assessment, which in 1989 rejected it, saying the county’s evaluation process was “in part non-existent” and “flawed.” That would have effectively killed it, but for an unusual political decision.

The then-Liberal cabinet of Ontario in 1990 ordered the environmental assessment to resume, in effect approving the site. Cabinets rarely exercise this kind of power, especially for a relatively small dump located in a rural backwater.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Gordon Miller, Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. “How on earth this thing got escalated to a cabinet agenda, I have no idea. That in itself is very unusual. Somebody obviously had the juice to do that.”

Because it has taken nearly 25 years for the dump to be ready for construction, standards have changed and Mr. Miller said he doubts the site could pass muster if it were chosen today.

“It would be screened out,” he said.

Mr. Miller said one of the reasons he believes the dump wouldn’t be approved is that that the site is so waterlogged that large amounts of pumping will be needed to prevent the plastic liner that will be placed under the garbage from floating up. The county has a provincial permit to remove nearly 250 million litres while the dump is being constructed.

The site is also close to an airport, raising worries about bird collisions.

Since the area’s dump closed in 1987, residents have been sending their garbage to other landfills in the county and elsewhere. One justification for the dump is that the residents don’t have a landfill of their own, and are using up capacity elsewhere in Simcoe.

Even so, the county council has been bitterly divided over the dump, and approved it by only a one-vote margin.

Mr. Miller has asked the province to review its approval, but the request was ignored.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment, Cindy Hood, said government scientists have analyzed the data supporting the dump and vouch for it. “We’re confident that the site … will be operated in an environmentally responsible way,” she said.

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The gold standard for purity

The water under the proposed landfill in Tiny Township has been named the world’s purest because it has extremely low concentrations of trace metals.

The amounts of cobalt, chromium and vanadium match those found in the cleanest layers of Arctic ice drawn from deposits as much as 15,000 years old. The lead concentrations are among the lowest detected anywhere in the world.

At one time it was thought the water was so clean because it was ancient and dated from the last ice age, but researchers now believe it’s of much more recent vintage. It probably fell nearby as rain within the past 20 years.

The secret to the clean water is that as rain slowly drains through the area’s glacial soil, pollutants are removed.

The clean water has already been used for research – as a kind of gold standard of purity. It was used in a study that found many samples of supposedly high-quality bottled water actually contained elevated traces of a metal, antimony, that leaches out of plastic containers into the beverages.