Site Visit Panoramas

Stone Church Road frontage of Upper Ottawa Street Landfill (UOSL)

UOSL Stone Church Rd frontage from the corner of Stone Church and Dartnell

Looking towards Dartnell from Stone Church rd at the UOSL mound

The Linc hits Mud Street at Dartnell Road Exit as seen from the top of the UOSL Mound

Peering down to the creek from the top of the UOSL Mound

Stone Church Road industrial park from UOSL Mound

A view of the concrete retaining wall which 'protects' the creek

The storm water culvert which is now the source of the Red Hill Creek

Municipal tipping floor at the Guelph MRF

Tipping floor at the Guelph MRF

The material bunker hall in the Guelph MRF

Compactor, Baler, and Storage floors in the Guelph MRF

Guelph Organic Waste Facility tipping floor

Guelph Organic Waste Facility tipping floor

Guelph Organic Waste facility Tunnels (on left) and grinder (green) which sends the waste into the maturation hall

Guelph Organic Waste Facility Maturation Hall! Where the windrows will be one day, once it gets up and running!

Biofiltre air purification system at the back of the Guelph Organic Waste Facility

Murph's first MRF

After getting up early and arriving on time for a tour first-thing this morning, I wandered aimlessly around the Hamilton Organics/Waste/Material Recovery Facility site for half an hour. It wasn't on purpose- I got lost due to the unclear office locations in a conglomeration of buildings off Burlington Street in Hamilton. What surprised me was that as a girl wandering around not wearing a high-visibility vest nor a hard hat just wandering around avoiding the front end loaders, I was never confronted. Nobody came to my rescue to tell me where to go, or even to tell me I wasn't authorized to be there! Once I found the right office I was fitted out with all the necessary gear and taken on a tour of the MRF. After the tour I had a good long chat with the operations manager at the facility and got some great information and insight into the design of MRFs.
This MRF was constructed within the old Firestone plant on Tire Street, and lacks the efficiency of its peers housed in pre-engineered warehouses. They have, however, made it work. The building has some obvious shortcomings, but there are also some great moments in the plant where the clerestory windows provides great daylighting to line sorters. When the Firestone plant was built (starting in 1921 and added onto at regular intervals to 1983), lighting the entire 822,191 sqft of plant was evidently a costly undertaking. (City of Hamilton Public Works Department: Energy, Fleet and Facilities Division Report PW09063) Clerestory windows appear in several of the buildings on the site, allowing plenty of daylight to enter into the bays of the facility. Despite being dirty and poorly insulated, these windows do make a difference in the ambient lighting levels of the plant, as seen in the photos.

The loader scoops bucketfuls of the mixed recyclables into a bin which feeds a rotating screen drum (to the left) which sifts out all the glass and sends it on a backward conveyor belt to the sectioned off area behind the concrete blocks. All else moves forward up a conveyor belt to be sorted.

Up the conveyor is a line of sorters who are each designated to pull different things off the line, including garbage, PET, LDPE and HDPE.

This is the super amazing plastic bag sucking machine! It's constantly vacuuming so that the ladies can "hand" the plastic bags upwards and it feeds them into a separate bin.

Just to the right is the magnet which pulls off all the steel and ferrous materials and throws them in a bin below. Next some other machine (it had a complex name!) shoots the aluminum down to the guy in orange below. He has to pick out all the non-aluminum stuff, and allow the aluminum to go on up the conveyor to the bin

This is the mountain of unsorted blue bin items that have been dumped off trucks

Steel bin

This is the optical plastic sorter. It works by shooting air from compressors at the plastic bits while they are being flung in the air off the conveyor. It somehow can sort and direct tetra packs, HPDA, LDPE, and PET at lightning speed!

There's that bin for Tetra packs and milk cartons

If compactors made scat, this would be it. The plastics have been compressed and baled as they come out of the compactor in a nice rectangular prism.

Baled steel

Baled Polystyrene (Styrofoam)- apparently it takes HUGE quantities of the stuff to make one of these bales because it has so much air in it! These are so dense it's unthinkable!

On the other side of the plant is the paper products dumping pile!

The paper products head up a conveyor which has large cogs in it to allow large corrugated cardboard pieces to "float" to the top, while the smaller paper products will drop to a conveyor belt below to be sent to a sorting line. Evidently, these rotating pieces can get really entangled in any plastic sheet contaminating the paper stream.

The paper sorting line enjoys the best daylighting in the house. Not a bad way to work!

Unfortunately not everyone follows the rules of recycling. and everything that got into the paper stream which shouldn't be there gets tossed into this bin. Despite having a plastics recovery facility in the next room, all this will be compacted and baled and sent to landfill because it is just too messy to deal with. SO SORT IT RIGHT!

A cardboard load arrived from the transfer station while I was visiting!

The entire paper section of the plant- not too bad for natural light and open space!

The compacted paper products are baled and wrapped with steel cable fed from these spools into the baler. I just liked the way the light was filtering in on them.

The trucks just open their gates and tip away anywhere on the floor. To get the last little bit out, they raise up the box and drop it down quickly, like you would shake a bottle to get the last bit out. The loaders come along shortly thereafter to push the recyclables into the mountain. The highest bay in the whole facility was converted into this truck dump station because it had to allow for the trucks to tip up and not hit the ceiling! Watch your head!

Action shot of that dump!

Paper products mountain, and a clerestory window

The recyclables have to get from the floor up to the top of the compactor, so they go on up this nifty conveyor with steps in it

Baled paper products with the cardboard conveyor in the background

Lavoisier's Law of Conservation of Mass

What once applied to the study of alchemy now applies to recycling:

"Matter can neither be created nor destroyed in a closed system."

What better motto could a recycling project desire?

Burn, baby, Burn!

After sorting our waste into recycling bins and organics pails, there will always remain some items that will head off to a landfill near (or maybe not so near) you. Depending on what your municipality chooses to do, that garbage might be compacted and shipped to a distant landfill, or just trucked straight to a local landfill, or maybe even sent to an incinerator facility. The Region of Peel has been burning trash for 20 years and is quite proud of their waste volume reduction in landfills. Not only do they burn the waste, but they capture the thermal energy of the incineration and produce power using steam and gas generators. This isn't a perfect burn, naturally, so there is ash and airborne pollutants to deal with after the garbage is burned. Instead of tonnes of raw waste oozing unknown liquid toxins and airing out methane, these pollutants are smaller in volume and created in a more controlled and understood environment. Perhaps there is a future in waste-to-power incinerators.
Peel's Waste Management division made a video highlighting their Brampton Incineration facility run by Algonquin Power, Inc: see it here

Hopefully they allow me a visit and I can follow up with some photos of a tour of the place!

So why would an incinerator be of interest  to someone investigating an old landfill and a new recycling facility? What I have in mind might be a little unconventional, but with some more research I'll  be able to say with better certainty if this is a possible and reasonable undertaking:

What if we excavated the capped landfill? From 1950 through 1980, tonnes of primarily residential garbage was piled on the Upper Ottawa Street Landfill site. Research done in the US shows that paper is the singularly largest occupant of landfills by volume (40%), research sites were excavated from 1960-1980. (The Garbage Project, University of Arizona) Imagine how many recyclable things are sitting under that cap, preserved with no airflow and no sunlight for over 30 years. By excavating the landfill, it just might be possible to reprocess the recyclable and organic items, and incinerate the remainder. Could the methane that is trapped deep in the mound also be captured and used for power conversion? What would all this look like, if we were to put it into a building, and combine it with a MRF for today's recyclables and organic goods? And what happens to this building when the landfill has been fully excavated and there is nothing but new recyclables coming in? Why, the facility should be re-cycled and put to a new use. The equipment used to sort and handle all the excavated material could be moved to another similar facility at another closed landfill being encroached upon by suburbia. This is a one-time locally-inspired proposal, but could be a design scheme applicable to other municipalities with similar issues. (Goodness knows we have enough of those in Ontario alone)

By the time that the area surrounding the Upper Ottawa Street Landfill is fully developed, there could be a local MRF (maybe powered by it's own incinerators), a community centre, a public park, a new storm water management plan, and a cleaner source for the Red Hill Creek.

I think there might be a thesis in here...

Red Hill Creek: Albion Mills to King Street by Bicycle

After the storm water from the mountain top drains through the Upper Ottawa Street Landfill, it passes through a highly-engineered set of culverts and fabricated wetlands at the interchange of the Lincoln Alexander Parkway ("The Linc"), the Red Hill Valley Parkway, and Mud Street. From there it flows alongside the Mill Pond which once belonged to a grist mill at Albion falls. Past the pond, the creek plummets down Albion falls and then meanders its way down the Red Hill Valley towards Lake Ontario. There are several bicycle and hiking trails that follow the creek through the valley and the following photos are from a trip taken on Labour Day weekend 2011.

A future adventure into the ravine beside Albion Falls is in order to try to find what remains of the three story grist mill and water wheel that sat just across from where the falls photos are taken!  

Albion Falls (Photo Credit: Al Murphy)

Albion Falls (Photo Credit: Al Murphy)

from "From Mountain to Lake: The Red Hill Creek Valley

from "From Mountain to Lake: The Red Hill Creek Valley"

Albion Falls (Photo Credit: Al Murphy)

Erosion Control measures near King's Forest (Photo Credit: Al Murphy)

Water speed control inside culvert past King's Forest (Photo Credit: Al Murphy)

Red clay and green oxidized minerals are mixed in the creek bed soils

The creek passes very close to the new Parkway that you can see in the background, as well as a rail bridge which crosses both the creek and the Parkway. Note the red bank on the far side of the creek.

More Erosion control measures in the valley (Photo Credit: Al Murphy)