EXCESS SOIL
Understanding the testing requirements under Ontario’s new excess soil regulation By Sylvia Rennie
T
he premise of Ontario’s Regulation 406/19 is that soil is a precious and limited resource and, as with any limited resource, excess soil generated from construction and earthmoving projects needs to be properly managed.
PHASED-IN APPROACH The new regulation is being phased in over time, with provisions for grandfathering existing projects. • January 1, 2021: Reuse rules, including risk-based standards, waste designation and approvals. • January 1, 2022: Testing, tracking and registration. • January 1, 2025: Restrictions on landfilling soils. WHAT IS EXCESS SOIL? Generally, it is all that good material that was sitting nicely on a site, fostering the nutrient cycle and housing lots of healthy organisms, before it had to be removed to make way for something like a condo development. The regulation provides clarity and direction to ensure clean soil does not simply end up in landfills, while at the same time ensuring reuse sites are not receiving waste soil. This involves risk-based rules related to sampling and testing excess soil to determine the levels of contaminants which may be present, and direction on how that soil can be reused. Not all excess soil is the same, Therefore, the risks associated with reusing it depend a lot on what contaminants are present, as well as the context in which it will be reused. To accomplish this, O. Reg. 406/19 introduces a new series of soil and leachate quality standards to help determine if excess soil can be used at a reuse site (i.e., is not deemed a waste). Like the brownfield regulation O. Reg. 153/04, the standards are presented in a series of tables 40 | April 2021
and reflect risk factors such as the type of property for the reuse site, as well as the site characteristics such as proximity to a water body, depth of soil, etc. When dealing with excess soil, the objective is to figure out what is in it, by attempting to sample in a representative fashion and having an accredited lab perform the testing. LEACHATE ANALYSIS Testing under O. Reg. 406/19 may
require asking the lab to perform leachate analysis. This is a test conducted to simulate the effect of acid rain on the soil. The lab will tumble bulk soil in this fluid and then test it for certain contaminants of interest and report the results. Those in the waste disposal business will likely be familiar with the concept of leachate analysis. It is used in O. Reg. 558/00 to help profile waste for the purpose of hazardous waste classification. O. Reg. 406/19 utilizes a slightly difEnvironmental Science & Engineering Magazine