Regional District of Nanaimo directors will decide later this week whether to start conceptualizing a $4.5-million project to remediate part of the regional landfill in Cedar.
The RDN is set to rotate areas where garbage is dumped at the landfill, according to Larry Gardner, RDN manager of solid waste services, with old disposal areas to be closed. Installation of landfill caps will be part of closure, with the RDN’s five-year financial plan allocating $2.3 million for work in 2021 and $2.1 million in 2022.
At its Tuesday meeting, the board will vote on whether to go to tender for engineering design work, which normally accounts for 10 to 15 per cent of the project cost. In this case it would be between $450,000-$650,000, according to an RDN staff report.
Landfill caps, the staff report said, are “multi-layer systems of both high and low permeable soils separated by synthetic liner systems,” and serve to limit rain from getting into the landfill, contain runoff and capture gas.
“If you think of the landfill as constructed in building blocks, the idea is you build an area in the blocks, you basically stack up, in our case we call them cells, so we build individual cells and once those are at their final elevation, then we place a cap on it and then we’ll continue to fill in other areas of the site,” said Gardner. “That’s so we can effectively manage precipitation getting in, leachate control and landfill gas.”
If the board green-lights the motion, the successful proponent would be responsible for engineering work that includes landfill cap design, preparing request for proposal documents for construction and overseeing construction, according to the staff report.
Other responsibilities would include a landfill phase development review, which will examine whether the site’s overall design strategy is in line with regulations and current technology. The proponent would also look into opportunities to “expand the life of the landfill,” the report said, along with bringing the landfill design and operation plan up to date.
Gardner estimates the RDN would then begin a request for proposal process in early 2021.
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