Odour complaints jump despite dump's $1.3M effort

Foul odours from Ottawa's Carp Road landfill are getting worse, even though the owner has spent $1.3 million to control the smell, local residents say.

'It's very much like what you would smell if you walked past a dumpster, or even just your own garbage cans after they've been sitting out in the sun for a week.' Local resident Erin Laforest

Gilles Chasles, who heads NoDump.ca, a group lobbying against a proposal totriplethe dump'ssize, said he has received 445 complaints about the smell since the start of January, comparedwith 800 during all of last year.

Among those who complained is Erin Laforest, who lives two kilometres from the dump. She said the smell is carried on the wind into her Stittsville home's yard and its furnace room, which brings "fresh" air from outside.

"It's very much like what you would smell if you walked past a dumpster, or even just your own garbage cans after they've been sitting out in the sun for a week," she said, adding that it stops her two small children from playing in the backyard most of the time.

Local city councillor Shad Qadri said he hasalso noticed the stench getting worse, and he's worried about what will happen if the dump expands.

"If they can't continuously maintain what they already have within their certificate of operation, how the heck are they asking for expansion and [saying] to us that they're going to be able to control it?"

The Ministry of the Environment has warned Waste Management, the company that runs the dump, that it could face charges if it does not clean up the smell within one month.

The company's senior director Michael Walters said the company should have started working on the problem a year ago, but has now spent $1.3 millionto controlthe odour, and local residents should smell the results by the end of spring.

"Like a farmer, we've already planted our crop," he said. "We're waiting for the seed to come up."

The company's measures include misting the area with essential oils to combat foul-smelling gases and building trenches and wells that will act like straws, sucking the gases out of the landfill.

Those gases will then be burned, and the company plans to build a plant by the end of the year that can use that combustionto generate electricity.

Walterssaid that his company's proposed expansion of the dump would not increase the smell.

"You have to engineer and design it, and that's what we're doing with the new site."

Waste Management submitted to the province on Jan. 12 a revised terms of reference document outlining plans for the Carp dump's expansion, and the public was given 30 days to respond.