Neighbors cry as waste is dumped on farmland near Cultus Lake

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The trucks began rolling into the Columbia Valley in early spring, leaving behind pieces of trash and a horrible stench.

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At first, the residents, who value their privacy and appreciate the difficulties posed by the rocky soil on the south shore of Cultus Lake, turned a blind eye to the piles accumulating in their neighbor’s field. He told them that he was trying to improve his land by applying compost.

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It wasn’t long before the goodwill dried up, said Darcy Henderson, who walks her dog near the field every day.

The children could not play outside because of the smell. The wind picked up small pieces of plastic and carried them across the valley. Then someone noticed that the trucks, sometimes 20 a day, were tagged with the name of a Lower Mainland gypsum company, and people began to question the safety of the community’s drinking water.

Throw and go. She rolls and go. Dump and go,” recalled Taryn Dixon, Fraser Valley Regional District director for the Columbia Valley area. “It didn’t stop.”

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Residents contacted the Agricultural Land Commission and the Environment Ministry, but the trucks kept coming. The material was supposed to be Class A compost, meaning farmers can apply it to their fields to amend the soil with little oversight or regulation.

But it wasn’t Class-A compost.

Now, as Columbia Valley residents fight to have hundreds of truckloads of material removed from the top of their aquifer, they are sounding the alarm about lax laws and poor oversight that make farmland a target for the wastes of the Lower Continent.

In October, the Environment Department issued a stop-work order to Fraser Valley Renewables, a recycling, composting and waste management company that partnered with Columbia Valley farmer Bruce Vander Wyk to accept the material at its Iverson Road property.

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In a statement, the ministry said the company is voluntarily shutting down operations at the site with the ministry’s supervision to ensure it is done “in accordance with laws and regulations.”

Under the direction of the ministry, the materials will be sampled and sent to an independent laboratory. “The organic matter is mainly class B compost, which presents a very low risk to aquifers.”

Fraser Valley Renewables business manager Simon Thorogood said the company was under the impression it was Grade A compost that simply needed a final check to remove “foreign matter.” Some lack of clarity in provincial laws led the company to believe that this final evaluation could be done on the farm before the compost was applied to amend the soil.

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“The material does not pose a problem for water,” he said, pointing to tests showing that while the material does not meet foreign matter standards, levels of fecal matter, pathogens and heavy metals are within range. Right.

Thorogood said the company complies with the stop-work order and has been trying to cover the piles since October, when the environment ministry said the material needed to be covered with waterproof covers to prevent runoff. While that work is ongoing, the site is in a “holding pattern.”

The company hopes that with further evaluation, the material can be clean enough to apply to Vander Wyk’s fields, providing an “easy fix.”

Thorogood said the farmer was not paid to take the material, nor did he pay for it. The plaster trucks observed by the neighbors were a poor choice of vehicle, but they did not contain plaster. Rather, during a trial period, the gypsum paper, which may have had some gypsum still attached to it, was brought to the site for testing as possible animal bedding or as a “bulking agent”.

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As BC tries to divert waste from landfills, subpar farmland could provide an ideal location for high-quality compost and regenerative agriculture, Thorogood said. “We hope that in the future the regulations will be clearer and easier to deal with.”

Henderson said the neighbors want the material removed. They fear that the sorting process will break the trash into finer pieces and further pollute the environment. The Columbia Valley Aquifer provides drinking water for residents, as well as several communities on the shores of Cultus Lake, and empties into the lake itself.

“I’ve been composting most of my life, and I know you can’t compost Class A with inorganic material,” he said. “They went into this process in a completely deceitful way and did nothing until they got caught. I am baffled why the ministry would let them get away with it.”

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Dixon said he has tried to trace the original source of the material and believes it may have come from a municipality’s green bins. While a city-contracted company composts some of the household compostables into Class A composts to sell to gardeners, a waste product remains that must be disposed of. It is not clear where he usually goes.

“Provincially, we have dropped the ball on this issue,” he said.

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