The high road

In a groundbreaking alliance, the aggregate sector and conservation groups, led by Ontario Nature, make common cause on a green certification standard for gravel.

By Ray Ford It has been a decades-long cold war, with some very hot engagements. But the struggle between Ontarios $1.3-billion sand, gravel and stone industry and the people seeking to safeguard the provinces landscape, could, at last, be reaching a detente. That may be tough to believe for residents of Dufferin County, where the application for a mammoth 937-hectare Melancthon Township quarry in the heart of Ontarios potato-growing country (see The big pit, Autumn 2011) seems to indicate the conflict is scaling up. The bid elicited more than 2,000 objections, sparking marches and a tractor convoy, and inspiring Foodstock, a culinary demonstration sponsored by the Canadian Chefs Congress. This sort of opposition is not cheap, especially when donations come in $20 and $50 at a time. But North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce vice-chair Carl Cosack promises that if the quarrys backers are willing to go down to the wire, well meet them, step for step. Yet even as new battles brew in parts of the province, potential for a new accord exists between industry and environmental groups one that could result in gravel being extracted in a greener, more sustainable way without generating the kind of confrontation inherent in the present system. Taking the lead in the effort is the Ontario Aggregate Forum, founded by members of both camps in 2008. Were looking for a more systemic way of lessening the impact of aggregate extraction, says Caroline Schultz, executive director of Ontario Nature and the organizations representative on the forum. The forum hopes to have the basic outlines of a plan for greener aggregate extraction next year and has already hired consultants from Deloitte to scan the world for leading standards and practices. For Bob Patrick, president of the Coalition on the Niagara Escarpment (CONE) and the coalitions representative to the forum, the process

could yield third-party environmental certification similar to that in place for lumber, paper, coffee and seafood. If petroleum is the lifeblood of modern society, aggregates including sand, gravel, stone, earth, clay and shale form the bones. In 2009, the last year for which complete figures are available, Ontarios pits and quarries produced 153 million tonnes of aggregates (almost 12 tonnes per person) for use in everything from roads, bridges and sewers to buildings and foundations, glass, paint, paper, fertilizers, even pharmaceuticals. These resources take a heavy toll on the environment. Even with a sensitive rehabilitation after a pit or quarry has been played out, extraction is a permanent eviction for the plants and animals originally on the site. Then there are the problems with dust, noise, lighting and truck traffic, potential changes to the filtering and storage of groundwater, and carbon emissions. Every kilometre a gravel truck travels adds about 1.5 kilograms of greenhouse gases to the already burdened atmosphere. If you look at all the stresses on the landscape, aggregate extraction is significant, says Schultz. It all boils down to growth and urban sprawl, where we build and where roads are needed. Growth is the monster that needs to be fed. The fact that industry and environmentalists have come together to tackle these issues is a near miracle, considering that the two sides have spent decades, as Ron Reid of the Couchiching Conservancy says, tossing bricks over the wall at each other. Members of the forum are familiar with the sort of bitter, protracted and expensive dispute now taking place in Melancthon. When CONE and Haltonbased Protecting Our Water and Environmental Resources (POWER) teamed up to fight the 2004 expansion of Dufferin Aggregates Milton quarry, the $175,000 bill basically bankrupted us, Patrick says. Hobbled by debt and without the cash to maintain fulltime employees, weve been limping along ever since. Industry has deeper pockets, but also larger bills. We have to buy land on speculation and hope we can get approval to mine it, says Ken Lucyshyn, another forum member and vice-president of

aggregates and construction for Walker Industries, based in Thorold. His firm has spent more than $10 million on a quarry application in Duntroon and, after six years, has yet to receive a go-ahead. A delay of that length is not unusual for large and contested proposals that, like the Duntroon application, are appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), the provinces land-use adjudicator. When you go through a months-long OMB hearing and spend millions, says Moreen Miller, president of the Ontario Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, to me thats a colossal waste of energy, money and time. Miller has been a driving force behind this new collaboration ever since she reached out to the environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in 2008. Weve had real opportunities to find common ground, but we never got to the discussion that would find it, she says. In the past, perhaps our approach was to say, Heres our position, like it or lump it. This time, we sent out an invitation that just said, Wed like you to come and talk to us about aggregate management. Twelve environmental groups were invited; six Ontario Nature, CONE, Save the Oak Ridges Moraine (STORM), Nature Conservancy of Canada, Gravel Watch Ontario and the Couchiching Conservancy took up the offer. On the industry side, participants included Miller, Lucyshyn and representatives from Lafarge, Miller Paving Ltd., Capital Paving and, initially, Holcim Canada, a member of the Swiss firm that now owns Dufferin Aggregates. (Holcim Canada left the forum in March 2011 and later announced its own green gravel program with Environmental Defence.) Early meetings were like a blind date, only one where you dont have a very positive image of who youre going to have a date with, Schultz says. Participants debated such contentious issues as recycling, shipping and greenhouse gas emissions. They went on field trips to pits and quarries, as well as to rehabilitated sites. And they began to develop a rapport. At a field trip to a rehabilitated Lafarge pit near Mono Mills, threatened bobolinks swooped and arced over rippling grassland. The green crowd was delighted. All the aggregate producers looked at each other and said, OK, now I know what a bobolink is, Miller recalls.

The encouraging thing was that everybody seemed to be civil, wellmeaning people who were trying to find solutions, Schultz says. In some cases, we had to agree to disagree. In others, we need to invest time in learning. One issue that has proven hard to resolve, for example, is terms for aggregate licences: environmental groups and local residents want firm sunset times for shutting down pits and quarries; the industry prefers the flexibility of being able to idle pits or adjust production to meet market demands. Despite these disagreements, Schultz argues that the aggregate business is ripe for the kind of third-party certification that began in the forest sector in the 1990s. The most obvious example is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which places its stamp on forest products that are both environmentally sustainable and grown and processed for the benefit of local communities and First Nations. A similar program in the aggregate sector could set standards for taking into account the natural environment when selecting sites for aggregate extraction, approval and rehabilitation of quarries and pits, including guidelines for reducing energy use and carbon emissions, and recycling aggregates and construction materials. Industry, meanwhile, sees certification as a way to offer a marketing advantage to progressive firms, reducing what Lucyshyn calls the costs and uncertainties of opening new operations for companies with a record of good environmental stewardship. Obvious markets for green gravel include governments (which already buy more than half the aggregates produced in Ontario) and contractors participating in green building programs such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). When Holcim Canada and Environmental Defence opted to draw up a separate certification regime, called Socially and Environmentally Responsible Aggregates (SERA), their decision raised the spectre of competing standards for green gravel. But Schultz sees a silver lining. As in the forest sector, where various standards programs fight for market share, Schultz says competing aggregates standards may up the ante for environmental protection. SERA executive director Lorne Johnson adds the competition also helps organizations develop more effective and practical standards and procedures, including

audits. Theres a tendency for an upwards harmonization of standards, not a downwards harmonization, he says. By having two standards to compare and contrast, nothing but good can come from that in terms of the long-term stewardship of the resource. Still, the two sides must work through some knotty problems before an effective certification system is possible. Unlike timber, aggregate is a finite resource. Stewarding it involves balancing conflicting demands. Take the tradeoff in deciding how close to the final market gravel should be produced: On the one hand, extraction in southern Ontario places more stress on an increasingly limited natural landscape. On the other, hauling aggregate from the hinterland could damage other, equally sensitive areas and, due to the longer truck routes, pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In the latter scenario, trucks are still going to be pounding the pavement through your community to reach aggregates farther afield. Its a loselose option, Schultz says. Rather than make a beeline for a particular model, were doing our due diligence in terms of researching the various options out there. Another challenge with an FSC-style approach is the limited retail markets for aggregates. Sales to do-it-yourselfers are minimal compared with the demand from governments and contractors. And those buyers, especially government, are heavily invested in what York University associate professorMark Winfield labels a policy of putting cheap aggregate close to the market. People have been trying for more than 40 years to bring about a change in the provinces approach to aggregates, with zero success so far, says Winfield, who studied Ontarios aggregate sector when he was director of the Environmental Governance Program at the Pembina Institute. Certification may start nudging those policies in a greener direction, but government still has a role to play. I dont see certification as replacing what government does, or should be doing, says the Couchiching Conservancys Reid. He argues that issues such as promoting rail or marine transportation, recycling and researching ways to make more efficient use of aggregates all require government leadership.

But the primary need and a key factor in creating a lasting peace in the sector lies in getting aggregate buyers to go green. If the province was going to say, Were going to use green aggregate, youd see the level of interest escalating, Reid says. Schultz agrees that the big challenge for the NGOs is to push municipalities to see the benefits of green procurement. There will be some ups and downs with this, she predicts, and adds, Ultimately, its up to voters to decide whats important to them and for citizens to make their voices heard.
Where the aggregates go The amount of aggregate used in various construction applications: - kilometre of a two-lane highway: 18,000 tonnes - 2,000-square-foot house: 250 tonnes - kilometre of a subway line: 114,000 tonnes - kilometre of water main: 1,000 to 4,500 tonnes (Source: State of the Aggregate Resource in Ontario Study, 2010) Where the aggregates are The Greater Toronto Area uses about one-third of Ontarios aggregate, so its no surprise the provinces top aggregateproducing municipalities are mostly clustered in southern Ontario. Although Ottawa is the number one municipal producer, other top 10 producers are Hamilton, Kawartha Lakes, Clarington in Durham region, Milton and Caledon. While areas with the highest populations tend to demand the most aggregate, they also face a wide range of competing priorities, including natural heritage protection, agriculture and the concerns of local residents. The Ministry of Natural Resources 2010 State of the Aggregate Resource in Ontario Study notes that land-use plans for the Niagara Escarpment and the Oak Ridges Moraine either outlaw or restrict the expansion of pits and quarries across significant swaths of those areas, even though each contains high-value aggregates. For aggregate producers and users, then, the challenge lies in finding suitable rock while limiting the environmental impact of its extraction. Given the difficulty in getting approval for new sites, the report notes, the

majority of the reserves supplying the GTA market are coming either from moderate or scarce reserves.Ray Ford Turning down the volume Ken Lucyshyn, vice-president of Thorold-based Walker Industries, was working late one night when he got a call from a resident living near one of the firms quarries. He said, I just want to come home from work, sit in my backyard and have a drink in peace, without listening to all the beep-beep-beep from the trucks. Lucyshyn was not surprised. Noise, along with dust and truck traffic, are the top three complaints associated with pits and quarries, and the company has been looking for ways to turn down the volume. Low-tech solutions include lining rock hoppers and the boxes of quarry trucks with rubber and enclosing crushers and rock-handling areas inside buildings. But changing the high-pitched beeping of a backup alarm is a different challenge, since the sound needs to be distinct enough to alert workers. The solution Lucyshyn found is Backalarm, a British-designed system that uses pulses of static-like white sound instead of the familiar beeping. Workers can tell where the sound is coming from, but it does not have the long-distance audibility of a traditional alarm. The result is an alarm that works on the job site but is far less intrusive outside the pit. R.F. The tax solution While Canadian environmental and industry groups are considering green gravel certification to encourage sustainable practices in the sector, European countries have tended to use taxes, fees and levies to reduce aggregate consumption. Mark Winfield, a York University associate professor who has studied Ontarios aggregate industry, says higher taxes or levies make the product more valuable, spurring builders to use it more carefully, look for new approaches to construction or take recycling more seriously. With aggregates, the damage is inherent to the extracting process, he says. The only way you really reduce the damage is to reduce the materials consumption.

In 2002, the British government introduced a tax equivalent to $2.52 per tonne on sand, gravel and crushed stone used for construction. Last year, the tax rose to the equivalent of $3.15 per tonne about 20 percent of the value of the aggregate. The tax is not without its critics, but the U.K. government credited it with reducing aggregate sales by 18 million tonnes between 2001 and 2005 and boosting the share of recycled aggregates to about 25 percent of the market. (In Ontario, by contrast, recycling provides only about 7 percent of aggregate.) In comparison, Ontarios aggregate levy is a mere 11.5 cents per tonne, revenue that host municipalities, the province, and pit and quarry rehabilitation initiatives share. If Ontario does adopt a green gravel system, an increased levy could help fund environmental audits. As it stands, says Ontario Stone, Sand & Gravel Association president MoreenMiller, the levy still has the same formula as it did in 1990.R.F.