This city’s wet-dry recycling plant could be a safety hazard if it is built near the Guelph Airpark.
Airpark manager Jane Arris-Finamore said she is concerned about the birds a recycling plant would attract and the damage they could do to aircraft.
According to Transport Canada, birds are a significant safety hazard to aircraft. Federal guidelines state that no land use which may attract large numbers of scavenger birds should be located closer than eight kilometres to an airport.
Dan Hoornweg, Guelph’s waste management co-ordinator, said that the city would have preferred to rezone municipal land.
"But there just weren’t any large tracks of land left in Guelph," he said in an interview.The site preferred by a city council selection committee lies in Puslinch next to the Ontario Reformatory and within a half a kilometre of the Guelph Airpark.
R.S. Binnie, regional director-general with Transport Canada, wrote to Hoornweg that he was concerned about the close proximity of the proposed recycling plant to the airport.
But Hoornweg said the entire process of breaking down the waste material will be done indoors.
"None of that material will be moved outside until 10 weeks after it enters the plant. At that point the waste has nothing a bird would want," he said. "Nutritional value is the equivalent to dirt."
"While Transport Canada does have policy statements for landfill sites and airports, none exist in Canada for recycling plants because this is a first," he said.
Guelph did look at four parcels of land in the Hanlon Business Park district but none met the criteria of being at least 20 acres in size, Hoornweg said.
"We really don’t think the birds are going to be a problem, but if they turn out to be, the City of Guelph will be responsible to implement bird-control measures."