City hopes for sewage clean up plan by year’s end

By Vernon Daily Courier staffFriday, March 2, 2007 http://www.dailycourier.ca/article_1000.php

The City of Vernon is hoping that Okanagan Spring Brewery will come up with a method to clean up their sewage waste by the middle of 2007.Okanagan Spring Brewery studied the waste discharged during the brewing process and the city is hopeful they will come up with an action plan soon.“They have done some preliminary studies so by mid to late 2007 the city is hoping the brewery will have a strategy and implement a timeline to improve the quality of their sewage,” Dale Danallanko, the city’s environment manager.

Bill Morrison of Okanagan Spring Brewery said that they will be drawing on some of the methods that were implemented at the Sleeman brewery in Guelph, Ont.“Other food processors in the area probably go through similar scenarios,” he said. “It’s a question of what’s involved on behalf of government and industry to resolve or to meet standards.”Morrison said that the brewery has yet to finalize a method to clean up the sewage the brewery discharges. He said he doesn’t know what the costs might be.In Guelph, the brewery’s discharge was cleaned up by installing permanent pipes to prevent the effluent from seeping into the soil. The pipes cost about $70,000 plus annual maintenance costs.Danallanko said some breweries and food processors have installed pre-treatment plants on site so that sewage is cleaned before it ever reaches the city’s wastewater treatment facility. However, he said the brewery is not obligated to install such a plant.

In April 2006, council passed an in-camera resolution that the city work with the brewery to clean up its sewage and encourage it to comply with the sanitary sewer use bylaw. Currently the brewery’s sewage exceeds acceptable levels of biosolids.Under the bylaw, the city can charge the brewery for its volume of unclean sewage, however, the two parties are working together to avoid any extra fees.