From Landfill to Productive Land Use

Описание: Brownie Awards 2024, Best Overall Project: Richmond Industrial Centre Development

The Richmond Industrial Centre is an innovative business park developed on the site of a construction waste landfill.

Location: Richmond, British Columbia

What is now Metro Vancouver’s largest single-owner-developed business park was a 130 hectare landfill of inert demolition construction and land-clearing waste. Montrose Industries is converting a landfill that had been operating since the 1970s into a much needed logistical hub in a metropolitan area desperately short of industrial land. This project’s groundbreaking approach to regulatory challenges and innovations in infrastructure development have been a gamechanger for other brownfield remediation projects.

Historically, regulations would have prevented a landfill from continuing to operate while closed sections became brownfields. A phased development approach simply did fit within the existing provincial regulatory process.

Montrose Industries, supported by PGL Environmental Consultants, recognized an opportunity to develop a precedent-setting approach. Through a collaborative and consultative process, we worked with stakeholders, the Province and the City of Richmond to achieve buy-in. This required finding areas of alignment between overlapping regulatory instruments (Landfill Operational Certificate and BC Contaminated Sites Regulation Instrument).

Apart from the significant precedents this project has established on the regulation side, it also exemplifies innovative approaches to sustainable remediation and massive infrastructure investment.

A rigorous process of investigation, remediation, risk assessment and in-situ risk management have enabled closed portions of the landfill to be transformed into the Richmond Industrial Centre while portions of the landfill are continuing to accept waste. We have successfully achieved regulatory closure on five areas, and four buildings are now complete and occupied by high-profile tenants. At project build out, the brownfield site will be converted into 12 industrial warehouse buildings totaling three million sq. ft.

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Project Team: Montrose Properties, PGL Environmental Consultants, City of Richmond, BC Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, Omicron.