The Bruce Report

No, Halifax, we are not finished, you and I.

Not while there’s one, petty, competitive funny bone left in my body.

Granted, old girl of my youth, you are bigger and more populous than Moncton. Your restaurants are grander and more plentiful. Your ocean-front vistas surpass anything the Petitcodiac River might ever hope to provide. You are richer, more ethnically diverse, better educated, and (let’s face it) prettier.

But know this, grand dame of East Coast municipalities: At least our. . .well, you know. . .“stuff” don’t stink.

That’s right, you heard me. We enjoy the sweetest-smelling poop this side of the Appalachians, thanks to the good folks at the Greater Moncton Sewerage Commission, who probably never imagined their scatological studies into human effluent would become a talking point on the site selection circuit.

Are you jealous yet? You ought to be.

Consider that for more than a few years now, solid waste engineers in the Hub City have been perfecting techniques to transform “humanure” into safe, reliable, odourless compost, and to stunning effect. According to Commission Chairman Ron LeBlanc, more than 2,000 residents have scooped up tonnes of the stuff for their flower beds and vegetable gardens. “We have more demand than we have product,” he told the Moncton Times & Transcript’s Aloma Jardine the other day.

We call it our “do-do” program, which, if recent news reports are correct, beats your “don’t-do” counterpart hands down.

 “Haligonians have been kicking up a stink this week about the smell they say is coming from treated human waste the municipality used as fertilizer along roadways in one area of the city,” Jardine writes. “LeBlanc says the two regions [Halifax and Moncton] are not using the same treatment process, resulting in two very different end products.”

Apparently, we’re just a little more fastidious than you. We, for example, separate the liquids from the solids and add lime. Then we throw in some leaves, bark, grass – you know, whatever’s handy – and let it cook to about 75 degrees Celsius, which eliminates all remaining harmful bacteria.

Voila! Et toi?

Says LeBlanc: “We’ve gone further to make sure that from a perception point of view, we take into consideration all of the human elements – visual, small – so we don’t have the problems (Halifax has) because we’ve taken care of making sure we don’t have them.”

What’s more, we’re attracting national attention, not flies.

An article published in Toronto’s Now Magazine not long ago reported: “More natural and less energy-intensive than pelletizing, composted sludge, says the Greater Moncton Sewerage Commission, blends bathroom waste with food, yard and forestry waste to create not just dried-out dung but a soil-building hummus that won’t combust the way pellets can and is lower in trace contaminants than any other sludge.

“In fact, Rajeshwar Tyagi, research chair in enviro engineering at the U of Quebec, has tested Moncton’s biosolid compost and found that micro-organisms in it actually degrade 80 to 90 per cent of the nonylphenols and bisphenol A present. Did they get rid of all of it? No. Would Tyagi use some on his own vegetable garden? ‘It depends on the crop,’ he says. ‘Probably not on leafy vegetables like salad consumed directly without any cooking, but certainly for agriculture crops, yes.’”

Oh come on, Rajeshwar, a little “Moncton Muck” on your radicchio won’t kill you. Indeed, our stuff is so safe that both the Canadian and U.S. military – ever more archly sensitive to environmental considerations – are contemplating its use in various site reclamation projects.

So, there you have it Halifax: Indisputable evidence of Moncton’s primacy on the poop front. But far be it from me to rub your nose (ahem) too gleefully in the substance of our superiority. Allow me, rather, to invite you to participate in our great cause for ka-ka reform.

With your brawn and brains, and our scat and street sense, we might together corner the international export market for healthy, human compost.

After all, the supply is virtually unlimited, and a turd is a terrible thing to waste.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.