Green is not cheap

Increasing restrictions on gravel development in the Toronto area are forcing aggregate producers to look farther afield for supplies, including to Grey and Bruce counties, Ontario Stone, Sand and Gravel Association president Carol Hochu said Friday.

Grey County municipal officials have begun to warn in recent months of major proposals for aggregate extraction in the region. The warnings come after licence applications were made for large stone quarries and gravel pits, including one near Owen Sound and another south of Collingwood, that involve amendments to the Niagara Escarpment Plan.

There are strong business and environmental reasons for keeping aggregate extraction closer to Toronto, Hochu said. However, new restrictions on aggregate development on the Oak Ridges Moraine, together with escarpment plan restrictions, mean sources in the Toronto are running out, Hochu said.

“The industry is concerned that existing licence resources in the GTA are going to be exhausted in the next decade,” the association president said from her Mississauga office. “We need in an environmental, economic and social sense to have it located close to market. . . It’s becoming more difficult to license and expand an existing site or to bring a greenfield site onstream.”

There are other sources in the Kawartha Lakes region northeast of Toronto, in Wellington County, Simcoe and in Grey and Bruce, Hochu said. A 1977 provincial government study identified the area between Durham and Flesherton as home to half the total gross possible gravel reserves remaining in all of southwestern Ontario.

Durham Stone and Paving Ltd. has submitted a plan to take a maximum of 500,000 tonnes of material from a proposed pit on 70.75 hectares of farmland near Singhampton in the former Osprey Township in Grey Highlands. Two larger operators are also seeking to expand in the same area.

MAQ Aggregates Inc. and Georgian Aggregates and Construction Inc. are seeking permission for quarries on land within six kilometres of the Durham Stone site. Combined, the three operations could mean the removal of as much as three million tonnes of stone annually — some of it from land protected under the Niagara Escarpment Plan.

That’s more gravel than is now produced by all the aggregate operators in Grey County, judging by 2004 research by consultants to the county government.

Durham Stone and Paving proprietor Paul Arnill has designed his proposal to serve construction in the area. It’s still not cost competitive to haul gravel by truck from Grey to Toronto, he said in a recent interview. And Ministry of Natural Resources aggregate analyst Craig Lang figures trouble getting gravel out of Grey County might mean it’s more likely that areas of Simcoe County near Orillia will serve Toronto first.

“What I’m seeing in my part of Grey County is a response to local markets,” Lang said in a recent interview. He works from an office in Midhurst and is one of three ministry officials responsible for administering aggregate licences in the Grey County region.

“The difficulty you’ve got in Grey County, in my view, is that there aren’t any really good transportation systems to get the stuff out,” Lang said.

Area residents have speculated for years about the resurrection of rail service or dedicated trucking routes for substantial gravel resources identified in the county.

So far, nothing has happened to resurrect rail and highway transport via multilane highways north from Toronto through Barrie make identified gravel resources in the Orillia area more likely for development in the short term, Lang said. He and his colleagues in Owen Sound and Guelph with responsibility for aggregate in other parts of Grey say the 20 current licence applications on their desks represent the normal course of business for the region.

Lang has three current licence applications in his area of eastern Grey. James Williams looks after the southernmost municipalities of Grey from his Guelph office. He has six current licence applications, five in West Grey and one in Southgate.

Dave Munro oversees northwestern Grey County and most of the Bruce Peninsula from the ministry’s Owen Sound office. His area includes a concentrated area of production of “dimension stone” used in construction and landscaping.

“It’s pretty rare for me to be below 10 on the go at any one time,” he said of current files in his office. “This is sort of the hub of the dimension stone industry here around Wiarton.”

Members of the stone and gravel association with GTA customers would prefer access to gravel closer to the market, Hochu said. However, new government restrictions and the region’s growing settlement mean gravel development gets more difficult and costly as time goes by.

“It makes most sense to have the resources located close to the market so we don’t have extra truck-haul kilometres, which increases transportation costs and increases fossil fuel consumption and increases greenhouse gas emissions.”

“If anyone is an environmentalist, they have to acknowledge that it makes more sense to have it close to market. People acknowledge the need for aggregate. People say, yes, I know we need it to build and maintain the infrastructure of the province, but don’t get it from here, get it from somewhere else. That just doesn’t make sense.”

Grey Bruce - Ontario, CA.