Sustainability, Service Diversification Drive Contractor

Canada’s NCM Hydro Vac Services goes beyond sewer and draining cleaning, taking advantage of its two waste treatment facilities to promote green, environmentally friendly practices

Sustainability, Service Diversification Drive Contractor

NCM Hydro Vac Services dewaters its sewer waste to landfill standards. The  water goes to the municipal treatment discharge facility, and the solids go to the landfill.

Interested in Municipal/Industrial?

Get Municipal/Industrial articles, news and videos right in your inbox! Sign up now.

Municipal/Industrial + Get Alerts

Canadian sewer and drain cleaner NCM Hydro Vac Services is proving that cleaners have much more to offer the industry than only pipe cleaning work.

Over the past several years, NCM Hydro Vac, based in Ottawa, Ontario, has added some new, innovative services. Namely, two new treatment facilities: a primary waste treatment facility and a hydrovac spoils recycling facility.

“We deal with all the silt and sediment that comes out of the sewers, which is considered a contaminant, so we’ve got to be able to handle that waste, treat it, and make sure it meets landfill criteria,” says Kris Norris, owner of NCM Hydro Vac.

NCM Hydro Vac handles most of the sewer cleaning work for the city of Ottawa, which means the company has a lot of waste to deal with. The primary waste treatment facility is fully up and running, and Norris’ goal for 2018 is to get the hydrovac spoils recycling facility up to spec and operating at full potential as well. 

“If you’re familiar with hydrovac material, it’s usually pretty hard to handle; it takes a long time for it to dry out, and then when it does dry out, you’re left with a clean fill, but it’s typically still really moist and mucky,” Norris says.

By dewatering the spoils immediately instead of just dumping them to dry, NCM Hydro Vac ends up with better fill material that can be repurposed. Plus, the recycled water can go right back into the hydrovacs.

“We’re looking to be able to introduce a better quality of aggregate back to our community and then sell topsoil back to our community. That way we’re not filling all these quarries, and we’re not using up all the empty land with all kinds of fill and stuff like that,” Norris says. “We’re regenerating the material back into a usable product.

“We decided we would try and push into the whole green, environmentally friendly service: introduce the soil back to job sites and, to the construction companies we work for, possibly at a cheaper rate than what it costs them to go and buy sand from a quarry.”

Read more about NCM Hydro Vac Services in this full profile featured in the February 2018 issue of Cleaner magazine.



Discussion

Comments on this site are submitted by users and are not endorsed by nor do they reflect the views or opinions of COLE Publishing, Inc. Comments are moderated before being posted.