Delays | Province slow to approve grey-water system

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By CHRIS FOX
fox.chris@dailygleaner.com

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An official with a Fredericton-based alternative energy business says a slow regulatory body is keeping New Brunswickers from cutting down on the amount of water they waste.

A household grey-water recycling system, which recycles leftover water from showers and sinks, treats it in a holding chamber and then uses it to flush toilets, was created by Brac Systems four years ago.

It has been widely used in British Columbia, Alberta and Guelph, Ont., but it hasn't been approved by the Department of Public Safety for residential use in this province.

Shawn Wilkie, president of Grun-Sol Technologies - the sole distributor of the product locally - said the technology should catch on quickly and stop thousands of litres of water from being unnecessarily flushed down New Brunswick toilets.

But the longer the approval process takes, he said, the more water is wasted.

"It just doesn't make sense to me why we use potable water that we can drink and consume for non-potable reasons like washing cars," he said.

"The thinking behind it has to change and it's not just government's fault, it is the speed at which government acts on these things.

"The fine print in the province here is where the problem has occurred in that this technology has come up so quickly that nobody has had a chance to catch up to the fine print and the paperwork."

Montreal-based Brac Systems is the only company manufacturing residential grey-water recycling technology in Canada.

Wilkie said his business has been advocating its approval for more than a year.

Most drainage products usually have to be certified by a national body, be installed by a licensed plumber, be examined by a committee and be deemed to live up to the national plumbing code of Canada to be approved.

Bill Fallow, the chief plumbing inspector for New Brunswick, said the process has been drawn out for longer than usual because of the uniqueness of the technology.

"Some progress is being made, but it is a slow process," he said. "Right now, there is no standard to certify this equipment to. Now there will probably be a will to write a standard to cover grey-water collection and we are definitely in support of grey-water collection systems or anything that saves energy.''

But Fallow said there's more work that needs to be done to get the standards to the point that the province can assess these systems.

Wilkie said he hoped a sustainable home equipped with grey-water recycling technology under construction in Moncton will give Fallow the information he needs to approve the product provincewide.

"We have been waiting for that for probably about 2-1�„2 years," he said. "We already have installed three systems residentially on First Nations property because they fall under federal jurisdiction, but it never caught the attention in the province it needed to catch.

"Hopefully, they look at the data from this, realize it is safe and will save money and give it their blessing."

Similar technology has already been used in the Upper River Valley Hospital and will be used in the new convention centre in Fredericton.

The convention centre will collect rain water from a receptacle on the roof and use it to flush the building's toilets, said Greg Cook, executive director of special capital projects for the city.

"Commercially, it is not a big deal because you just get it engineered and away it goes and I wish it was that easy for residential, but it doesn't work that way," said Wilkie.