British ColumbiaCastlegar, B.C., is now scrambling to find something, anything, to quell the stench coming from its sewage treatment plant, municipal services director Chris Hallam says. Castlegar now looking for quick fix at sewage plant, municipal services director saysCourtney Dickson · CBC News · Posted: Nov 17, 2025 5:06 PM EST | Last Updated: November 17Listen to this articleEstimated 3 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence.The community of Castlegar, B.C., has been trying to mitigate the stench coming from the South Sewage Treatment Plant, pictured, but says it isn’t having any luck. (Google Maps)In a small B.C. Interior city surrounded by trees, a strong odour overpowers the fresh mountain air. “Periodically, it would smell kind of like a farm,” said Castlegar, B.C., resident Elisha Del Col. “A very strong scent. It’s awful.”The smell, she said, has been a problem for years. “Summer is worse than the winter. It’s the warmer season when it’s a stronger odour. Winter not as much.” It comes from the South Sewage Treatment Plant situated along the Columbia River.“Unfortunately it’s a sewage treatment plant in the middle of a neighbourhood, which, as you can imagine, would exacerbate our problems,” said Chris Hallam, Castlegar’s director of municipal services. In an effort to mitigate the stink, the city spent $600,000 to install new technology — called geotubes — that was expected to help with the storage of biosolids, and in turn, reduce the smell. But it actually made things worse, Hallam said.A geotube, he said, is a large geotextile bag made of permeable fabric. The city pumps the geotube with wet sludge material, then mixes it with a polymer base to separate the liquid and the solids. “Ideally we’re left with a dry material that we’re able to, once we cut open the bag, load into a truck and transport that off-site,” Hallam said. He said the city chose geotubes as the least expensive and lowest operational impact solution to ongoing issues, like the stench, at the sewage plant. Geotubes at the South Sewage Treatment Plant in Castlegar, B.C. (Submitted by City of Castlegar)“The hope is that because the material will be stored inside of a bag and contained inside of a bag, that we would see some odour mitigation compared to the open air drying ponds that we were using before,” Hallam added.“Unfortunately, as things have played out, it’s just been anything but that. Actually, I think the odours have increased since we’ve installed the geotubes.”Not only did the geotube fail to mitigate odour, according to Hallam, it also didn’t really dry out that sludge. So Hallam said the city is “going back to the drawing board.” They’re also working with a legal team to see if they can recoup any of the $600,000 the city — and therefore taxpayers — spent on the project. He said the city is looking at a long-term project to move the sewage treatment plant, but that’s 10 to 15 years down the road. To deal with the ongoing stink, they’ll need to come up with something else sooner. “We’re actively working with our technical experts,” Hallam said. “We’re probably one to two years out before we’d be able to get through the design and implementation of any solutions.”ABOUT THE AUTHORCourtney Dickson is an award-winning journalist with CBC News based in Vancouver, B.C.With files from Daybreak South
B.C. city says it spent $600K on tech it hoped would abate sewage odours but actually made it worse
