Assessment and management of aquatic impacts from airport de-icing activities -- The Canadian perspective
- Environment Canada, Hull, Quebec (Canada). Evaluation and Interpretation Branch
- Transport Canada, Ottawa, Ontario (Canada). Airports Group
Historically, aircraft deicing fluids have simply drained from aircraft and runway surfaces into airport drainage systems and invariably end up in surrounding receiving aquatic systems. This led to recent concerns over environmental impacts from glycol-based fluids typically used for deicing aircraft. Glycols from de-icing fluids have been detected at high levels at Canadian airports. Concern not only stems from the high volumes being used at relatively few point sources, but also to the higher toxicity of the formulated de-icing fluids, compared to pure glycols. As a result, significant environmental management efforts have been made at Canadian airports over the last 4 years, including extensive stormwater monitoring, glycol mitigation and pollution prevention plans. Site-specific mitigation plans have been implemented at 15 major Canadian airports which typically include glycol containment, collection and removal. While a reasonable dataset is available on the toxicity of pure glycols, much less information is available on the toxicity of formulated deicers. Furthermore, there have been very few field assessments of the aquatic impacts of de-icing. To date, management regimes developed to address the problem in Canada have focused almost exclusively on glycols and voluntary compliance to discharge limits and receiving water quality guidelines. This approach has resulted in reductions in the quantities of glycols which are released from Canadian airports into the surrounding environment. Currently, government and industry are refining this management system with an examination of new approaches and options such as more holistic airport wastewater quality assessments and toxicity-based guidelines.
- OSTI ID:
- 460503
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-961149--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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