Kerry Rowe, a Queen's University professor and a world expert in landfill design, is this year's winner of the Herzberg gold medal, Canada's highest non-medical science prize.Jana Chytilova/Supplied
Kerry Rowe came to Canada for work, but he stayed because of love. More precisely, because of Love Canal.
In the late 1970s, Dr. Rowe was an Australian research engineer newly arrived at the University of Western Ontario for an academic stint. But just across the border, the Love Canal neighbourhood of Niagara Falls, N.Y., was found to be marinating in toxic chemicals from a nearby landfill site, touching off one of the worst environmental health emergencies in U.S. history.
For Dr. Rowe, who until then had specialized in dam construction, the disaster was a clarion call.
“It never occurred to me that waste would be where I would go until I discovered there were hundreds of people being moved from their homes an hour and a half’s drive from where I lived,” he said. “It wasn’t dams, but it was containment. And I figured there had to be a better way to do it.”
In the decades since then, Dr. Rowe, now a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, has become a world expert in containing polluted runoff from landfills and mine waste.
On Wednesday, his many contributions in that field earned him the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal, the country’s highest award for non-medical scientific research.
The prize, which comes with a top up in research funding of up to $1-million, is bestowed annually by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) for work conducted in Canada that has demonstrated persistent excellence and influence.
Dr. Rowe, who received his award Wednesday during a ceremony in Ottawa, said the infusion of resources over the next five years would allow him to accelerate his efforts to develop better ways to stop contaminants from going where they shouldn’t. One area of current focus is a class of synthetic chemicals known as PFAS which are used in many commercial products such as non-stick cookware and can leach into the environment through landfill waste. Some have been linked to adverse health effects.
The research includes developing computer models that can predict how the contaminants migrate through the ground under different conditions and then testing those predictions in real world settings.
“I’ve really tried to link the full spectrum, from theory to the laboratory, to field performance and monitoring,” said Dr. Rowe.
While he did not work directly on Love Canal, it was that incident that led him to collaborate with Robert Quigley, a geotechnical engineer at Western who was trying to understand the spread of contaminants around a landfill site in the Sarnia area seemed to move and spread more rapidly than theoretical calculations predicted.
The research, which unfolded like detective work, produced a trove of valuable data that would later inform the development of new landfills around the growing city of Toronto in the 1980s and beyond. During that work, Dr. Rowe was instrumental in discovering how bacteria could colonize and ultimately block a runoff system designed to collect contaminated fluid leaching out of a municipal landfill.
Along the way, the work helped to lay the foundations for the field it now called geo-environmental engineering.
Other aspects of Dr. Rowe’s research concerns synthetic membranes that can be used as a barrier underneath landfills, or overtop to capture methane gas that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and contribute to emissions that exacerbate climate change.
Dr. Rowe has won international acclaim for his research and directly affected the design of waste sites around the world.
In more recent years, he said, his work has increasingly started to encompass mining sites. The need is pressing, he said, as the shift to electric vehicles is expected to increase the impact of mining for critical minerals.
“If we’re going to go the electric car route, I want to minimize the environmental impacts of it,” Dr. Rowe said. “The good news is that mining companies are starting to pay attention to that. So what I want to do is help them.”