Picton Terminals

The modernized, privately owned port has now become an important fixture in the Doornekamp portfolio. “We’re still developing the port,” says Seymour. “We have regular port jobs happening for other companies on the site — we ship steel and aggregate, for example — but for Doornekamp, the activity is currently tied closely to a construction project in Toronto, at Ashbridges Bay Marina.” The stone that is required for the project, which is the build of three breakwaters on the north shore of Lake Ontario, is surplus aggregate from the redevelopment of the Picton Terminals. It’s loaded onto barges to ship from the terminal.

The Ashbridges Bay build, called the Ashbridges Bay Landform Project, is a good example of how having port access can make some construction work more efficient. Without Picton Terminals, Doornekamp would either need to hire a third-party marine shipping company or put the stone on trucks on the road. “It gives us an advantage to support marine construction projects,” says Seymour. “If we were just a regular land-based construction company, it would be harder to manage. Imagine how many trucks you’d have to have to get 4,000 tonnes of armour stone down the highway to Ashbridges Bay. We can put that volume of stone on a barge at our port and have it off-loaded at the other end within a week. That’s extremely fast for getting that kind of quantity to a marine construction site.” It also means product is handled less and requires less equipment.

In addition to efficiency, marine shipping also has environmental advantages. “This type of shipping is better in terms of carbon footprint than both trucking and rail,” says Berg. Boats have the best fuel economy of any shipping option, at approximately 243 kilometres to one litre of fuel. In comparison, a truck is about 35 kilometres to one litre of fuel. This translates to cost savings and less greenhouse gas. “We honour the environmental side of things. We promote shipping by water, but we also all want water to swim in, to fish, to enjoy…we need to protect the waterways we grew up on,” says Seymour. Even the updates to the port itself are being done in concert with Ministry of the Environment-approved plans for storm water management. “We have a 90-foot limestone cliff on the site, and you can’t just start moving dirt around,” says Berg. “It has been a multi-phase, multi-year project that is coming to a close.” The pinnacle to this project will be a covered, dry storage bin in the rock. The site stores road salt, and previous to this improvement, the road salt — which ships in massive quantities — was stockpiled under tarps. “Once we complete the storage bin, all of the salt will be stored under a roof,” says Berg. “We will no longer require the single-use tarps destined for the landfill that previously covered the salt.”

Considering that this port was a shell of itself just a few years ago, these kinds of improvements are mind-boggling. But it just goes to show, making something old new again can have far-reaching positive implications if you look hard enough.