Ontario’s garbage crisis is urgent

Communitypress.ca
July 30, 2020

Ontario’s garbage crisis has just become more dire. With new legislation making it all but impossible to build new landfills, it is more likely the province will run out of waste disposal capacity by 2032.

Ontarians are now sending almost 12 million tonnes of waste to landfills every year. That’s 70 per cent of the material we throw out despite efforts to improve waste diversion with blue boxes and green bins. In 2018, Ontario residents sent 750,000 more tonnes of waste per year to landfills than in 2008.

About one-third of that garbage is trucked to landfills in the United States -- a flow that continues through the pandemic, even with the border closed to private travel. But this waste disposal option is increasingly precarious politically, especially now that Ontario has shown itself to be unwilling to build its own new landfills.

Because it takes at least 10 years to plan and construct a new landfill, our only domestic disposal option is the less than 120 million tonnes of landfill capacity left in Ontario -- unless we build more.

Part of the problem is that Ontarians are misled by some popular fallacies. One is that we can recycle our way out of this problem. More recycling, composting and waste diversion are core objectives of Ontario’s waste management strategy. But those efforts merely dent the vast amounts of material we send to landfill disposal. In fact, over the past decade, recycling levels have basically flatlined in Ontario. Even 30 per cent of what we toss into our blue boxes ends up in landfills.

There is growing interest in energy and resource recovery from waste, yet energy-from-waste facilities in Ontario have a very limited capacity. And building new energy-from-waste facilities is fraught with the same political difficulties as constructing a new landfill.

Bill 197, introduced earlier this month, creates a further barrier to waste disposal investment by requiring local municipalities to approve new landfills -- in addition to the provincial government’s stamp of approval.

Wanting local approval for new landfills is understandable. And very few landfills are ever built without local community support. But Bill 197 creates a new, unprecedented layer of red tape: requiring the explicit approval of neighbouring towns and cities, not just the municipality where the landfill is to be located.

This means that Markham can halt a project in Pickering, and Toronto can veto a project in Vaughan or Mississauga -- and vice versa. In the new world of Bill 197, municipal governments will cede control over what’s built in their communities to neighbouring local councils. “Not in my backyard” becomes “not in my neighbour’s backyard, either.”

Ontario needs to face up to its garbage crisis. Every bag of garbage we throw out brings us one step closer to running out of landfill space. Recycling, composting and energy recovery are important solutions, yet leave us with millions of tonnes of garbage every year.

The environmentally safe, cost-effective and reliable disposal option for this growing amount of garbage is made-in-Ontario landfills. Our landfill capacity deadline of 2032 will arrive even sooner -- by 2028, just eight years away -- should the U.S. government decide to close the border to Ontario’s garbage.

Ontario’s waste sector is more than ready to work with local communities, residents and the provincial government to mitigate issues related to odour, environmental impact and traffic that are often associated with landfills. Active landfills usually aren’t pretty but they are vital to managing the garbage we all throw out. Landfills ensure waste is managed responsibly, not illegally dumped or tossed into our public spaces and natural environment.

Landfills really are critical infrastructure, necessary for the economic and environmental well-being of our province. Changes to the environmental assessment process should remove barriers to landfill projects, not create new ones. Ontario needs more landfills before it’s too late.