Many environmental groups support the City of Ottawa’s proposal to buy land near Boundary Road that is available for a landfill.
The purchase plan passed last month and is moving into a bidding process.
The environmentalists argue the acquisition is the best of a number of sub-optimal alternatives. But they say the purchase should be paired with measures to divert more waste away from landfills.
Duncan Bury, of Waste Watch Ottawa (WWO), says Ottawa’s waste diversion rate has been stalled at about 45 per cent.
“Now there are municipalities in Ontario who are doing 60 per cent plus. So we’re not doing as well as we should,” he says.
Bury says the CRRRC purchase is the more environmentally beneficial option. He calls it a realistic next step as the city works to reduce the volume of waste going to landfill.
Bury says the landfill purchase is definitely preferable to incineration, which he says produces more greenhouse gases than a landfill with proper methane recovery. He says because the city knows how landfills operate, he believes it can engineer them properly to reduce environmental impacts.
“Why on earth would we build an $860 million incinerator?” he says. “We will pay for (it) one way or the other, in terms of, cost to tip of the site and long term contracts when we have a landfill – which is admittedly not ideal either.”
He says that the city should not consider an incinerator “for another decade or so” and instead focus on diverting and reducing waste.
Bury says Ottawa’s 2024 Solid Waste Master Plan, the first adopted by council since 2003, was a long time coming. He worries that it’s taking longer to implement than is ideal. The Parks Waste Diversion Pilot that placed recycling bins in Ottawa parks as part of the master plan, for example, has been underway since summer 2017.
Bury says he thinks the city means well, but its budget has been limited. When the latest master plan was adopted, the solid waste capital budget was in a $25 million deficit.
“(This) suggests that they have been significantly under-funding, and thus not committing to putting the money aside,” he says. He adds that the city is on track to change that.
Karen Wirsig, senior program manager for plastics at Environmental Defence Canada (EDC), shares Bury’s concerns.
“A number of municipalities seem to have thrown up their hands about actually reducing waste destined for landfills,” she says. “They’re starting to embrace the idea of waste incineration, which is just, in our view, the totally wrong way to go.”
Wirsig says Ontario policy is backsliding on waste reduction and diversion.
“Ontario needs to do a 180-degree turn and prioritize waste reduction over all the other silly things that it is doing,” she says.
There’s a lot more (the province of Ontario) can do to improve waste reduction programs, to avoid the need for new landfills.
Karen Wirsig, Environmental Defence Canada
Progress at the federal level has also been hindered, she says.
In 2021, plastics and petrochemical companies sued over the federal government’s decision to label “plastic manufactured items” as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA). The companies won in Federal Court in 2023, and a federal appeal is still awaiting a decision.
Wirsig says all federal work that would regulate single-use plastics has not advanced as a result. It’s been under a “big legal cloud, she said.”
This “really sets the whole country back,” she says.
Environmental Defence wants the province to introduce a deposit return program for all beverage containers. Ontario has one only for alcohol containers. Without it, Environmental Defence estimates around 1.7 billion plastic bottles end up in landfills, incinerators or as litter every year in Ontario.
“I mean, that’s an urgent thing for the province to do, but there’s a lot more it can do to improve waste reduction programs, to avoid the need for new landfills,” Wirsig says.
Bury says the City of Ottawa needs to do more work on its user pay system for garbage. Currently the city has a three-bag limit with excess waste requiring the purchase of yellow for extra garbage.
“We know from the city audits that about 50 per cent (of) what’s in the garbage should either be in the blue black box recycling program or in the organics program, and that’s a huge management challenge that needs to be addressed,” Bury says.
Bury says an essential part of reducing waste is proper communication about where garbage and recycling end up.
“I am always amazed by the number of people who keep saying to me … ‘so don’t most of my recyclables end up in the garbage anyway?’ And I keep trying to say, ‘no, they don’t, actually,’” he says.
Bury says this miscommunication exists because what happens after people separate waste “has never really been explained.”
Wirsig says online communication is especially important when it comes to plastics because there is a lot of “greenwashing,” which is when companies falsely promote their products or individual people’s acts of recycling as the main solutions to the climate crisis.
“The industry will suggest that recycling will save us from plastic pollution, which is totally false,” she says. “Communicating, like trying to make sure that people are thinking critically about what we’re hearing from industry through social media posts and other things, is really important.”
Sara Johnson is an environmental engineering student at Carleton University. She saw the pressure on landfill space firsthand during a co-op term monitoring groundwater at the Carp Landfill. Johnson says it’s a big problem.
“I saw them building the new cells, and then I saw them start to fill them up once they were done. And they said, ‘They’re filling up a lot quicker than we thought,'” she says.
Johnson founded Carleton Society of Environmental Engineering (CSEE) three years ago with Spencer Green and Rory Scottblack. Now, she is the vice-president of communications and runs the society’s Instagram account.
She says waste management is a big problem on Carleton’s campus. She hopes to bring light to it through the CSEE social media.
“Next semester I will be producing more content to promote the environmental engineering program, but also our society’s mantate and sustainability initiatives,” she says.
Johnson says CSEE has talked about building vermicomposts, which use worms to help turn food waste into soil, or bioreactors on campus to deal with compostable waste.
Wirsig says the good news is that Canada’s position has solidified on the key measures that are going to address plastic pollution worldwide: getting harmful chemicals out of plastics, and promoting alternatives to single-use plastics.
