Waste disposal plans don’t smell so sweet
After eight years in office, it gets pretty difficult for a mayor to admit there are areas where he has dropped the ball. Delivering a plan to do better is equally unattractive because it inevitably takes us back to the dropped-the-ball problem.
That’s about the only way to explain Mayor Jim Watson’s weak response to the very real deficiencies in the way the city disposes of our garbage. People aren’t demanding action at the doors, Watson says. Given that, he seems to be feeling no pressure to do anything. That’s not the kind of leadership we should expect from a mayor.
Fortunately for Ottawans, a civic action group called Waste Watch Ottawa is doing Watson’s job for him. The group has produced a credible, six-point action plan to dramatically reduce the amount of stuff we deposit in the city landfill.
When it comes to recycling and organics collection, Ottawa is the laggard among major Ontario municipalities. We divert only 44 per cent of residential waste, while most others are over 50 per cent and leading municipalities divert more than 60 per cent.
Waste Watch Ottawa wants the city to set a 65 per cent diversion target to be reached by October 2022. That’s an increase of nearly 50 per cent, and would take us from the bottom to the top in provincial waste diversion.
Why does it matter? Keeping stuff out of landfills is usually cast as an environmental problem, and there are greenhouse gases associated with landfills, but the pragmatic reason for diverting more is to extend the life of the city-owned Trail Road landfill. Increasing waste diversion by one per cent adds a year to the life of the landfill.
When it comes to recycling and organics collection, Ottawa is the laggard among major Ontario municipalities.
The city expects there will be capacity there until 2043, but we will need to start planning and locating an alternative many years before that. If we don’t have landfill capacity, the city will have to consider incineration, a technology that costs twice as much as landfill.
Waste Watch Ottawa proposes a number of actions to get our diversion rate up. The group would triple spending on promotion of the green bin and recycling to bring it in line with what other large municipalities do. It also suggests green bins for multi-residential buildings and a full or partial user-pay system for garbage to reduce the number of bags put out. It argues for cancelling council’s odd decision to allow non-compostable plastic bags in the green bins. It’s an unnecessary move when compostable plastics are available at low cost.
One need not agree with all the community group’s suggestions, but they form the basis for a debate we need to have. Despite an excess of environmental virtue-signalling, Ottawans are not doing a good job on either organics or recycling. The amount of waste going to landfill declined after bringing in green bins and biweekly garbage pickup, but then began increasing again in 2013.
That debate should include a discussion of the cost. Collecting and processing a tonne of garbage costs $111. Green bin stuff costs $269 a tonne and recycling is $285 a tonne. The more we keep out of the landfill, the more it’s going to cost us.
When it comes to garbage, we have three choices. We can muddle along pretending to be diversion champions, we can commit to higher rates of diversion and pay the cost, or we could forget about diversion and go straight to incineration.
The previous Ontario Liberal government set a target of 70 per cent residential waste diversion. It’s not clear that the Conservative government will demand, and the city wants to wait and see.
The new council will discuss garbage next year, but why not engage the public now? Watson hasn’t released a campaign plank on garbage yet, but indicated that he will build on what has been done in the past. That’s not much.