SOMETHING STINKS IN OTTAWA

Who could blame Ottawa residents for feeling a little down in the dumps about the state of garbage collection and disposal in this city? First, there was the switch to bi-weekly trash pickup, a move that still infuriates many residents from Stittsville to Orléans (especially when the scent of two-week-old garbage starts wafting out of the garage in the summertime). It would have been a powerful wedge issue during the most recent election campaign had a credible alternative bothered to run against Mayor Jim Watson. The sales job behind the move suggested cost savings for the city and a reduction of garbage thanks to increased green bin usage.

Enter the Orgaworld fiasco, featuring a 20-year, $140 million source-separated organics contract that had already cost Ottawa nearly $8 million in “unnecessary” payments by the time the city’s auditor reported on it this past July. The terms of the deal revealed an astounding level of ignorance on the part of the city staffers who arranged it (that’s the best-case scenario, anyway), and were a black mark on the councillors who approved them.

And now we have Plasco, which looks increasingly like a pile of magic beans smooshed together into the shape of a waste-to-energy power plant. Plasco filed for bankruptcy protection on Tuesday, the same day city staff recommended Ottawa end its relationship with the firm. The city had a tentative agreement to send as much as 109,500 tonnes of waste to Plasco per year at a per-year cost of $9 million, but Plasco has never been able to prove its technology is commercially viable in the 10 years it has operated here.

The collapse won’t cost Ottawa much cash — it can just walk away from the proposed deal — though our tax dollars did cover the salaries of city staffers working on the partnership and contributed to millions in federal and provincial funding for the company over the years.

But now we’ve lost 10 years chasing the dreams of a startup — always a high-risk gamble — pitched by a CEO with a history of some success and a lot of failure, and we’re no closer to finding a solution to the growing mountains of garbage around the city. There never was a strong push to come up with a Plan B, either, even as Plasco blew deadline after deadline to show its technology worked and/or there would be adequate financing available to keep the dream alive.

When is someone, anyone, going to clean up the waste management mess in Ottawa?