The Status of Waste Management in Ontario
(Background document prepared by John Jackson for the workshop of
the same title at the OEN Spring
Spring Eco-Gathering 2007 in Hamilton, April 14)
The waste management industry and municipalities often say that there
is a waste disposal crisis in Ontario, which threatens to result in solid
non-hazardous waste from the municipal, commercial, industrial, and institutional
sectors piling up with nowhere to go. They blame this disposal crisis on
an environmental assessment process that they claim is “too difficult”
for proponents to be willing to go through it.
This so-called disposal crisis is a false alarm. The EA process has
not proven to be a barrier to increasing disposal capacity within Ontario.
In the past ten years, nineteen new landfills for solid non-hazardous waste
have been approved in Ontario under the EAA. EAA approvals have also been
granted for thirteen expansions, including increasing the capacity for
one EFW-incinerator.
The size of these new or expanded disposal facilities varies substantially.
Many serve relatively small communities and, thus, are relatively small
in capacity. Some approvals have been granted for huge disposal capacity.
For example:
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Adams Mine – 20 million tonnes
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Warwick Landfill, Canadian Waste Management – 18 million tonnes
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Walker Landfill – 17 million tonnes
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BFI Ridge Landfill – 13.6 million tonnes
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Green Lane Landfill, St. Thomas – 10 million tonnes
Three of these gigantic sites were approved in the past six months.
The real crisis in solid non-hazardous waste management in Ontario is
around waste generation and diversion. The latest survey by Statistics
Canada, reflecting the situation in 2004, paints a dismal picture:
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In 2004, Ontario’s diversion rate for non-hazardous solid waste from residential,
institutional, commercial, and industrial sources was a mere 22.5 percent.
This was lower than the diversion rate in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island,
British Columbia, Quebec, and New Brunswick.
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In 2004, almost 13 million tonnes of solid non-hazardous waste were generated
in Ontario. This was an increase of one million tonnes over 2002.
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In 2004, just over one tonne of waste was generated in Ontario per capita.
This was an increase of 60 kilograms for each person over 2002.
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Because of this increased waste generation, despite increased quantities
of waste diverted from disposal between 2002 and 2004 (an increase of 640,000
tonnes), waste disposal continued to rise (400,000 tonnes).
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60 percent of waste generated in Ontario in 2004 was from the non-residential
sectors. The institutional, commercial and industrial sectors recycled
only 17.7 percent of the waste they generated. 29.3 percent of residential
waste was recycled.
Ontario has failed to deal with this waste generation and diversion
crisis:
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The Province held a consultation in June 2004 on a strategy for achieving
60 percent waste diversion by 2008. Almost three years later such a strategy
has not been approved or implemented and the province is far from achieving
the target.
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Ontario still has only one stewardship programme in place (the Blue Box
programme) under the Waste Diversion Act. No additional programmes have
been put in place in the three years since February 2003.
As this assessment of the state of non-hazardous waste in Ontario has shown,
the crisis in Ontario is not the difficulty of finding disposal capacity.
The crisis is the result of the failure of successive provincial governments
to put in place legislation, regulations, and programmes that would result
in the reduction of waste generation and of waste disposal.
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