The City of Toronto expects to run out of landfill space by 2035, and despite approving a “long term waste plan” in 2016, city officials are still searching for solutions.
“Yeah, stay tuned,” said Atif Durrani, acting project director of business transformation residual waste for the City of Toronto.
Durrani and others at city hall know there is no simple fix for Toronto’s garbage problem.
“When you look at the amount of waste generated per capita for the average person, it’s increased significantly over time,” said Calvin Lakhan, director of the Circular Innovation Hub at York University.
Last year, Toronto managed more than 725,000 tonnes of residential waste, including recycling and organic waste.
Still, 351,690 tonnes of garbage was sent to the Green Lane Landfill near London, Ont. That’s enough to fill about a third of the Rogers Centre.
It’s an unsustainable rate for the landfill the city has used exclusively for residential waste since 2011.
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Durrani said provincial laws and regulations make it difficult to build a new city dump.
“Wherever you’re building it, you need that municipality to basically give you approval for it,” said Durrani. “So that’s kind of almost put a freeze on any new landfill development in the province.”
Under the Ontario Environmental Assessment Act, any new landfill proposal over 100,000 cubic metres requires a full environmental assessment and support from the host municipality and any nearby municipalities with residential areas within 3.5 kilometres of the site.
Toronto has benefit agreements with four municipalities, including three First Nations, to ensure it can use the Green Lane site.
“When the air is thick and the wind is blowing, you’re going to get the smell,” said Mary Wolfs, a Southwold, Ont., resident, who lives near the landfill.
That “putrid” smell Wolfs describes is one reason she’s against any idea of expanding the landfill.
“This isn’t unique to Toronto,” said Emily Alfred with Toronto Environmental Alliance. “Every municipality in Ontario is facing a similar problem.”
Ontario Ministry of the Environment Conservation and Parks spokesperson Gary Wheeler acknowledges “our landfills, as they stand, will be full within the next decade.”
This despite 40 per cent of the province’s waste already getting exported to the United States – something many waste management experts warn could become an increasingly unreliable solution given the current political climate.
The City of Toronto is calling other municipalities, searching for other existing landfills to buy and considering the controversial practice of burning waste for energy.
Most importantly, Durrani says the city needs to find way to keep more waste out of the landfill by increasing the amount going into the blue box and green bin.
“It’s a priority to do more to reduce and divert waste so that we can buy a little bit more time,” said Durrani.
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