Ecology Center

During the last four years, the City of Toronto searched far and wide for a new home for its trash when the City’s landfill closes in 2002. The conventional wisdom held that the City would use one of a handful of options — a landfill in northern Ontario, an incinerator in upstate New York, a landfill in southwestern Ontario, or one of several landfills in Michigan — and that the winning community would protest the outcome.

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After suffering the protests, though, Toronto has come up with a new and surprising solution. The City now plans to entirely eliminate its waste in ten years. No waste, no dump. The decision marks a profound change in the way Toronto deals with trash, and could potentially transform the waste business in North America. The story of Toronto’s transformation starts 250 miles away in 1997.

At his home in Dexter Township near Ann Arbor, Jeff Surfus read his newspaper one night and hit the roof. It said the City of Toronto had just voted to ship one-fourth of the town’s trash to a landfill fifteen miles from his home.

"I was in sheer disbelief that this was happening," thought Surfus, an environmental engineer. "I absolutely could not believe that we were powerless to stop it."

He quickly beat the bushes — phoning, emailing, faxing, and writing every public official and environmental group with a potential interest in the issue. In short time, he’d founded NO Waste of Michigan, joined league with the Ecology Center, and organized what’s become a four year-long fight to stop the trafficking of trash into Michigan.

Four hundred miles to the north and east, residents of the tiny Ontario village of Kirkland Lake were waging their own struggle. Since the early 1990s, industrialist Gordon McGuinty had sought approvals to convert an abandoned mine into a landfill for waste from the more populated part of the province. Village leaders originally embraced the plan for its supposed economic development benefits, but community activists wanted no part of the landfill’s attendant truck traffic, nuisance problems, and threat to the area’s groundwater. While the activists held off McGuinty throughout the 1990s, he eventually won support from Ontario Premier Mike Harris and Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman. Their backing made the Adams Mine the odds-on favorite as Toronto’s long-term trash repository.

In Toronto itself, environmentalists had been lobbying City Hall for years to upgrade the City’s modest recycling and composting program. City residents had embraced curbside recycling and yard waste diversion, but trucks only collected recyclables every other week from single-family households, and not at all from apartment residents. Despite this limited service, the City managed to achieve a respectable 27% diversion rate, leading advocates to conclude that a high level of service would likely achieve impressive results.

City leaders were unmoved. Toronto had a dirt-cheap place to dump its trash at the City-owned Keele Valley landfill just outside city borders. Recycling was viewed as a pleasant personal virtue, not a serious alternative to trash disposal.

And Toronto’s few strong efforts were thrown back in the City’s face. A few years earlier, the City adopted a municipal Bottle Bill, forcing retailers to collect and redeem a deposit on pop and drink container sales within the City. The law, however, was fiercely opposed by the soft drink industry, and promptly overturned by the pro-business, Conservative provincial government.

But cheap disposal was not going to last forever. However, Keele Valley was slated to close in 2002, and Toronto Works officials knew they’d soon need to find a new place to send more than one million tons of waste generated by City residents every year. They also knew it wouldn’t be cheap. The interim Michigan plan would buy them one or two extra years while they worked on a long-term solution. The City’s leading environmental organization, the Toronto Environmental Alliance, teamed up with the city employees’ union and proposed an ambitious plan to raise diversion rates to 75%, but the plan fell on deaf ears. All signs pointed north to Adams Mine, and recycling wasn’t on the road map.

In October 2000, the Toronto City Council voted for the Adams Mine, and the resulting firestorm of criticism may have changed Toronto’s environmental politics forever. The Kirkland Lake activists brought hundreds of protesters 300 miles to Toronto, led protests, and disrupted Council meetings. The City had never before seen this level of outrage over an environmental issue.

In the November municipal elections, environmentalists targeted Mine proponents for defeat, and trash became the election’s number one issue. According to city political reporter Charles Angus, the garbage debate became "the most raucous debate in the history of the City and spelled the kiss of death to some of Mayor Lastman’s most favored councilors (including Works Chair Bill Saundercook)."

Lastman quickly re-calibrated his position, and persuaded the City to back out of its commitment to McGuinty. In February the Council voted overwhelmingly to abandon the Mine proposal for good. Unfortunately, the next leading option was southeast Michigan.

But Jeff Surfus, NO Waste, and the Ecology Center refused to make this easy. In the intervening four years since Surfus first awoke to the waste import problem, NO Waste had given dozens of radio, print, and television interviews, helped draft new state and federal legislative proposals to restrict waste flow, and organized public protest against the Toronto trash plans. In October 1997, the anti-trash campaign delivered several thousand protest letters to then-Mayor Barbara Hall and her challenger Lastman.

As the long-term disposal decision loomed last fall, NO Waste and the Ecology Center began to mobilize. In October 2000, a protest at the Ambassador Bridge generated widespread media attention. Michigan Democrats proposed legislative fixes, but Governor John Engler put off calls for action, claiming his hands were tied without federal enabling legislation. By failing to show a unified front, Michigan gave Toronto the impression that their trash wasn’t unwelcome, and the City approved a contract with Arizona-based Republic Industries to ship all of its trash to Republic’s mega-landfill in Wayne County’s Sumpter Township.

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Toward a Waste-Free Washtenaw

Ecology Center and Recycle Ann Arbor Propose Ambitious Plan

On May 23, the Ecology Center and Recycle Ann Arbor (RAA) released a five-point proposal to dramatically increase recycling rates in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County. Unveiled at RAA’s annual meeting, the plan would increase Ann Arbor’s already impressive 50% recovery rate by half in five years, and would increase the County’s 34% rate by an even larger amount. The following measures are the first steps to lead the region toward a waste-free future.

1. The City of Ann Arbor should approve its new draft solid waste plan, and then move promptly to implement it. The draft contains 11 specific recommendations regarding enforcement of the City’s recycling ordinance, expansion of fee-for-service programs, and other measures.

2. Ann Arbor should install a comprehensive and convenient recycling collection program for all businesses in the City. The City would provide all business locations with rolling curbcarts or dumpsters for recyclables, collect materials as frequently as needed, and promote the service widely.

3. Ann Arbor should implement a full-scale organics collection program for residents and businesses. The program can be started with an expanded pilot program collecting vegetative waste from local restaurants and University of Michigan dining facilities.

4. Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Ypsilanti Township, Pittsfield Township, Scio Township, and Ann Arbor Township should explore intergovernmental recycling and composting programs to improve service and reduce cost. All of the major municipalities outside Ann Arbor have recycling rates below 20%, and they are likely to receive better services at lower cost if they jointed together to provide (or contract) services jointly.

5. Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County should embrace "zero waste" as a guiding principle for their solid waste services.

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NO Waste and the Ecology Center re-doubled their effort. In March, Surfus, Michigan Environmental Council staffer James Clift, and the author testified before Toronto’s Works Committee. We argued that Toronto’s trash was not only unwelcome, but that long-distance shipment to Michigan was financially, environmentally, and politically unwise. We were joined by southwest Ontario Mayors who objected to scores of Toronto trash trucks rumbling through their cities en route to the U.S. Instead of reopening the Adams Mine proposal, however, we suggested that the City invest more heavily in expanded recycling and composting programs. While we might have been politely ignored one year earlier, City Councilors listened closely this time. The two delegations’ visits were widely reported in the Toronto press. The politics of garbage had undergone a sea change since the election, and the pro-recycling message was beginning to make headway.

Eyeing a unique opportunity, Toronto environmentalists made a dramatic play. In behind-the-scenes discussions with City leaders, they proposed that the City adopt a "zero waste" plan that would strive to eliminate ALL of Toronto’s garbage in ten years. Inspired by similar commitments in Australia and New Zealand, and by a growing grassroots zero waste movement in North America (see FTGU, June/July 2001), they argued that Toronto should become the world’s environmental leader in handling trash.

Their vision was compelling enough to interest Lastman and Works Committee Chair Betty Disero, who ordered a report investigating the zero waste option. In June, the Toronto City Council approved a remarkable ten-year plan to eliminate all of the city’s waste.

"The zero waste presentations were very well received," said Jed Goldberg, President of Earth Day Canada and one of the plan’s leading promoters. "We are pleased with the report."

The Waste Diversion Task Force 2010 Report outlines eight major steps to approach zero waste — source-separated organics collection, a "take it back" program, new and emerging technologies, improvements to the current curbside recycling service, a "depot" program for reusable materials, home and garden composting, leaf and yard residuals, and bag limits.

The critical first step is the "organics" collection program, which comes up for funding in September. If approved, the City would expand its anaerobic composting facility, purchase new yard waste collection trucks, and distribute hundreds of thousands of animal-proof containers for household food waste and other compostable material, including non-recyclable paper products. City trucks would collect compostables every week. Refuse and recyclables would be collected on alternate weeks. Organic waste makes up a huge portion of the total waste stream, possibly as much as 40% of the total.

"We’re quite excited that the City is going to curbside pick-up [of organics]," said Shelly Petrie, Acting Executive Director of the Toronto Environmental Alliance. "For the first time in recent history, the City is on the right track. It’s just wait and see if they’ll spend the up-front dollars that the program needs."

And that is the key question. Toronto trash officials project that a full-scale organics program will cost the City roughly as much as sending their trash to Michigan, but they’ll need to find start-up cash for their facility, trucks, and containers, at a time when the City is coping with $300 million in budget cutbacks. In September, the City Council will vote on a $25 million appropriation to start up the organics program. Petrie calls the organics program "the shining light" of the ten-year plan.

The other major short-term initiative is a "Take It Back" program, modeled on a precedent-setting private sector effort in the Ottawa region. In the Ottawa program, residents can drop off certain types of household hazardous waste, such as leftover paint or used oil and needles, at hardware stores, gas stations, pharmacies, etc. The cost of collecting and disposing or recycling materials is paid by the retailer, except in the case of latex paint, which the City collects from retailers and redistributes through a paint exchange program. Residents find out about participating retailers through a Directory of Take It Back Products, which are distributed free of charge by the local newspaper.

Toronto has commissioned Earth Day Canada and Toronto Environmental Alliance to develop its Take It Back program. While the initiative will not divert a large amount of resources, it will make the three collected "streams" of materials (organics, recyclables, and "residuals") far cleaner than they would otherwise be.

Toronto environmentalists haven’t declared victory yet, but they’re more optimistic about their prospects than ever before. In fact, they’re somewhat startled by their recent successes. Concerns over the trash shipments to Michigan "are still an issue with City elected officials," says Petrie. And the zero waste plan is "one of the last things that Mel Lastman wants to accomplish before his term ends next year."

If Toronto does move forward as planned, everyone (except Gordon McGuinty and Republic Industries) will be smiling. Jeff Surfus now works for Clean Water Action of Michigan, and he still fights the waste wars. He says he’s glad Toronto "realized it’s wrong to put garbage on people who can’t do something about it. Their plan is a great turn of events, and I’m happy we might have had something to do with it, if indeed they do make it happen."

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