BODY:
Growing up in a small town in Northern Ontario, I have always had a healthy skepticism of our provincial capital.
Toronto's refusal to accept responsibility for its own garbage, however, goes far beyond big-city arrogance. And the fact that the people of Kirkland Lake no longer have to face the prospect of playing host to the Big Smoke's excreta changes little.
Why should someone who now lives thousands of kilometres away in Vancouver care who gets to clean up Toronto's messes? Because, like so many environmental issues, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Maybe if Toronto's political overlords knew what was going on elsewhere in North America, and engaged in a little speculative extrapolation, they wouldn't have been so keen on sending all their municipal waste a few hundred kilometres north, to the hole that was once the Adams Mine, on the edge of Ontario's hinterland.
Or they could have paid attention to the plan's opponents, who pointed out that safe disposal at the abandoned pit would require "complete dependence (on) man-made mechanical devices (pumps and piping systems) to operate flawlessly for a period of over 100 years, under extremely harsh conditions."
They even could have listened to one of the continent's largest garbage contractors, BFI, which rejected the whole idea as technically and economically unfeasible.
Environmental liability
But they didn't. Some of the city's more antediluvian councillors are still insisting Kirkland Lake is best place for TO's trash. Apparently, when Rail Cycle North backed out at the last minute in understandable fear that future changes in environmental rules would make the contract a money-loser, nothing was learned.
Instead, Toronto is now set to disgorge its annual output of one million tonnes of municipal waste even further away, this time in Michigan, which is rapidly earning a reputation as America's dumping ground.
The decision reeks of stupidity, and I can smell it all the way out here on the Pacific coast.
It's disgusting, but not surprising. Cities all over North America are running out of landfill space, and more and more, they are shipping their garbage far, far away, to the lowest bidder, many of whom are impoverished municipalities and First Nations with few real options in the matter.
Trash is crossing state, provincial and international borders with increasingly regularity. Just ask the Mexicans unfortunate enough to live close to Texas. Or the Goshute Indians of Utah, whose land is being converted into a dump for 40,000 tonnes of highly radioactive nuclear fuel.
Missed opportunity
The real irony is Canada in general and, to a lesser extent, Toronto, are actually making decent strides toward waste reduction and so eliminating the need to export the stuff.
The National Packaging Protocol, which negotiated voluntary reductions in the stuff we wrap things in, met its goal of diverting half of all packaging from landfills in 1996, four years ahead of schedule.
Canada, while usually not considered a recycling champion, stacked up favorably in a 1998 14-nation survey commissioned buy the British government, with a 29 per cent recycling rate. Only Finland topped us, at 30 per cent.
Depending how you count it, Toronto manages to divert between 25 and 48 per cent of its municipal waste. That's a respectful rate, although Edmonton, Halifax and several other cities are doing much better, with rates closer to 70 per cent.
The point is, exporting waste, whether across national or municipal borders, carries too high a price tag for any rational citizen to condone it. And you don't have to be a sanitation engineer to figure out why.
The alternatives are obvious: taxes that encourage more aggressive recycling programs, more packaging reductions ... all the things that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth harp on about all the time.
Don't let anyone tell you we don't have the technology. We do.
What's still missing in Toronto is a new attitude, a new ethic, toward trash, one that recognizes the link between excess waste and excess consumption.
It's like the old camper's adage about packing it in and packing it out. In theory, if you aren't allowed to pack it out, then maybe you'll learn not to pack it in.
Of course, if anyone in Toronto or anywhere else can make a good case why they shouldn't have to clean up their own mess, I'd love to hear it.
Related sites:
The right approach: Edmonton
The scoop on Toronto's trash situation
A scholarly look at continental trends
The industry's point of view