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It’s been a bad few weeks for West Quebec’s landfills. First came the province’s BAPE agency decision, Sept. 27, that the Danford Lake massive engineered landfill project should not be approved. The Bureau des audiences publics sur l’environnement summed up its hearings with solid negatives in terms of long-term supply planning, environmental effects, road damage, repairing leaks, and public acceptance.
Next came the Quebec Administrative Tribunal’s upholding of the closure order for the Cantley Dry Materials Dump, Oct. 16. The tribunal was ruling on the dump company’s appeal to overturn a shutdown order by the Quebec Ministry of the Environment this summer for repeated code violations and failure to comply with repair orders.
The third strike against old-fashioned dumps as solutions to waste management was the re-enforcement by both bodies of the policy that garbage should be handled where it is produced, that garbage must have its recyclables and compostables separated out, and that we citizens must look at reducing our obscene obsession (not their words) with buying and consuming. Most of us would mutter an “amen.”
Except that there is no “amen” on the horizon. There’s no closure at all.
For those of us living in the rural areas and disgusted with the acrid smoke floating across many of our towns from the illegal, but accepted, night-time burning of garbage in municipal dumps, closing off what was to be a regional “engineered landfill” means we may be stuck with local, inadequately regulated dumps much longer. And that’s the puzzle for the whole region, from Gatineau’s city streets to the rural lanes: what do we do with our garbage now?
Gatineau and a few towns are trucking their waste to Lachute, which has one of the largest dumps in Quebec. The province has ruled that local open-pit dumps must close and also that no matter where it’s going, all garbage has to be reduced in volume. Quebec wants garbage mining, more recycling, and the removal and composting of organic materials. This is progress for environmentalists and it has generated much enthusiasm. The town of Huntington, for example, is about to legislate the end of plastic bags – no more plastic grocery and shopping bags, not even the plastic ad-bags we find thrust upon our door knobs.
This is all very exciting, for at least 10 minutes. While we feel exhilarated with these environmental measures, almost no one has any idea what the next steps will be. This is where exhilaration can turn to depression.
Consider that municipalities including the City of Gatineau must reduce the volume of material going to landfills by 60 per cent by 2009, yet current recycling is not growing. In fact in Gatineau, it’s declining slightly. Gatineau’s ham-handed attempt to impose a composting facility on north Aylmer has been withdrawn, leaving the city with no composting capacity within its boundaries (which is what a strict reading of the law requires). Gatineau residents, suffering from complicated pick-up schedules and complicated rules of what’s admissible for recycling or not, are already finding recycling a chore. Will they be agreeable to even more separating and another pick-up schedule for their organic, compostible wastes? Don’t bet on it.
In the rural towns, just getting a recycling program up has been a challenge. Who will organize and pay for a composting program? It is looking more likely that old-fashioned backyard composing is the most efficient way to deal with organic wastes.
The dry materials dump is closed, but what will replace it? Construction is a growth industry, and even if recyclable materials are sorted out, who is going to recycle them? This might be a boon for Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores, but there’s an unaddressed question of volume here. Who will re-use recycled building materials in such volumes? All the homebuilders with pictures of old-growth forests on their ads and street signs? There’s hardly a recycled nail or piece of plywood in an entire subdivision now.
The Danford Lake project is still a part of the region’s waste management plan. BAPE recommendations have been over-ruled before. The construction industry is using its substantial political clout to get the Cantley dry dump re-opened. Gatineau announced last week it will not meet its 2009 waste-reduction targets. The Outaouais is a long way from any “amen” on the dump and garbage issue.
Fred Ryan is the publisher of the Aylmer Bulletin, the West Quebec Post and the Pontiac Journal.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007