The collapse of the contract between the city and Plasco Energy Group is a disappointment, because this was a promising Ottawa company and the solution it offered for getting rid of garbage was just what Ottawa needed.
The Plasco deal didn’t work out, but the city was correct to give the company a chance to show what it could do. If Canadians don’t support their own tech companies, who will? The deal was also structured in such a way that the cost and the risk were on Plasco’s side. All the city lost by giving Plasco a chance was some time.
Now comes the hard part. A new long-term solution to garbage disposal has to take into account politics, cost, and passionately-held beliefs about the environment that aren’t always based on reality. Those three factors are entwined in a way that makes the rational path hard to find.
Landfill location is a political issue, primarily. Although disposal of garbage is often portrayed as an environmental issue, the environmental effects are localized to the landfill site itself. There is nothing wrong with landfill, in the right place, but some politicians wrongly decry it as “burying garbage in a hole.” Mayor Jim Watson did it just this week. With its liners, covers and gas-to-energy technology, a modern landfill is far from that.
Ottawa has more rural land within its boundaries than any other city, so it’s entirely possible to find a new landfill location, but politicians won’t do it because of the predictable local protests.
Split responsibility for garbage also complicates the politics. The provincial government is responsible for rules governing business and institutional garbage, which makes up 70 per cent of the total. The city has no say over that, and it’s why the Waste Management site on Carp Road is being expanded. Despite its dislike for landfill, the city is allowing Kanata and Stittsville development to creep ever closer to the landfill. Probably not a smart decision.
After Plasco, Ottawa will not choose another experimental technology. The only real alternative is incineration, but it’s costly. A new city report estimates incineration will cost $140 to $150 a tonne. We pay about $65 a tonne for landfill now.
Clearly, incineration would boost your taxes considerably, and there is another consideration, too. An incinerator is only commercially viable if there is a large enough garbage volume to justify the capital cost. For Ottawa, that would mean burning both residential and commercial garbage.
Unless government steps in to prevent it, businesses will send their garbage to the cheapest disposal site. That’s why most of Ottawa’s garbage has been shipped out of town for the last several years, since Waste Management closed its Carp Road site.
While common in the U.S. and Europe, incineration is not the norm here. Expect any incineration plan to generate opposition from people who wrongly believe that incinerators load the air with toxins.
But what about recycling?
The city recycling program is a feel good thing for homeowners, but it’s expensive to run and there isn’t a strong market for a lot of the stuff we drag to the curb. Rationally, most of it should probably be incinerated but that won’t sit well with the public, who have been conditioned to believe that recycling has huge environmental payoffs.
Recycling is never going to be a garbage solution. All it does is extend the life of existing landfills by reducing the volume of material we send there.
It’s expensive, too. Diverting garbage cost $218 a tonne in Ottawa in 2013, far more than either landfill or recycling. If the city does choose incineration, it will be difficult to justify the cost of recycling programs.
So, not an easy problem for city councillors. They will have to be sharper than they were when they approved our expensive and ineffective green bin program.
The Plasco plan promised to make garbage disappear, as if by magic, on a site the city already owned, without emissions. It really doesn’t get any better than that, as we are all about to discover.
Randall Denley is a strategic communications consultant and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com
