C M Y K A8
A8 ■ Saturday, January 16, 2010 ■ THE LONDON FREE PRESS
We’re
back
of the
pack
10
20
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50
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100
MIKE HENSEN The London Free Press
Queen’s Park has set a target of 60% waste
diversion from landfill sites. London is at 41%.
SOLID WASTE
Municipal target No. 1
While pollution can strike land, water or air, city halls in
Ontario have more sway over solid waste than they do
over other pollutants, observers say.
More than half the air pollutants we breathe in London
are produced in the United States. Another big segment
comes from other places in Ontario and the remainder,
while produced here, largely falls outside the power of
cities to regulate — city hall can’t force someone to walk
to work rather than drive an SUV.
The Thames River already is polluted from farm runoff
when it enters our borders.
But when it comes to what we throw out in the trash,
cities have a tool box that affects what homebuyers
re-use, recycle and trash.
From bag tags that cost as much as $2.25 to a con-
tainer limit of one, some cities are giving residents
financial and practical incentives to reduce their trash,
and with green bins for kitchen scraps, they’re providing
an alternative to landfills.
Trash talk tainted
Diversion rates published by cities across Ontario bury
one important caveat — the figures exclude waste
produced by the biggest producers of trash.
Cities track how much household waste they divert
from landfills and Queen’s Park has set a target of 60%.
But there is no such scrutiny or targets for big industry
and business, a lacking highlighted a few months ago by
Ontario Environment Minister John Gerretsen.
“We are better with our home-generated waste, divert-
ing about 39%. But at our places of work and play, we
only divert about 12%, and that rate appears to be drop-
ping instead of going up,” he wrote.
That means only 22% of Ontario’s waste is being
diverted from the dump, a figure that is tripled by
Austria, Belgium, Germany and Sweden.
In response to tougher European recycling rules,
Coca-Cola reduced the weight of its drink cans by 5%,
saving as much as 15,000 tonnes of packaging a year.
specialreport
There’s no gentle way to put it:
Compared with how other cities keep a lid
on the amount of garbage that goes
to their landfills, London’s efforts stink,
this report by Free Press reporter
Jonathan Sher shows.
An embarrassment.
That’s how Controller Gina Barber feels about
London’s four-container limit on household trash.
Some cities in Ontario push residents to reduce
their trash toll with user fees — Stratford charges
$2.10 a bag, a fee that goes up to $2.25 next month.
Jonathan Sher
Some impose tough bag limits — starting in
April, Hamiltonians will be able to get one con-
tainer picked up weekly. And every big city except
London and Windsor has rolled out green bins for
table scraps so they don’t end up in a landfill.
“It’s an embarrassment, quite frankly, to have a
four-bag limit,” Barber says.
The lack of a green bin program, user fees or
tougher bag limits go a long way to explain why
London has fared badly compared to others when
it comes to diverting waste from the dump.
In 2008, the most recent year for which data of
waste diversion was collected, London ranked
10th of 12 larger urban centres, with only 41% of its
household waste directed away from the landfill.
Only Windsor and Ottawa fared worse and the
latter has done something about it, distributing
240,000 green bins the last few months of 2009.
That poor ranking will be a talking point Monday
when council debates whether to spend $100,000
this year to do a pilot green bin program that would
include 750 homes. That spending would be the tip
of the trash pile — full implementation would cost
London taxpayers $6.7 million in capital costs and
ongoing annual expenses of $5.5 million.
But the benefit would be large as well, says the
city’s environment head, Jay Stanford, who projects
a green bin program in London would boost diver-
sion rates here between 10% and 15%.
The expected payoff has been worth it to all major
Ontario cities except London and Windsor.
It’s not the first time London has been at the back
of the line. In 1990, London became the last major
Ontario city to roll out a blue-box program with an
effort that accepted glass, newsprint, two-litre soft-
drink containers and metal and aluminum cans.
Since Stanford assumed a leadership role, he has
pushed to be at the forefront of change rather than
bringing up the rear — London now has the second
most aggressive anti-idling bylaw in Ontario, for
example. It was he who introduced a four-bag limit
where there had been none and he sees the limit
as a stepping stone to more aggressive efforts, with
lower bag limits and user fees.
“Wouldn’t the next logical step be a lower (bag)
limit with a $1-a-bag charge above the limit?” he
said.
Eighteen years after blue boxes were introduced
to London, while the scope of what’s recycled has
broadened, Londoners still put a lot of recyclables
in the trash can — 41%, provincial tracking shows. MIKE HENSEN The London Free Press
While that’s better than the regional average, it Various varieties of green boxes have been looked at as part of London’s recycling program for organic
trails local leaders like Stratford and Thames Cen- wastes.
tre, where only 27% of recyclables are thrown out.
Neither Stratford nor Thames Centre has green
bins —the program has been used only by bigger
cities with deeper pockets. But both have turned to
user fees to make it costly to use garbage bags.
Thames Centre provides property owners with 45
bag tags annually but extra tags cost $2.50 each. In
Stratford, there are no free bags and the imposition
of the charge in 1997 produced monumental results.
The amount of waste dropped 35% and recyclables
increased 62% — all in the first year.
That’s not the only tool being considered — some
Ontario cities are considering requiring the use of
clear garbage bags so collectors can reject those
with recyclables visible inside.
Neither approach is near the top of the agenda at
London city hall, where the immediate focus is on
getting green bins.
But Stanford is monitoring how user fees in
Toronto and a single-container limit in Hamilton
roll out.
“Toronto and Hamilton — those two are defin-
itely the leaders,” he said.
jonathan.sher@sunmedia.ca