When a city lacks clear direction and an administration is concerned only about a few high-profile issues, progress stops on a lot of projects – especially those the mayor is not interested in.
Count recycling efforts in this category.
Currently, the city is stuck at a 47 per cent diversion rate – meaning more than half of all trash heads to the dump instead of being recycled or composted. We’ve been stalled for several years at this level, far from the council-set goal of 70 per cent.
And now, deputy mayor Doug Holyday is talking about removing the objective from the list of council priorities. Whether he can deliver on that threat is iffy, given the mayor’s recent defeats.
What would it take to achieve 70 per cent diversion? The primary objective is to reduce total waste produced. To this end, the city could push the province to impose extended producer responsibility, like in Europe. This means producers of products would have to coordinate proper disposal and pay all associated costs, a great encourager of manufacturing recyclable objects.
The province could also get tough on industrial, commercial and institutional waste. Stunningly, this makes up 50 per cent of our garbage, and includes trash from offices, factories, fast food joints and restaurants. This sector is almost entirely handled by private waste haulers and has a very low recycling rate because provincial laws are not enforced.
The easiest, albeit rather expensive, way to raise diversion levels would be to follow Halifax and Edmonton in buying a state-of-the-art trash sorting plant. An operation like this, which would cost about $250 million, uses magnets and gravity as well as computerized optical sorters to separate out missed recyclables and compostables.
This would allow the city to run garbage bags through a process that removes materials people neglected to recycle, finding every last pop can, scrap of paper or compostable tissue. The process ends by sucking the moisture out of trash, turning it into a fluffy, dry, inert substance so there is no leachate in the landfill.
It’s estimated that this process would ultimately boost our diversion rate by 8 per cent.
Of highest priority is upping recycling in multi-family buildings, which have a diversion rate of only 18 per cent compared to 63 per cent in single-family houses. Only 100,000 condos and apartments out of a possible 500,000, approximately, have a green bin option at this point. Expanding that program would bring in an additional 75,000 tons of compostable material.
It wouldn’t come cheap, however. Green bin processing costs twice as much as landfilling, or around $140 per ton versus $70, but it would add another 4 to 5 per cent to our diversion total. With the 8 per cent from mechanical sorting above, we’d be near 60 per cent.
Toronto currently operates several mechanical facilities to sort the hundreds of thousands of tons of recycling collected every year. Another upgrade option would be to retrofit these plants with new tech like optical scanners to better process plastics and coloured glass.
Today, most of the glass is crushed, ground up for asphalt or fibreglass and not recycled because it can’t be adequately separated, limiting its reuse options. In addition, the various kinds of plastics aren’t properly sorted, so there is a risk that as the list of recyclable plastics expands, some of it could end up exported to China, where it’s often burned instead of repurposed.
Adding new sorters alone would up our rate another 1 to 3 per cent.
To reach the 70 per cent target, the city needs to do more education about existing curbside collection of used electronics, mattresses and furniture and depots for household hazardous waste, and make provisions to expand service as volume increases.
The good news is that Environment Days were saved in this year’s budget, meaning there is a place to take used articles and hazardous waste. But you need a car to get to most of the city-operated recycling depots that take toxins and construction waste, and their hours are limited. The city needs to invest in a slew of local drop-offs.
Reducing, reusing and recycling are good environmental principles to live by, but there are also huge financial rewards. If we can attain a 70 per cent diversion rate, the city-owned Green Lane landfill site in Elgin County, purchased for $250 million dollars in 2008, can be used for another 20 years.
(The cost of disposing waste there, amortized purchase price and operating factors, is close to $70 per tonne, less than at other landfills.)
But if we can reach 90 per cent diversion, the site could be used perpetually, in the sense that the rate at which we add garbage to it would be equal to or less than its decomposition and settling rate. We’d never run out of space – or not for a very long time.
With the cost of landfill expected to more than triple over the next 20 to 30 years, it makes good financial sense to extend recycling and hence the use of our site. At the same time, we’d be putting Toronto on a sustainable path.
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