Tag: eco-friendly

Res­id­ents seek answers after new recyc­ling sys­tem’s bumpy start

This article was written by David Rider and was published in the Toronto Star on January 5, 2026.

A key fig­ure in Ontario’s recyc­ling trans­ition says the new sys­tem has been set up in a need­lessly bur­eau­cratic way.

Allen Lang­don, chief exec­ut­ive of Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als — the pack­aging industry’s non­profit that has taken over recyc­ling from muni­cip­al­it­ies as of Jan. 1 — told the Star that, in the years ahead, the province should move to a model that looks more like Brit­ish Columbia’s highly regarded pro­gram. Oth­ers, mean­while, are point­ing the fin­ger back at Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als itself, say­ing the industry­friendly organ­iz­a­tion has slowed pro­gress and will be the face of a rol­lout they expect to be a “dis­aster.”

Lang­don knows the B.C. model. Years before he was hired by Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als he helped set up North Amer­ica’s first “exten­ded pro­du­cer respons­ib­il­ity” regime in that west­ern province, one that is still con­sidered, more than a dec­ade later, a gold stand­ard for the recyc­ling industry.

It’s too late to stream­line Ontario’s sys­tem as muni­cip­al­it­ies handed off blue­box respons­ib­il­it­ies to Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als, fun­ders of which include Loblaw, Costco, Coca­Cola and Keurig Dr Pep­per Canada, on New Year’s Day — “that ship has sailed,” Lang­don told the Star in an inter­view. But he’s hope­ful that, down the road, this province will adopt policies and prac­tices road­tested in B.C.

“Ontario’s sys­tem has cre­ated com­plex­it­ies and added admin­is­trat­ive bur­den, rather than the flex­ible approach B.C. took of con­tinu­ous improve­ment over a num­ber of years and sev­eral plans,” said Lang­don, who also over­sees Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als oper­a­tions in Alberta, Nova Sco­tia, New Brun­swick and Yukon. From 2013 to 2018, he was man­aging dir­ector for Recycle B.C.

“Sim­pli­fy­ing Ontario’s sys­tem would make it cheaper, more flex­ible and more respons­ive.”

Lang­don said he doesn’t know why the Ford gov­ern­ment craf­ted a made­in­Ontario plan rather than fol­low B.C.’s example, adding, “They could have asked me, or oth­ers. I have no idea why they didn’t.”

A lack of flex­ib­il­ity

Ontario’s reg­u­la­tions are “hard­wired” into legis­la­tion and dif­fi­cult to change, Lang­don said, com­pared with B.C.’s more flex­ible launch that allowed some muni­cip­al­it­ies to stick with their own pro­grams until they felt com­fort­able switch­ing to the industry­run sys­tem.

Ontario cre­ated the Resource

Pro­ductiv­ity and Recov­ery Author­ity (RPRA) to reg­u­late and enforce the province’s “cir­cu­lar eco­nomy” laws, report­ing to the envir­on­ment min­is­ter. B.C. recyclers deal dir­ectly with Envir­on­ment Min­istry offi­cials, devel­op­ing five­year road maps for sys­tem improve­ment agreed upon by the province, industry and muni­cip­al­it­ies. Recyclers risk min­istry fines if they break the rules.

B.C. also has one “pro­du­cer respons­ib­il­ity organ­iz­a­tion” (PRO), a col­lect­ive of industry part­ners, per type of mater­ial col­lec­ted. Ontario has mul­tiple PROs per col­lec­ted mater­ial, some­times mak­ing dif­fer­ent decisions, as seen in Ontario’s troubled tire recyc­ling pro­gram.

He said Ontari­ans should see a mostly seam­less trans­ition with an expan­ded list of recyc­lables includ­ing black plastics, hot drink con­tain­ers, tooth­paste tubes and ice cream tubs. It’s industry that must grapple with extra cost and red tape, he added.

Some envir­on­ment­al­ists, however, are point­ing the fin­ger at Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als and its waste­pro­du­cing mem­bers for Ontario’s trouble­some trans­ition to date and poten­tial prob­lems ahead.

A con­tam­in­ated pro­cess?

The Ford gov­ern­ment announced in 2021 that cor­por­a­tions mak­ing pack­aging waste would, over three years start­ing in 2023, fully assume the oper­a­tions and cost of recyc­ling from the muni­cipal patch­work of sys­tems and ser­vices partly fun­ded by industry.

Ontario’s then­envir­on­ment min­is­ter Jeff Yurek pre­dicted the switch would see more mater­ial recycled rather than go to land­fill. About half of the waste cur­rently col­lec­ted by the city goes to land­fill. Toronto offi­cials at the time fore­cast annual sav­ings of $15 mil­lion for the cash­strapped city, thanks to not hav­ing to col­lect and/or pro­cess blue bin con­tents as well as other recyc­lables, includ­ing haz­ard­ous waste such as paint and bat­ter­ies.

Early on, however, recyc­ling experts called the province’s plan a made­in­Ontario mish­mash so inde­cipher­able they doubted the trans­ition could launch in 2023. The Ford gov­ern­ment tabled reforms but con­tro­versy and policy reversals con­tin­ued.

Last June, the Envir­on­ment Min­istry pro­posed killing its plan to add blue box recyc­ling to apart­ments, con­dos, long­term­care and retire­ment homes that pre­vi­ously had private pickup. It also pro­posed a five­year delay in for­cing waste pro­du­cers to recycle mater­i­als from recept­acles in pub­lic spaces.

The Ford gov­ern­ment said it needed to reduce the bur­den on industry. Muni­cipal offi­cials pre­dicted an ava­lanche of extra waste to land­fill.

Final reg­u­la­tions pub­lished in Septem­ber delay by five years — rather than can­cel — require­ments to expand blue box into multi­res­id­en­tial build­ings not cur­rently in the muni­cipal recyc­ling sys­tem. Also, a much­cri­ti­cized pro­posal to sus­pend some of industry’s recyc­ling tar­gets for five years was reduced to a two­year grace period for waste pro­du­cers to make “best efforts” to hit tar­gets before facing poten­tial fines.

The Ford gov­ern­ment stuck to its plan, however, to relieve pro­du­cers of respons­ib­il­ity for pub­lic­space recyc­ling col­lec­tion and pro­cessing, put­ting the cost on muni­cip­al­it­ies, includ­ing Toronto, which now expects to annu­ally save only $10 mil­lion from the recyc­ling trans­ition.

Ontario reduces its tar­gets

Emily Alfred, a senior cam­paigner at Toronto Envir­on­mental Alli­ance, told the Star that adopt­ing B.C. recyc­ling prac­tices won’t fix an Ontario sys­tem head­ing for major waste woes.

Ontario muni­cip­al­it­ies are push­ing to accel­er­ate and expand the recyc­ling trans­ition, she said in an email, while “Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als, along with pro­du­cers, have done a lot of advocacy to nar­row the scope and slow down Ontario’s reg­u­la­tions, which is the main cause of the prob­lems, along with ongo­ing changes that have made it impossible for muni­cip­al­it­ies to plan.”

Res­id­ents are learn­ing what they can put in their bin and who is pick­ing it up, Alfred said, “but the big­ger issue is that this is part of a sys­tem­atic erosion of recyc­ling and all waste pro­grams in Ontario.

“We’re expect­ing the new blue box sys­tem in Ontario is going to be a dis­aster.”

Alfred poin­ted to the province redu­cing its ini­tial recyc­ling tar­gets and allow­ing pro­du­cers to count the incin­er­a­tion of some mater­i­als toward 15 per cent of recyc­ling tar­gets.

Ash­ley Wal­lis, asso­ciate dir­ector of Envir­on­mental Defence, said there are draw­backs to the B.C. sys­tem com­pared to Ontario’s — if the new sys­tem is allowed to oper­ate prop­erly.

Hav­ing the RPRA as an arm’slength enforce­ment agency is import­ant to ensur­ing impar­ti­al­ity, as opposed to B.C.’s stream­lined sys­tem that makes the envir­on­ment min­is­ter “com­pli­cit in the pro­du­cers’ approach,” she said in an email.

Prep­ping for the switch

Even though they’ve stopped being respons­ible for recyc­ling, local gov­ern­ments expect to get an ear­ful from res­id­ents if things go wrong.

Toronto offi­cials recently urged people to not call 311 if they have a blue bin prob­lem, instead to reach out to Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als, which will have a cus­tomer ser­vice line open only week­days and not all day, with after­hours callers being invited to leave a mes­sage.

One poten­tial point of con­fu­sion is the recyc­ling col­lec­tion sched­ule. Curb­side col­lec­tion days remain the same in Toronto, Wed­nes­day or Thursday, depend­ing on where you live.

However some res­id­ents in the old City of Toronto will see a switch in the altern­at­ing order of recyc­ling and garbage pickup. Affected res­id­ents received notices of the change, which is also on the city’s web­site.

The city says it has been work­ing with Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als since 2023 to make the switch as pain­less as pos­sible, while not­ing “ser­vice gaps,” such as the city hav­ing to pick up recyc­lables from park bins and the delay in ser­vi­cing all multi­res­id­en­tial build­ings.

“The city is work­ing to fill these gaps, where pos­sible, so recyc­ling access and cus­tomer ser­vice remains strong,” said city spokes­per­son Krys­tal Carter.

Aurora was among muni­cip­al­it­ies to com­plain when res­id­ents were told they had to take hulk­ing 95gal­lon recyc­ling bins.

Mayor Tom Mra­kas said they have since been offered 65­gal­lon bins, but those are still dif­fi­cult for some people to handle. Mra­kas also said local gov­ern­ments have had to solve such prob­lems and shoulder the task of keep­ing res­id­ents informed.

“A stronger and earlier com­mu­nic­a­tions effort by Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als would have gone a long way in eas­ing this trans­ition for res­id­ents,” Mra­kas said, adding that the Ford gov­ern­ment has been recept­ive and respons­ive to his feed­back.

Gary Wheeler, a spokes­per­son for Ontario Envir­on­ment Min­is­ter Todd McCarthy, said reg­u­la­tions to guide the trans­ition were intro­duced after “extens­ive con­sulta­tion” with muni­cip­al­it­ies and waste pro­du­cers, not­ing that, for the first time, the same recyc­lables will be col­lec­ted provincewide.

Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als will work closely with com­munit­ies to ensure a smooth trans­ition, he said, while the RPRA will “closely mon­itor imple­ment­a­tion to ensure that pro­du­cers ful­fil all reg­u­lated require­ments.”

Used tires could be incin­er­ated after eas­ing of reg­u­la­tions

This article was written by Patty Winsa and was published in the Toronto Star on December 15, 2025.

Ontario’s tire recyc­ling pro­gram has slowed to a crawl fol­low­ing the Ford gov­ern­ment’s decision to lower recyc­ling tar­gets earlier this year.

Thou­sands of old tires are now being stock­piled as organ­iz­a­tions respons­ible for tire recyc­ling meet lower tar­gets and reduce col­lec­tion and recyc­ling oper­a­tions.

Industry experts say the stock­piled tires could soon be sent to the U.S. for incin­er­a­tion, des­pite eco fees that con­sumers pay on tires to ensure they are recycled.

“This is a prob­lem that’s going to abso­lutely hit the con­sumers of Ontario,” said Adam Mof­fatt, exec­ut­ive dir­ector of the Ontario Tire Deal­ers Asso­ci­ation, which rep­res­ents more than 500 tire deal­ers, retail­ers, dis­trib­ut­ors, whole­salers and industry vendors.

More than 80 mem­bers of the asso­ci­ation have com­plained that their used tires aren’t being picked up, said Mof­fatt.

Con­sumers “may be told at some point in time in the com­ing weeks that they can’t drop (tires) off any­more,” said Mof­fatt.

The slow­down is the res­ult of changes made to pro­vin­cial reg­u­la­tions that came into effect in 2019. Those reg­u­la­tions made tire pro­du­cers — com­pan­ies that man­u­fac­ture or sell tires, or products with tires — respons­ible for man­aging tires at the end of their life, repla­cing a mono­poly held by Ontario Tire Stew­ard­ship, a gov­ern­ment agency, for dec­ades.

A num­ber of so­called pro­du­cer respons­ib­il­ity organ­iz­a­tions, or PROs, were set up in the province to man­age recyc­ling for tire com­pan­ies, which can choose which PRO they want to belong to.

The shakeup was inten­ded to pro­mote com­pet­i­tion and effi­ciency in the recyc­ling pro­cess.

But in Janu­ary, the Ford gov­ern­ment changed the reg­u­la­tions, redu­cing the recov­ery tar­get for tires from an 85 per cent col­lec­tion and man­age­ment rate to a 65 per cent man­age­ment rate, which means tire pro­du­cers have to recycle, retread or reuse 65 per cent of the tires, by weight, that they put on the Ontario mar­ket.

Melissa Car­law, vice­pres­id­ent of com­mu­nic­a­tions and sus­tain­ab­il­ity for eTracks Tire Man­age­ment Sys­tems, the largest PRO in Ontario, rep­res­ent­ing 70 to 80 per cent of the mar­ket, said the slow­down star­ted after another PRO that rep­res­en­ted 15 to 20 per cent of the tire industry stopped col­lect­ing tires in late sum­mer.

“Once other PROs met their man­age­ment tar­gets they slowed/stopped,” said Car­law in an email. “This has led to back­logs and they became more than eTracks — or any single PRO — could reas­on­ably absorb.”

Car­law said eTracks is try­ing to pick up the slack but can’t absorb the higher volume of tires that have come into in the mar­ket over the past few months. The non­profit organ­iz­a­tion, foun­ded by the Tire and Rub­ber Asso­ci­ation of Canada, a national trade group, is col­lect­ing any tires that have become prob­lem­atic “as we are noti­fied of them and send­ing them for recyc­ling,” said Car­law.

The pro­vin­cial reg­u­la­tions require PROs to con­tinue pick­ing up tires from gar­ages or auto­body shops, for example, that they have iden­ti­fied as sites in their col­lec­tion sys­tem.

But once a PRO has reached its recyc­ling tar­get, any excess tires from sites out­side its col­lec­tion sys­tem can be incin­er­ated.

The Resource Pro­ductiv­ity and Recov­ery Author­ity (RPRA), the pro­vin­cial agency that over­sees recyc­ling in Ontario, said it is aware of the situ­ation.

“Tire pro­du­cers and their PROs have been reminded that they must con­tinue to col­lect and man­age tires from all col­lec­tion sites that are part of their col­lec­tion sys­tem,” said Wilson Lee, RPRA’s chief of pro­grams and pub­lic affairs, in an email.

“RPRA is act­ively mon­it­or­ing com­pli­ance and will take action if pro­du­cers and PROs fail to col­lect tires from their col­lec­tion sys­tems,” said Lee.

The Min­istry of the Envir­on­ment, Con­ser­va­tion and Parks said in an email that it is work­ing with the author­ity to “address these dis­rup­tions to the col­lec­tion and pro­cessing of end­of­life tires.”

In Novem­ber, the Envir­on­ment Min­istry issued an order to CFT Recyc­ling, a site near Ott­awa, to address com­pli­ance issues related to the stock­pil­ing of tires. The min­istry has stayed the order while it reviews new inform­a­tion from the com­pany. Car­law, of eTracks, said her organ­iz­a­tion is cur­rently haul­ing tires out of the inde­pend­ently oper­ated site, and tak­ing them to a pro­cessor in Brant­ford.

The province has also lowered the num­ber of sites that PROs have to col­lect from in Ontario, from 4,872 to 4,332. In a small town, a PRO could still be required to col­lect from all the gar­ages or tire stores, based on that city’s pop­u­la­tion.

But in Toronto, where there are a myriad of stores that sell tires, or products with tires, a PRO can drop a site once they’ve reached their tar­get.

That means, for example, that a gar­age dropped by a PRO would have to pay to have its used tires hauled away, even if they are registered with that PRO — and even though eco fees, meant to cover recyc­ling costs, have already been paid by the con­sumer.

Before the col­lec­tion tar­gets were lowered by the province, PROs were col­lect­ing from more than 11,000 sites, accord­ing to data from RPRA.

It’s at least the second time that the com­pet­it­ive sys­tem brought in by the province has hit a major hurdle.

In 2023, one PRO col­lec­ted more tires than it needed to meet its oblig­a­tions on behalf of the tire pro­du­cers it worked for. The com­pany essen­tially held cred­its, as in tonnes of tires col­lec­ted, that other PROs needed to meet recyc­ling tar­gets for that year on behalf of their pro­du­cers.

Dozens of com­pan­ies faced poten­tial fines for not meet­ing 2023 tar­gets, but instead of buy­ing the cred­its from the other PRO, which tire pro­du­cers allege were over­priced, the tire pro­du­cers settled with RPRA for $7.44 mil­lion, essen­tially pay­ing the author­ity money that con­sumers had paid to them in eco fees.

Lack of enforce­ment allow­ing some pro­du­cers `to avoid their oblig­a­tions’ to col­lect, recover waste

This article was written by Moira Welsh and was published in the Toronto Star on December 3, 2025.

The organ­iz­a­tion cre­ated to over­see the recyc­ling of tires, bat­ter­ies or elec­tron­ics in Ontario is not provid­ing proper over­sight of “low­pri­or­ity” pro­du­cers — giv­ing “free riders” a pass on enforce­ment, the province’s aud­itor gen­eral has found.

The Resource Pro­ductiv­ity and Recov­ery Author­ity (RPRA), a non­profit cor­por­a­tion that requires pro­du­cers to pay for the recyc­ling of their products, is “not effect­ively enfor­cing regis­tra­tion of smal­ler pro­du­cers, allow­ing some to avoid their oblig­a­tions to col­lect and recover waste,” said the report from aud­itor gen­eral Shel­ley Spence.

By focus­ing its enforce­ment on large pro­du­cers, RPRA allows smal­ler com­pan­ies to avoid over­sight even though “col­lect­ively their sup­ply could add up,” Spence’s report said.

RPRA agreed to the aud­itor gen­eral’s recom­mend­a­tions and said it would develop risk­based tar­gets “for address­ing low­pri­or­ity unre­gistered pro­du­cer cases,” the report said.

RPRA spokes­per­son Wilson Lee said the recom­mend­a­tions mainly focus on “oppor­tun­it­ies to improve our com­pli­ance and enforce­ment approach to small pro­du­cers who pose a low risk to the over­all sys­tem.”

Lee noted that RPRA’s over­sight of large­scale recyc­ling projects was con­sidered effect­ive and said “this approach puts resources where they will have the biggest impact on keep­ing waste out of land­fill and increas­ing resource recov­ery.”

The organ­iz­a­tion also over­sees the blue box pro­gram, but the recyc­ling of paper, plastic and alu­minum were not fully included in the audit due to gov­ern­ment changes, the report noted.

At the heart of the recyc­ling pro­gram — and the reason why fail­ures mat­ter — is the need to keep waste out of land­fills where, the aud­itor said, it risks “harm­ful chem­ical chem­ic­als leak­ing into the sur­round­ing soil or water and wast­ing valu­able mater­i­als that could oth­er­wise be reused.”

A recent report by Waste To Resource Ontario said the province gen­er­ated 16.88 mil­lion tonnes of waste in 2024, with 12.75 mil­lion tonnes taken to land­fills. The aud­itor found a series of over­sight prob­lems, includ­ing smal­ler pro­du­cers who fail to register for the recyc­ling pro­grams, defined by RPRA as “free riders” because they “avoid their oblig­a­tions and costs of col­lect­ing and recov­er­ing their waste.”

As of Dec. 31, 2024, the report said RPRA had poten­tially iden­ti­fied more than 1,800 such cases. Regis­tra­tion enables RPRA to track pro­du­cers’ com­pli­ance with the Resource Recov­ery and Cir­cu­lar Eco­nomy Act, but it was slow to pur­sue” low pro­file cases, the report said.

Data col­lec­tion was another prob­lem, the aud­itor said, lead­ing to com­plic­a­tions for some of the recyc­ling pro­grams.

The pro­du­cers — and the pro­grams that recycle their products — are expec­ted to provide detailed inform­a­tion on mater­i­als col­lec­ted so their per­form­ance can be ana­lyzed.

This was com­plic­ated, the report said, by min­istry changes to recyc­ling reg­u­la­tions.

The aud­itor said the RPRA has not begun to enforce data veri­fic­a­tion on any of its pro­grams except tire recyc­ling.

The Resource Pro­ductiv­ity and Recov­ery Author­ity said it would develop risk­based tar­gets “for address­ing low­pri­or­ity unre­gistered pro­du­cer cases”

This editorial was written and published by the Toronto Star on September 29, 2025.

On paper, it was a great idea: A new recyc­ling sys­tem that uses mar­ket forces to drive down costs and reduce house­hold pack­aging waste. In prac­tice, it has been a colossal let­down, another Ontario envir­on­mental ini­ti­at­ive where the envir­on­mental bene­fits got lost along the way.

On Jan. 1, Ontario’s new Blue Box regime will finally kick in in Toronto. The new sys­tem is the product of more than a dec­ade of plan­ning, lob­by­ing and com­prom­ise. It star­ted from a place of lofty ambi­tions and high ideals. It will end as something closer to a giant waste of every­one’s time.

The ori­ginal idea was solid enough. Make the com­pan­ies that pro­duce pack­aging waste pay to col­lect and recycle that waste. Doing that should cre­ate a fin­an­cial incent­ive for those com­pan­ies to use less pack­aging and to recycle more of the pack­aging they do use.

It’s almost eleg­ant, if it’s done right. Ontario, safe to say, hasn’t done it right.

The new Ontario sys­tem is based on an idea known as Exten­ded Pro­du­cer Respons­ib­il­ity (EPR). For years, Ontario muni­cip­al­it­ies were respons­ible for col­lect­ing and pro­cessing house­hold recyc­lables. The costs for those sys­tems were split between the muni­cip­al­it­ies them­selves and the pro­du­cers — the com­pan­ies that intro­duce the paper, plastic and metal pack­aging into the mar­ket­place.

Under the new Ontario sys­tem, the pro­du­cers are respons­ible for fund­ing and find­ing someone to run curb­side recyc­ling. If someone recently slapped a “Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als” sticker on your recyc­ling bin, that’s the reason why.

Most, although not all, global experts see EPR as the gold stand­ard in house­hold recyc­ling. But — and this is a very big but — only when paired with high recyc­ling tar­gets and tough enforce­ment. Right now, the Ontario sys­tem is sched­uled to have neither. Instead, Doug Ford’s gov­ern­ment has essen­tially allowed industry to dic­tate the stand­ards them­selves; until 2028, there are essen­tially no stand­ards at all, only an industry com­mit­ment to “best efforts.”

The final Blue Box reg­u­la­tion pos­ted in Septem­ber does include some improve­ments from the last pro­posal released in June, espe­cially on flex­ible plastic. But over­all, it remains deeply unam­bi­tious. The gov­ern­ment has essen­tially punted most of the high recyc­ling tar­gets it once touted sev­eral — and in many cases, five — years down the line. It has deferred expan­ded col­lec­tion to multi­res­id­en­tial build­ings until 2031 and removed entirely the require­ment for expan­ded col­lec­tion in pub­lic spaces. What’s more, with less than four months to go until the trans­ition begins, the pro­vin­cial reg­u­lat­ory body in charge of the new sys­tem has yet to lay out how it intends to enforce what lax stand­ards there are.

None of this should come as a sur­prise. The Star’s busi­ness depart­ment has been writ­ing about the loom­ing dis­aster in Blue Box reform since 2022. To give the gov­ern­ment some credit, many of the logist­ical kinks have been ironed out since then. Sev­eral industry experts who spoke to the Star’s edit­or­ial board this week said they are reas­on­ably con­fid­ent that when the new sys­tem kicks in next year, most Toronto house­holds won’t notice a sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fer­ence in curb­side pickup.

What’s been lost along the way, however, is the entire reason this whole expens­ive and com­plic­ated pro­cess was launched in the first place. The gov­ern­ment’s rationale for the changes — to reduce costs on pro­du­cers — is self­defeat­ing. The whole point of the sys­tem is to get more mater­ial recycled. Without high costs and high stand­ards, there is no fin­an­cial incent­ive for that to hap­pen. It’s a mar­ket solu­tion with the mar­ket part taken out at the knees — a full dec­ade of sound and fury on the recyc­ling file reduced to almost noth­ing pro­duct­ive at all.

If this were a one­off, that would be bad enough. But the Blue Box fiasco has instead been a show­case for all the worst tend­en­cies of the Ford gov­ern­ment. It’s been incon­sist­ently designed, impuls­ively changed, and at times ideo­lo­gic­ally driven.

But more than that, the new curb­side recyc­ling regime is mis­aligned in a way that has come to define Ford’s ten­ure as premier. Put simply, the policy as cur­rently laid out, the one that will be spread­ing across the province next year, touch­ing vir­tu­ally every house­hold and loop­ing in many of Ontario largest com­pan­ies, has been so watered down it can no longer reas­on­ably be expec­ted to achieve the policy goals for which it was ori­gin­ally designed.

It’s a text­book example of Ford’s pat­en­ted brand of chummy cor­por­ate social­ism: To each accord­ing to who­ever has the premier’s ear last, from each accord­ing to who­ever was fool­ish enough to assume things were going to roll out as ori­gin­ally planned. The Blue Box fiasco has instead been a show­case for all the worst tend­en­cies of the Ford gov­ern­ment. It’s been incon­sist­ently designed, impuls­ively changed, and at times ideo­lo­gic­ally driven.

This article was written by Ben Cohen and was published in the Toronto Star on September 22, 2025.

The year was 1989. Bryan Sta­ley, a farm boy from Mary­land, had just star­ted his bach­elor’s in bio­lo­gical and agri­cul­tural engin­eer­ing at North Car­o­lina State Uni­versity. On a rare night away from his books, he took a trip to the cinema, where he saw a vis­ion of a future so stir­ring it made him want to ded­ic­ate his life to bring­ing it about.

Doc Brown, in the open­ing seconds of “Back to the Future Part II,” was gass­ing up his DeLorean with flat beer and a banana peel pro­cessed through a mini­ature fusion reactor.

“I was just fas­cin­ated by that scene,” said Sta­ley, now CEO of the Envir­on­ment Research & Edu­ca­tion Found­a­tion, a garbage research char­ity in the United

States and Canada. “It’s part of the reason I got into the waste industry. The­or­et­ic­ally, it’s pos­sible for us to, someday, advance to the point we can cre­ate pure energy from any kind of mass. As a sci­ent­ist, I’m fas­cin­ated by that.”

Sta­ley said human­ity is, sadly, “way far away” from devel­op­ing the “Mr. Fusion” device seen under the hood of Doc’s mobile time machine.

But Sta­ley and his peers are still keen to turn rub­bish into power, to cre­ate a per­fectly “cir­cu­lar eco­nomy” where noth­ing goes to waste. The sooner the bet­ter. Earth today is buck­ling under the 2.1 bil­lion tonnes of solid waste cit­ies gen­er­ate each year, a num­ber pro­jec­ted to grow by 80 per cent to 3.8 bil­lion by 2050, accord­ing to the UN Envir­on­ment Pro­gramme.

Toronto, for its part, cre­ates 0.1 per cent of the global trash total, an estim­ated 2.1 mil­lion tonnes annu­ally, the city said in a report last year. As the city’s cur­rent land­fill at Green Lane in south­west­ern Ontario nears capa­city, the idea of a cir­cu­lar eco­nomy becomes even more press­ing.

The Star spoke with Sta­ley and other garbage research­ers to see what novel waste dis­posal tech­no­lo­gies human­ity is work­ing on while we wait for someone to invent Mr. Fusion.

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and robot­ics

Maybe the inventor of a per­fect “waste­fuel” device won’t be a someone — maybe it will be a something.

We could be on the pre­cip­ice of the tech­no­lo­gical sin­gu­lar­ity, Sta­ley said, the moment when arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sur­passes our own, which could lead to sci­entific advance­ments we can’t even con­ceive of. Or, in this case, it could help reveal solu­tions that may have been right in front of us all along.

“Some expect that waste­fuel is reli­ant on only base advances in our under­stand­ing of the world and how things work,” he said. “I’m optim­istic we can get there. A hun­dred years ago we didn’t have microwaves. We didn’t have nuc­lear energy. We barely had the auto­mobile. I think the future could be very bright.”

Step­ping back from the realm of sci­ence fic­tion, there are some mod­ern­day applic­a­tions of AI that could greatly improve how cit­ies deal with trash.

In Toronto, about half of waste col­lec­ted by the city from homes and apart­ments is sent to land­fill, accord­ing to a spokes­per­son. AI’s super­hu­man sort­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies could be of use here, experts say. A garbage truck could be equipped with a cam­era that could scan trash, determ­ine if there are any organ­ics con­tam­in­at­ing it and auto­mat­ic­ally refuse pickup unless a homeowner prop­erly sorts their bins, Sta­ley said.

A pilot project in the city of Leduc, Alta., had suc­cess with something like this in 2023 and ’24. Cam­eras with AI detec­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies on garbage trucks scanned for con­tam­in­ants and sent post­cards to the fam­il­ies respons­ible for them to edu­cate them about proper sort­ing. This halved the res­id­en­tial recyc­ling con­tam­in­a­tion rate for the city, accord­ing to a local media report.

Toronto may be get­ting the same AI­powered scold­tech soon. Allen Lang­don, CEO of Cir­cu­lar Mater­i­als, a non­profit that will begin man­aging recyc­ling in Toronto next year, told the Star the com­pany is in the “early stages of test­ing sensor tech­no­logy on curb­side col­lec­tion trucks,” but is “optim­istic” about its poten­tial.

AI could also be used to mon­itor com­mer­cial dump­sters and only flag them as ready for pickup when they are full and con­tam­in­ant­free, instead of hav­ing reg­u­larly sched­uled vis­its from garbage trucks, Sta­ley said. Then, there could be one final layer of AI defence at sort­ing facil­it­ies.

“One of the biggest chal­lenges with recyc­ling is in sort­ing out the con­tam­in­a­tion,” he said. “There are optical sort­ing tech­no­lo­gies now that are being driven by AI where, when a cam­era sys­tem sees a piece of con­tam­in­a­tion, it does a quick iden­ti­fic­a­tion and then trig­gers a robot arm that grabs it off the con­veyor belt before it ends up get­ting into the bin where the good mater­i­als are.”

Earlier this year, a recyc­ling facil­ity in Seattle had four such robots installed.

Char­lotte Ueta, act­ing dir­ector of Toronto’s solid waste man­age­ment policy and plan­ning, said the city is “broadly” inter­ested in advance­ments like these, but has no imme­di­ate plans to acquire any.

“I can’t say that we have any par­tic­u­lar tech­no­logy that we are explor­ing cur­rently,” she said. “But for our long­term man­age­ment strategy, we did soli­cit and do a jur­is­dic­tional scan to see what else is out there that we can look to poten­tially pilot or imple­ment in our sys­tem.”

Plastic­eat­ing crit­ters

If arti­fi­cial life can’t save us from all the trash, maybe some spe­cial­ized, good old­fash­ioned organic life is what we need?

A land­fill is a “micro­bi­ally medi­ated envir­on­ment,” Sta­ley said, which is a “fancy way to say there’s bugs in the land­fills that break down waste.”

That’s great, but with the amount of garbage people pro­duce, we need hun­grier bugs with less­dis­cern­ing pal­ates. In par­tic­u­lar, sci­ent­ists are look­ing to develop plastic­eat­ing crit­ters, since plastic does not decom­pose; rather, it breaks down into micro­plastics that end up in our bod­ies.

Right now, sci­ent­ists are exper­i­ment­ing with using CRISPR, a power­ful gen­ome edit­ing tool, to design plastic­degrad­ing organ­isms. Nature also seems to be help­ing. In 2001, Japan­ese sci­ent­ists dis­covered bac­teria break­ing down and meta­bol­iz­ing plastic out­side a bottle­recyc­ling facil­ity. French sci­ent­ists in 2020 also isol­ated an enzyme that breaks down plastic and mutated it inside bac­teria to make it 10,000 times more effi­cient.

These are prom­ising innov­a­tions but it remains to be seen whether they are eco­nom­ic­ally viable, experts say. (This is also the reason we can’t shoot garbage into space — too expens­ive.)

Another prob­lem is that land­fills can be dif­fi­cult places for even the har­di­est creatures to sur­vive. “Part of the man­age­ment strategy for a land­fill is to com­pact it as densely as pos­sible, which can cre­ate restrict­ive water move­ments and, as we know, microbes need water to live, just like the rest of us,” said Sta­ley.

High cost of `advanced recyc­ling’

One rel­at­ively new, con­tro­ver­sial strategy pre­vi­ously endorsed by the Doug Ford gov­ern­ment is what’s known as “advanced recyc­ling” — the pro­cess of break­ing down non­re­cyc­lables with heat or chem­ic­als. Crit­ics, includ­ing Toronto Envir­on­mental Alli­ance and the Centre for Cli­mate Integ­rity, two envir­on­mental non­profits, say it is eco­lo­gic­ally dis­astrous, far too expens­ive and inef­fi­cient.

“The plastic com­pan­ies are cer­tainly tout­ing it as this new thing that is going to solve everything,” said Chelsea Roch­man, assist­ant pro­fessor in the depart­ment of eco­logy and evol­u­tion­ary bio­logy at the Uni­versity of Toronto and head of the Trash Team, the uni­versity’s garbage edu­ca­tion organ­iz­a­tion. “But it isn’t fully developed.”

A pilot project in Whitby in 2019 used pyro­lysis, a type of advanced thermal recyc­ling, to turn singleuse plastics into fuel. But this tech­nique, which involves heat­ing plastic in a vir­tu­ally oxy­gen­free envir­on­ment, is costly and can’t yet be scaled.

In 2022, the province made advanced recyc­ling easier by grant­ing some projects exemp­tions from envir­on­mental assess­ments. The Star asked the Min­istry of the Envir­on­ment, Con­ser­va­tion and Parks how wide­spread the adop­tion of chem­ical and thermal recyc­ling had become in Ontario since then and how it would respond to crit­ics of the prac­tice. A spokes­per­son did not respond to the ques­tion of how many facil­it­ies in Ontario use advanced recyc­ling and which tech­niques they employ.

“Muni­cip­al­it­ies and the private sec­tor are respons­ible for select­ing and imple­ment­ing the waste man­age­ment tech­no­logy that best suits their spe­cific situ­ation,” said Lind­say Dav­id­son.

“The min­istry does not endorse or require any spe­cific waste man­age­ment tech­no­logy. All approved waste pro­cessing facil­it­ies in Ontario are required to oper­ate in a man­ner that pro­tects human health and the envir­on­ment.”

Garbage­can pilot pro­gram

Roch­man, from U of T, spoke effus­ively about a garbage­can pilot project in Sankofa Square that, if spread throughout Toronto, could make the city a lot cleaner. Accord­ing to her team’s research, an estim­ated 3,500 tonnes of plastic lit­ter hit Toronto streets in one year. Of that, 3,000 tonnes were from “mis­man­aged waste,” typ­ic­ally from over­flow­ing trash cans and fur­ther spillage from them when they are loaded into garbage trucks.

The Sankofa bins are an anti­dote to this issue, Roch­man said. They have built­in solar­powered com­pac­tion, which lets them store four times as much rub­bish as a reg­u­lar Toronto can.

“They have to be emp­tied way less, so we don’t see over­flow,” she said. “They don’t smell as much because they’re not open and don’t get broken into. They’re a stronger, more dur­able bin.”

Win­nipeg, Hal­i­fax and New York are some of the North Amer­ican cit­ies that have installed the bins, with New York find­ing they helped keep rats out of parks because these cans are harder for them to break into. (A study this year found Toronto’s rat pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing faster than New York’s.)

In 2009, Phil­adelphia replaced 700 tra­di­tional bins with 500 sol­ar­powered com­pact­ors. The city repor­ted sav­ings of $720,000 a year from this move because it allowed them to reduce garbage col­lec­tion trips from 17 per week to five. Win­nipeg approved a $135,000 pilot in 2019 to pur­chase 15 solar bins.

Toronto determ­ined it would be too expens­ive to buy the cans, a spokes­per­son told the Star.

“The city explored pilot­ing the solar bins found at Sankofa Square; however, based on pri­cing, a pilot and any broader deploy­ment of the bins was determ­ined to be cost­pro­hib­it­ive,” said Krys­tal Carter. Instead, she said the city gave the Down­town Yonge Busi­ness Improve­ment Area a grant, which paid to install two bins near the square last sum­mer.

Cheryll Diego, pub­lic realm exper­i­ence man­ager for the BIA, said while data is still being col­lec­ted on the solar bins’ per­form­ance, they seem to have con­trib­uted to a visu­ally and olfactor­ily super­ior street around them. “One of the issues we had before … was stench,” she said. “We’ve seen a huge reduc­tion in that.”

`There is no sil­ver bul­let’

To Mark Win­field, pro­fessor in the fac­ulty of envir­on­mental and urban change at York Uni­versity and head of its “Waste Wiki” garbage research project, the solu­tion to the prob­lem­atic pro­lif­er­a­tion of rub­bish won’t be found in a lab.

It needs to come out of par­lia­ments, factor­ies and homes. Gov­ern­ments need to force man­u­fac­tur­ers to build longer­last­ing products made out of recyc­lable mater­i­als, and con­sumers need to slot them in the right bins when they’re through with them.

“There’s no sil­ver bul­let,” he said. “You’ve just got to design things for dur­ab­il­ity, and you’ve got to design them for dis­as­sembly and recyc­ling. Things that last long, so you don’t have to throw them out, but that are con­struc­ted in such a way that when that day comes, you can max­im­ize the amount of usable com­pon­ents and mater­i­als that you can recover. This is where the Europeans are at.”

Last year, the European Union passed a law man­dat­ing a series of “eco­design require­ments” to do just what Win­field described. Europeans also have a bet­ter recyc­ling cul­ture, said Sta­ley: “If you go to a typ­ical home in Sweden, you’ll have six recyc­ling bins. They don’t have just a blue box pro­gram like Toronto; they have dif­fer­ent bins and you sort them in six dif­fer­ent ways in your home and then they’re picked up.”

This is to their bene­fit — it increases land­fill diver­sion — but it may also be hold­ing them back long­term, Sta­ley con­tends. North Amer­ic­ans hun­ger for futur­istic garbage tech­no­logy because they can’t be bothered to recycle so fas­ti­di­ously.

“Some of the greatest advance­ments in recyc­ling facil­it­ies seem to be hap­pen­ing in North Amer­ica because we have con­sumers who don’t want to sort things in the kit­chen.”

I’m optim­istic we can get there. A hun­dred years ago we didn’t have microwaves. We didn’t have nuc­lear energy. We barely had the auto­mobile. I think the future could be very bright.

BRYAN STALEY, CEO, ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH & EDUCATION FOUNDATION

With the city’s land­fill approach­ing capa­city, the search for a new solu­tion is get­ting messy

This article was written by Ben Spurr and was published in the Toronto Star on September 14, 2025.

With the city’s land­fill approach­ing capa­city, the search for a new solu­tion is get­ting messy

Two and a half hours down High­way 401, off a dusty two­lane road, is a sliver of land most Toronto­n­ians will never see, but that each one of us is intim­ately con­nec­ted to.

From a dis­tance, the only clues to the prop­erty’s pur­pose are the unnat­ural­look­ing berms around its edges shield­ing it from passing eyes, and a faint sickly smell waft­ing off the 18­wheel­ers that arrive reg­u­larly at its gates, some­times as often as every one or two minutes.

This is the Green Lane Land­fill, the 320­acre facil­ity south­w­est of Lon­don, Ont., where Toronto has been send­ing almost all its garbage for more than a dec­ade. Since 2011, every baby wipe, potato chip bag, nail clip­ping or shiny wrap­ping paper Toronto­n­ians have thrown in their trash has likely ended up here, bur­ied among the 420,000 tonnes of waste car­ted annu­ally to the site.

Toronto, it turns out, won’t be able to ignore Green Lane for much longer. The city estim­ates it will reach capa­city by 2035, and has already begun the urgent work of fig­ur­ing out where to put its trash once the site can’t take any­more. An update on its plans is expec­ted as early as this month.

Although the land­fill’s end date is a dec­ade away, it could take at least that long to secure or build a facil­ity to handle the city’s waste. And find­ing a solu­tion won’t be easy: Pro­vin­cial reg­u­la­tions have made build­ing new land­fills in Ontario dif­fi­cult, so Toronto may have to loc­ate an exist­ing dump to buy or expand, or take the con­tro­ver­sial step of incin­er­at­ing its garbage.

There’s also the pos­sib­il­ity of expand­ing Green Lane, but that’s an option opposed by lead­ers of a nearby First Nation.

“We all want it shut down ASAP,” Chief Todd Cor­nelius of the Oneida Nation of the Thames told the Star.

No mat­ter which route Toronto chooses, its decision looks likely to raise con­cerns about envir­on­mental and health impacts, and risks anger­ing whichever com­munity is the next recip­i­ent of the trash from Canada’s biggest city.

In other words, the future of Toronto’s garbage is messy.

Toronto’s dilemma is hardly unique. How a soci­ety dis­poses of its waste is a prob­lem that has vexed humans since the earli­est set­tle­ments. The chal­lenge has spawned tech­no­lo­gical advances — pol­lu­tion in the Tiber River promp­ted the Romans to build aque­ducts — and in cases where it hasn’t been addressed, sparked pub­lic health dis­asters (see the garbage­dwell­ing rats that helped spread the Black Death through 14th­cen­tury Europe and Asia).

In his 1997 novel “Under­world,” author Don DeLillo asser­ted that civil­iz­a­tion itself arose in response to the com­plic­ated task of dis­pos­ing of waste. “Civil­iz­a­tion did not rise and flour­ish as men hammered out hunt­ing scenes on bronze gates and whispered philo­sophy under the stars,” he wrote. “No, garbage rose first, incit­ing people to build a civil­iz­a­tion in response.”

Toronto has been grap­pling with the prob­lem since its incor­por­a­tion in 1834, when one of its first bylaws man­dated safe dis­posal of garbage in the wake of a chol­era out­break. Since that time, it has employed dif­fer­ent dis­posal strategies, all of them tem­por­ary, many of them con­tro­ver­sial — and some of which have lit­er­ally shaped the city. Toronto is dot­ted with about 160 former dumps, many of which have been con­ver­ted to parks.

When the city ran out of space within its bor­ders, it sent its garbage else­where. For dec­ades, it used the Keele Val­ley Land­fill in Maple, but in 2002 that was shut down after a sus­tained cam­paign from local res­id­ents. Toronto hoped to send its trash to an aban­doned mine near Kirk­land Lake, but after local out­cry there as well it star­ted truck­ing its waste to Michigan.

At one point, as many as 140 trucks a day crossed the bor­der, but the deal was opposed by U.S. politi­cians and res­id­ents — par­tic­u­larly after a state trooper test­i­fied to dis­cov­er­ing a “bleed­ing” garbage truck loaded with dis­carded blood products — and it wasn’t renewed when it ran out in 2010. Instead, Toronto bought Green Lane, a local dump first com­mis­sioned in 1978, which it upgraded and has been using as its main land­fill since 2011.

Toronto stresses that Green Lane is a state­of­the­art facil­ity — offi­cials who work there bristle at the term “dump” — that fea­tures sys­tems to trap and pro­cess leachate (the con­tam­in­ated liquid that seeps from garbage), flare off land­fill gas and man­age storm­wa­ter. The city con­tracts out oper­a­tions, main­ten­ance and con­struc­tion at the facil­ity to a private com­pany under a nine­year, $187­mil­lion agree­ment that began in 2021.

Once the trucks car­ry­ing Toronto’s trash enter its gates, they dis­ap­pear between the grass­covered berms, before reappear­ing high up in the dis­tance, look­ing like toys as they trundle along the top of huge grey­brown mounds of soil­covered trash. They roll to the edge of an open part of the land­fill marked by fen­cing and flocks of wheel­ing birds, where bull­dozers wait to com­pact the cargo into the mounds, which grow big­ger with every load.

A 2023 city report noted that des­pite meas­ures already taken to extend Green Lane’s life — such as increas­ing how much trash is com­pacted into each cubic metre of the site, con­tract­ing with other land­fills to send some waste there, and pro­mot­ing diver­sion pro­grams such as recyc­ling and organic col­lec­tion — there was “an urgent need” to find other options before it reached capa­city.

“It’s crit­ical that the city con­tinue plan­ning for the future long­term dis­posal of Toronto’s garbage as build­ing new waste dis­posal infra­struc­ture can take more than 10 years to com­plete,” accord­ing to the report.

The city has been con­sid­er­ing two broad options: the con­tin­ued use of land­fills, and the adop­tion of “energy­from­waste” tech­no­lo­gies, bet­ter known as incin­er­a­tion. City staff have been hold­ing pub­lic con­sulta­tions on Toronto’s waste plans since last year, and while they told the Star in August there was no timeline yet for a final recom­mend­a­tion, an update could go to coun­cil’s infra­struc­ture com­mit­tee later this month.

While it’s tech­nic­ally pos­sible for Toronto to build a new land­fill, there’s no space within city lim­its. Build­ing one else­where is a long shot, due to 2020 Ontario legis­la­tion that requires new land­fills get con­sent from muni­cip­al­it­ies within 3.5 kilo­metres of the pro­posed site.

“Sit­ing a new land­fill in the province is near impossible now,” said Atif Dur­rani, a project dir­ector in Toronto’s solid waste man­age­ment divi­sion.

That assess­ment has been echoed by the Asso­ci­ation of Muni­cip­al­it­ies of Ontario and the Waste to Resource Ontario industry group, both of which have warned the law has cre­ated a land­fill capa­city “crisis” in the province.

With a new land­fill unlikely, Toronto is con­sid­er­ing part­ner­ing with another muni­cip­al­ity to buy or expand an exist­ing pub­lic facil­ity, or pur­chas­ing a private one.

The city is also study­ing expand­ing Green Lane. While that might seem like the simplest solu­tion, Dur­rani said none of the city’s choices are “easy options,” and staff will have to per­form a thor­ough ana­lysis of “the eco­nomic, social and envir­on­mental implic­a­tions” of each altern­at­ive.

The other broad option is incin­er­a­tion, which Toronto phased out in the 1980s. In pub­lic con­sulta­tion mater­ial pub­lished in June, the city acknow­ledged that burn­ing waste comes with down­sides: The facil­it­ies are expens­ive to build and oper­ate, it pro­duces car­bon diox­ide, and people might be less will­ing to recycle if they know their garbage is being burned instead of spend­ing etern­ity in a land­fill.

But accord­ing to the present­a­tion, incin­er­a­tion also has bene­fits: It can gen­er­ate elec­tri­city, requires less land and would allow the city to pro­cess garbage closer to where it’s pro­duced. Most con­tro­ver­sially, the con­sulta­tion mater­ial asser­ted that burn­ing trash pro­duces “less green­house gas emis­sions com­pared to land­filling.”

Emily Alfred, a waste cam­paigner with the Toronto Envir­on­mental Alli­ance (TEA), called claims that burn­ing garbage is cleaner than land­fills “really mis­lead­ing,” and wor­ried the waste con­sulta­tion could skew pub­lic opin­ion toward incin­er­a­tion.

TEA says claims about incin­er­a­tion’s sus­tain­ab­il­ity are based on blanket assump­tions that ignore import­ant local factors, includ­ing sys­tems like the one in place at Green Lane to cap­ture meth­ane, the main source of green­house gases from land­fills. The city is upgrad­ing the facil­ity to con­vert meth­ane to renew­able nat­ural gas, which can be used to dis­place fossil gas.

An ana­lysis TEA pub­lished in June that took into account local factors found incin­er­at­ing Toronto’s waste at local facil­it­ies would release five to six times more cli­mate­warm­ing emis­sions than send­ing it to an upgraded land­fill.

Burn­ing garbage gen­er­ates “about the same green­house gas emis­sions as burn­ing coal,” Alfred told the Star.

“It’s waste­ful. It’s toxic,” she added. “So we think the sug­ges­tion to burn Toronto’s garbage is basic­ally a cli­mate dis­aster.”

Dur­rani, the city project dir­ector, said the con­sulta­tion mater­ial was inten­ded to provide a high­level

com­par­ison, and a site­spe­cific review could lead to a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion.

If Toronto does opt for incin­er­a­tion, one of the places it could send its trash is the Emer­ald Energy from Waste facil­ity in Bramp­ton, which this spring won approval from the Ontario gov­ern­ment for a major expan­sion, des­pite push­back from local politi­cians and advoc­ates.

In an April report to Peel Region coun­cil, pub­lic health offi­cials warned that emis­sions of chem­ic­als from the expan­sion could increase the risk of neg­at­ive health out­comes such as heart and lung prob­lems.

They noted that pop­u­la­tions liv­ing closest to the facil­ity on Bra­malea Road were more likely to be racial­ized, immig­rants and low­income, and already at higher risk for health com­plic­a­tions. The Peel Regional chair wrote to the Min­istry of Envir­on­ment, Con­ser­va­tion and Parks express­ing con­cern about the expan­sion, and the min­istry agreed to impose con­di­tions around pub­lic report­ing and using tech­no­logy to reduce emis­sions.

Emer­ald’s gen­eral man­ager, Joe Lyng, con­firmed the com­pany has sub­mit­ted an unso­li­cited pro­posal to Toronto about tak­ing the city’s garbage. He told the Star last month Toronto had acknow­ledged the pro­posal but no talks had taken place.

Lyng said claims that incin­er­a­tion is as dirty as burn­ing coal are “flat­out wrong.” He said that because burn­ing garbage doesn’t require pro­du­cing emis­sions like haul­ing trash to a land­fill far from the city, avoids the meth­ane pro­duced by dumps and can be used to gen­er­ate energy, it is “a low car­bon altern­at­ive for waste man­age­ment.”

Stud­ies the com­pany com­mis­sioned as part of its expan­sion applic­a­tion pro­cess determ­ined emis­sions from the redeveloped facil­ity “would not res­ult in a sig­ni­fic­ant increase in health risks.”

Coun. Dianne Saxe (Ward 11, Uni­versity­Rosedale), former envir­on­mental com­mis­sioner of Ontario, said incin­er­a­tion could be accept­able if the city imposes strict emis­sions stand­ards to pro­tect local com­munit­ies from adverse health effects, such as those used in Europe. She pre­dicted Toronto could end up pur­su­ing a mix of incin­er­a­tion and land­fill, espe­cially if it can’t find a new per­man­ent dump before Green Lane is full.

Land­fills and incin­er­a­tion are “both bad” options, Saxe said, but “there are no easy solu­tions here. And the prob­lem is real and advan­cing upon us rap­idly.”

Chief Cor­nelius can’t see the Green Lane land­fill from the his office, but when the wind blows in the right dir­ec­tion, he can’t avoid the smell.

The elec­ted chief of Oneida Nation of the Thames, a com­munity with a pop­u­la­tion of more than 2,000 roughly three kilo­metres west of Green Lane, says his com­munity was never prop­erly con­sul­ted on Toronto’s decision to loc­ate a land­fill in its back­yard, and for the past 15 years it’s been liv­ing with the con­sequences.

That includes the offens­ive odour from the dump, which Cor­nelius says is so strong that on some days kids aren’t able to play out­side. Loc­als say it’s par­tic­u­larly bad on hot or humid days, and they worry the land­fill is mak­ing res­id­ents sick, harm­ing local water­ways and ruin­ing prop­erty val­ues.

Some­times res­id­ents “go straight to the car and out of the ter­rit­ory so we don’t have to smell it,” Cor­nelius said.

If incin­er­a­tion has its crit­ics, the exper­i­ence of Green Lane’s neigh­bours is proof that land­fills are hardly a per­fect solu­tion either. Since 2020, the Ontario Min­istry of the Envir­on­ment has recor­ded an aver­age of approx­im­ately 175 com­plaints about Green Lane each year, the vast major­ity related to odours attrib­uted to the facil­ity.

The province charged the city under the Envir­on­mental Pro­tec­tion Act for allegedly dis­char­ging odour at Green Lane in Novem­ber 2021. The city denied the charge.

In a deal reached with Toronto in 2007, the Oneida Nation reportedly splits about $1 mil­lion in annual pay­ments with the nearby Chip­pewas of the Thames as com­pens­a­tion for the effects of the land­fill. Neither the nation nor the city con­firmed that fig­ure to the Star.

Cor­nelius said that agree­ment doesn’t make liv­ing next to Green Lane worth it, however, and while Oneida is ask­ing to be con­sul­ted on the city’s nat­ural gas project at the land­fill that could provide rev­enue for the com­munity, his con­stitu­ents would oppose plans to extend the land­fill’s life.

“My com­munity is dir­ect­ing me to see if we can shut the land­fill down,” he said.

Dur­rani says Toronto takes com­plaints about Green Lane ser­i­ously, and has mit­ig­a­tion strategies in place, includ­ing gas col­lec­tion, reg­u­larly cov­er­ing the site to pre­vent smells from escap­ing, and fre­quent mon­it­or­ing and con­sulta­tion.

But for Toronto to fur­ther reduce the harm­ful impacts of its waste, offi­cials know the city needs to stop pro­du­cing so much of it. Char­lotte Ueta, act­ing dir­ector of policy, plan­ning and out­reach in the city’s solid waste man­age­ment ser­vices, said the muni­cip­al­ity has already made pro­gress.

The city’s green bin pro­gram is “prob­ably one of the most suc­cess­ful large­scale organ­ics diver­sion pro­grams in North Amer­ica,” she said. It kept 120,000 tonnes of res­id­en­tial organic waste from land­fills in 2024, mater­ial pro­cessed into com­post and nat­ural gas. The city is work­ing to increase the capa­city of one of its organ­ics facil­it­ies to 140,000 tonnes a year.

Toronto’s blue bins also diver­ted more than 90,000 tonnes of res­id­en­tial recyc­lables last year, and while the province is shift­ing res­id­en­tial recyc­ling to private pro­du­cers, the muni­cip­al­ity says its “long­stand­ing” efforts have “laid the ground­work” for a sus­tain­able pro­gram.

But the city hasn’t moved the needle much on its res­id­en­tial diver­sion rate. For the past dec­ade, the por­tion of waste Toronto col­lects from res­id­en­tial homes and multi­res­id­en­tial build­ings that is diver­ted from land­fills has remained steady at between 52 and 54 per cent. Last year the city man­aged about 725,000 tonnes of waste those sources, about 375,000 of which was diver­ted. (The city also col­lects a smal­ler amount from non­res­id­en­tial sources such as schools, small busi­nesses and pub­lic spaces.)

Advoc­ates say the city could do more by improv­ing diver­sion pro­grams for tex­tiles and con­struc­tion waste, and ensur­ing more multi­res­id­en­tial build­ings take part in organ­ics col­lec­tion.

Ueta said the city doesn’t have a hard diver­sion tar­get, but has an “aspir­a­tional” goal of zero waste. As part of its updated waste strategy it hopes to find new ways to min­im­ize garbage and encour­age res­id­ents to “par­ti­cip­ate wherever they can” in the city’s efforts, she said.