Controversial waste disposal facility planned for near Ottawa
Ottawa’s old landfill site in Gloucester. Photo: Dan the Hutt, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
I Love Trash is Oscar the Grouch’s song in honor of his love of collecting garbage. However, residents along Boundary Road and in the hamlet of Carlsbad Springs, east of Ottawa, don’t all share the love of refuse with the green grouch from Sesame Street. The review process under Ontario’s Environmental Assessment laws has just wrapped up, clearing a hurdle for a proposed facility in the area that will collect and recycle waste from the construction industry.
The project is officially known as the Capital Region Resource Recovery Centre, but is better known as the Taggart-Miller project. It’s a joint venture of Taggart Investments, a local construction company, and Miller Waste Systems, part of the Miller Group, a Toronto area-based holding company of road construction and transportation management companies across Canada and the United States. The purpose of the new facility will be to recycle waste material from the construction industry. It will be privately owned and operated, and no household trash will be taken there. The same property was considered for a municipal landfill to serve Ottawa and surrounding communities back in the late 1980’s.
A group of local residents has organized opposition to the project. Photo: Dump the Dump 2 Facebook group
An organization of nearby residents and environmental activists has formed to oppose the Taggart-Miller project. They call themselves Dump This Dump 2 and argue that the 450-acre site will not be a recycling facility, but rather an actual landfill that receives trash from the various companies that have their waste disposal contracts with Miller. The property is also located near the eastern edge of the National Capital Greenbelt, the federally-regulated ring of land circling Ottawa where commercial and residential development is limited, and forests and farms instead stand. Dump This Dump 2 has been protesting the project by assembling along local roads and waving signs, and outside the local offices of members of the Ontario legislature.
Taggart-Miller argues that their project will be good for the local economy and create jobs. Dump This Dump 2 wants the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change to reject the proposal, arguing it goes against the very mandate of the department to protect Ontario’s land and water resources. The Miller Group already has close ties to the Ontario government. All highway maintenance in the province is contracted to private companies, and Miller, or various divisions of it, have contracts with the Ministry of Transportation to maintain and pave highways in regions across the province. In 2014, Miller and McAsphalt Industries, its asphalt manufacturing division, donated over $12,000 to the governing Ontario Liberal Party. In Ontario politics, that’s considered a big contribution.
Dump run. A traditional Saturday activity. Photo: Lee Brimelow, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
On a much lighter side, Canadians have an odd relationship with landfill sites. Outside of political and bureaucratic circles, most people still just call them “the dump.” Making a “dump run” is a Saturday tradition in many households in areas where there is no municipal trash collection or homeowners have more garbage to get rid of than the collection crew can handle at the curb. Seeing giant hills of trash and a dirty fire burning used to be very amusing for children. Environmental laws and health and safety policies have put an end to all of that. Everything is sorted into tidy sections now. Resourceful visitors can no longer salvage items from their local dump either.
My Dad extended the life of an electric clothes dryer and a lawnmower by several years because he removed parts from identical or similar items at the dump. The dump operator, usually just called “the dump guy,” or “dump man” was usually seen as a public official, albeit with a more minor stature. In one village I lived in, “Poolie” the dump guy gave himself the title of “Superintendent of the Dump.” He also salvaged items and resold them from the yard around his house next to the dump. It made Sanford and Son look like Macy’s in comparison.
In Cornwall, a former section of the city landfill, now covered with soil and grass, opens in the winter as the Big Ben ski hill, a sort of introductory slope for locals not yet ready for the Adirondacks or Laurentians. These are all small, local landfills though. They are quaint, friendly little small town dumps in comparison to big regional landfills or corporate landfills taking in commercial and industrial waste. These facilities, including the Taggart-Miller project near Ottawa, are what prompt protest and concern from citizens, and that’s why they want the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change to reject the plan.
Tags: canada, environment, landfills, Ontario, ottawa, recycling
Hello James, Is it not interesting that today we have all of the hullabaloo about recycling yet as you point out one is forbidden to remove and reuse/repurpose items from the local “transfer stations” or landfills. Back in the 50’s and 60’s the local “dump” was not even manned daily and as I recall someone was either hired locally or volunteered to drive a front end loader to the dump occasionally to dig a pit and bury the one currently in use. If there was something of use to one all that was required was to remove it before it was buried. I was utilizing the local transfer station a few years back and the fellow and his wife in the slot next to me were off loading a pick up, much newer than mine, which appeared to contain a carefully dismantled children’s play house which had been very well constructed of 1/2 inch and 3/4 inch very good grade plywood and dimensional lumber and was being tossed into the transfer trailer. Before I had finished unloading my truck the transfer station grapple operator had proceeded to begin smashing the plywood and lumber, apparently so as to render it worthless.
For all of the recycling propaganda that is beamed at us it is obvious that the capitalists are not in favor of “real” recycling, because the most effective conservative approach to spaceship Earth’s finite resources would be to build products that would last not for 6 months but for 6 to 60 years. Think about all of high tech toy phones, TV’s auto’s, ….. etc. that get tossed out every day because a new much much better version is now on the sales/showroom floor.
I agree Ken Hall’s sentiments (above) and am reminded of a verse from Arlo Gutheries’s line from Alices Restaurant, where he hadn’t heard of the dump being closed at Thanksgiving.
In our youth did we ever, I mean ever, think that something so simple would become so complicated.
(Please excuse my grammer and punctuation)