Toronto Finally Finds Canadian Home for its Trash
Date: 21-Sep-06
Country: CANADA
Toronto had been looking for places to dump its garbage for more than a decade, as landfill sites filled up and communities in both Canada and the United States declined to take it.
The city had been shipping its garbage to Michigan, to the outrage of residents and some lawmakers there who feared the state was becoming North America's landfill center.
Toronto plans to stop shipping garbage to Wayne County, Michigan, in 2010 and start using a recently expanded site in rural, southwestern Ontario.
In a statement on Wednesday, Toronto Mayor David Miller called the deal a "major step forward in meeting our commitment to the people of Michigan."
Ownership of the Green Lane site, near London, Ontario, will give Toronto landfill capacity for 20 to 23 years after the city's current waste agreement with Michigan expires in 2010, the city said.
A media report indicated the city paid C$500 million (US$442 million) for the site.
The city began shipping its trash to Michigan in 1998 and increased that to include all municipal waste, rising to more than 125 truckloads a day of household, school and restaurant garbage four years ago. It has since cut that total through composting and recycling efforts and now says it sends 85 truckloads a day to Michigan.
Combined with commercial and industrial waste from the city and other parts of Ontario, that adds up to almost two-thirds of the landfill dumped in Michigan annually.
Mike Garfield, director of the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and leader of the "Don't Trash Michigan" campaign, said the deal was a good start and solved half of Michigan's problem of garbage from Canada.
"A better solution is to recycle and compost more," he told Reuters.
(US$1=$1.13 Canadian)
