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* Update: Council's Environment and Climate Change Committee agreed that staff pursue three options in more detail: 1) Status quo + new landfill, 2) incineration, 3) new landfill and report back next term of Council. (Check out our delegation given there!) The issue comes to Council for their consideration on June 25.
Ottawa City Council is considering dealing with its waste residuals by incinerating them. This is a bad, bad idea.
(“Waste residuals” means what’s left over after diversion—that is, recycling, composting, and so on.)
Currently, residuals in Ottawa go to the Trail Road landfill. Since the Trail facility is getting full, Council asked staff in December 2023 to explore future options for residuals management. The result of this exploration, a feasibility study, comes to Environment and Climate Change Committee on June 17.
The study (PDF here) examines five options:
- Status Quo + Private Landfill
- Waste-to-energy
- Mixed-Waste Processing
- Waste-to-energy + Mixed-Waste Processing
- New Landfill
You may have noticed that “incineration” isn’t listed. Well, that’s what “waste to energy” refers to. The idea is that from burning waste, you can generate electricity. While of course this is true—you can generate electricity from anything that’ll burn—this doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, or even that the waste generation is the principal goal (it’s not). In fact, incinerators consume more energy than they produce, since the stuff put in isn’t particularly suitable to burn.
So yes, this is misleading at best, but possibly greenwashing.
There are good reasons we don’t usually burn trash: it produces all sorts of toxic byproducts. Think dioxins, furans, fluorinated chemicals, NOx, heavy metals—stuff you really don’t want in your air, water, or soil. There are serious health risks with these, as you can imagine.
Also, incineration is very expensive. The feasibility study estimates an incinerator to cost $497 million to $862 million to build, and then another $47 million to operate and maintain. It’s worth noting, too, that incinerators routinely run over projections, both to build and to operate.
What’s more, incineration still requires a landfill—the very thing it’s supposed to avoid. This is because incineration produces ash that’s 30 percent by volume of what’s put in. What’s worse, it requires a special landfill, since the ash is so toxic.
There’s a lot to know about incineration—and a lot of misinformation out there. One of our partners, Waste Watch Ottawa, has created some FAQs with copious links to further information to help with this. Please check them out! There are also several resources that we shared with councillors when we invited them to a webinar on incineration.
In summary, it’s kind of shocking that Council is considering incineration at all, and we’re doing what we can to stop this process before it gets too far.
What can you do?
- Contact your councillor and let them know you don’t want nasty pollution, substantially increased emissions, and huge costs to taxpayers
- Delegate at the June 17 meeting (see instructions at the top of the agenda)
- Follow us on social media or via our newsletter for future updates
