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On June 17, Ottawa City Council’s Environment and Climate Change Committee considered a feasibility study on approaches to the city’s waste residuals—that is, what’s left over after composting, recycling, and other diversion. One of the options under consideration was incineration, which brings a host of threats. (Check out some FAQs that we collaborated on, and which contain much of the information provided below.) Ecology Ottawa delegated on this issue, challenging aspects of the study and advocating for sustainable approaches to waste residuals.
Please read our delegation below—or you can watch the recording. For more on this issue, check out our anti-incineration campaign page.
Our Executive Director William van Geest addressing City Council's Environment and Climate Change Committee.
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We at Ecology Ottawa are very preoccupied with the issue of what happens with our city’s waste: our approach to waste has major implications for our air, water, and soil, if not also for our communities’ health and our city’s finances.
And so we’re concerned about the recommendation of incineration to handle our waste residuals.
I’ll note here that I won’t be using the term “waste to energy” that appears in the feasibility study before us. Sure, incineration can generate electricity; but let’s be clear about what’s really happening: it’s burning trash.
And if that sounds bad, it’s because it is. I believe other delegates will discuss the health risks with incineration, but here’s a short list of compounds that incineration produces: dioxins, furans, fluorinated chemicals, NOx, heavy metals—things that cause reproductive problems, cancer, immune system damage, and so on. Incineration is also bad from an emissions standpoint: per kWh, it produces as much CO2 as coal. And then there’s the ash that incineration produces, which is considerable—30 percent by volume of what’s put in—and in some cases toxic. Again, what are we doing? Do we want this in our city?
But here I want to focus on the feasibility report’s evaluation—specifically, the environmental requirements. In short, the evaluation doesn’t hold up. Let’s quickly go through its five criteria:
1. Energy Recovery Potential: The wording alone reveals that the primary concern isn’t environmental: this is an economic opportunity to generate electricity. This generation would produce GHGs—the very thing that’s gotten us into the climate emergency.
2. Landfill Diversion Percentage: Our Solid Waste Master Plan rightly calls for waste to be diverted from landfill. But incineration diverts trash via the one thing worse than landfilling it: burning it. Moreover, a landfill is still needed for the resultant ash—including special facilities, given its hazardous composition.
I’ll pause here to note that these are the two categories where the feasibility study awards incineration high scores—so it’s not looking good.
3. Opportunity to Recover Marketable Commodities: Again, the terminology—“marketable,” and “commodities”—suggests that this is an economic argument, not an environmental one.
4. Emissions—Discharges to Air, Land and Water: Finally we’re getting to properly environmental issues. If anything, this category should be broken out and further developed. You’re not getting the whole story here either: as the report acknowledges, “Total biogenic emissions…are not evaluated in the comparative evaluation” (A-3).
5. Potential for GHG Impacts: There’s some trouble here, as the report ranks incineration as “preferred” here, even though it has the highest GHG emissions of all the options. Incineration has a bad history here, though: one investigation found that incinerators emit more CO2 per megawatt-hour than coal-fired, natural-gas-fired, or oil-fired power plants. We abandoned coal generation a decade ago, what the Ontario government calls “the single largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction action on the continent.” Why would we go back?
In the simple chart in the study’s Executive Summary (PDF), the strongest argument for incineration appears to be environmental; in the other categories, Social and Economic, incineration fares more poorly. But as I’ve shown, the environmental argument doesn’t hold up: the study is straining to make an economic argument through environmental topics.
Finally, we need to talk about the cost. How, when we’re leaving holes in the transit budget and people stranded at bus stops, when we’ve stopped daily water testing at beaches, when our streets are full of potholes, can we opt for the most expensive option for our waste residuals management? It would take similar magical thinking about incineration—if we just burn our trash, it disappears—to pursue an approach that could cost up to $862 million—and that’s without solving the problem of additional landfilling also necessary with incineration.
The report assumes that Trail Road will run out by 2035, but we know its life will likely be extended until 2048, if not further. Take this time to properly study the issue and to properly undertake real, environmental, and cost-effective solutions to waste—principally diversion, reduction, and reuse.
Thank you.
