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Ecology Ottawa attended City Council’s Environment and Climate Committee on Tuesday, June 16 to delegate on the City’s second Solid Waste Master Plan Update. Two years after the plan’s approval, the City is making meaningful progress on waste diversion, learning about and supporting community-led efforts. Much remains to be done, however, to encourage a zero-waste culture and cultivate a circular economy.
Please read our delegation below, or watch it here.
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To begin with, we want to applaud Council for requiring annual progress reports on our Solid Waste Master Plan’s implementation. Properly managing our waste economy is a critical municipal function, and the public should have regular progress updates. We also want to applaud staff for its work implementing the Solid Waste Master Plan. This report describes a healthy array of initiatives underway to foster a Zero Waste Culture and develop a circular economy. Our Solid Waste Master Plan is quite good, and we’re beginning to see its fruits. It’s particularly encouraging to see the City’s emphasis on supporting community efforts. The heart of fostering a zero-waste culture is the community. It’s here where people will decide an item has potential for reuse by someone else, or even that they’ll decide they don’t need to acquire an item in the first place. More than this, building a circular economy—and particularly a sharing economy—fosters social connections that enrich our city and even strengthen community resilience.
This only adds to the evidence that Ottawans are eager to divert waste, and supports our calls to improve funding for community work—namely, to increase available funding to at least $500,000 per year, make funding multi-year, and allow staff salaries, operations, and insurance as eligible expenses. We hope that when the program comes up for review early next year, Council will recognize this community enthusiasm and increase investments.On this note, we recommend that staff present more data as to the impact of these diversion efforts. How do these efforts relate to what’s going to Trail Road? For example, as we offer mending circles, is there a corresponding decrease in textiles reaching Trail? As we improve bulky items diversion, are there fewer set out at the curb? And what are the corresponding cost savings associated with this reduction of items sent to Trail, and the corresponding emissions reductions? This isn’t to say we shouldn’t undertake diversion efforts unless there’s an immediate observable effect—and we acknowledge collecting these data is complicated. But it would help show why diversion efforts are so important. And so it’s encouraging to see the report promise that “GHG impacts will be quantified with future annual reporting.”
Such a cost–benefit analysis is particularly important in light of the costs associated with end-of-line waste management approaches. It’s sobering to see in the report that the City continues to explore what it calls “waste-to-energy,” but is in fact burning our trash, with all the associated environmental, health, and financial risks. It’s hard to imagine the $862 million it could cost to construct an incinerator, or the $47 million annually to run it, couldn’t instead be invested in developing a circular economy in Ottawa that would lead the nation, if not the continent. On the topic of data, it was helpful to see the results of the recent set-out study. This study shows what we already knew: that restricting, no matter how gently, how much trash people can put out encourages them to reduce this amount—which in turn will help prolong the Trail landfill’s life, reduce emissions, and so on. Council must return to the question of further restrictions on curbside trash put-out as soon as possible and have the courage to do what dozens of municipalities across Ontario already do by imposing bolder restrictions on how much can go in the garbage.
We look forward to seeing further fruits borne from the Solid Waste Master Plan’s implementation, and again urge deeper investments in the good work that our communities are already doing and could do further.
