Waste management association says landfills to reach capacity by 2032

By Chris Jones/The Oshawa Express

The Ontario Waste Management Association has estimated if current waste disposal methods continue, Ontario landfills will be full in less than 15 years.

According to a report from the region’s commissioner of works Susan Siopis, the OWMA began a data collection and analysis initiative in 2015 meant to determine the state of Ontario’s waste management infrastructure.

The second landfill capacity report was released in December last year.

Data was collected from both public and privately owned landfills, and also “based on a combination of survey responses and publicly available information from the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks’ databases,” reads the report.

Siopis noted 76 per cent of Ontario’s landfills are publicly owned, with most of them belonging to municipalities, such as Durham Region.

According to Siopis, it is estimated by the OWMA approximately 30 per cent of Ontario’s waste is shipped to the United States for disposal.

Most of the waste sent to the U.S. is from the industrial, commercial and institutional sectors because Michigan does not accept municipal waste.

“This disposal is subject to potential legislative changes in the receiving states either prohibiting Canadian waste shipments or increasing the cost to make it economically infeasible to ship waste to the receiving state for disposal,” Siopis said.

Siopis writes the province will run out of space in its landfills by 2032 if “current waste shipments to the U.S. continue.”

However, she notes if the province were to completely stop sending waste to the U.S., the OWMA estimates the province’s landfills would reach capacity by 2028.

Siopis says 10,000 tonnes of unprocessed waste was diverted from the Durham York Energy Centre to other disposal options because the centre was at its permitted capacity of 140,000 tonnes.

She notes the waste was shipped to a combination of Ontario landfills and other waste facilities.

“As landfill capacity decreases, disposal costs will increase. Therefore, it will become more urgent for the [region] to divert more waste from disposal and to minimize the volume of waste requiring final disposal in landfills,” she says.