Incineration: no longer merely a dirty word?

At last, it would seem there's one subject on which the two main combatants in next October's Ontario election seem to be in agreement.

Both Premier Dalton McGuinty and Opposition Leader John Tory both favour state-of-the-art incineration as an option for dealing with solid wastes.

McGuinty says he hopes the day will come when the world will look to Ontario for guidance on incinerating garbage. He says his government is now allowing municipalities to fast-track pilot projects in hopes of pushing the technology forward and one day cashing in on its success.

The premier noted burning solid wastes to create energy could be a solution to overloaded landfill sites and Ontario wants to be ahead of the pack in developing incineration technology. Highlighting a test in Ottawa that involves gasification, he said that could be the future.

The Plasco Energy Group project he was referring to uses high heat to turn garbage into a gas that is then turned into power. It's under construction and expected to be operating this summer. It's the only waste-toenergy pilot project currently under construction in Ontario.

The premier said the government will let such small pilot projects bypass some timeconsuming environmental assessments to provide an opportunity for the province to become a leader in incineration, rather than getting left behind.

Not surprisingly, some environmentalists say the premier should instead focus on recycling, noting that incineration could create even more emissions than coal if it's not done properly.

As matters stand, the only remaining political opposition to incineration seems to be coming from the New Democrats provincially (who banned it during their term in office) and Mayor David Miller and his allies in Toronto, who seem to feel its use would be a step backward.

Tory, who campaigned for garbage incineration in Toronto during his run for mayor in 2003, said it's about time Premier McGuinty embraced the technology.

Proponents can point to the success of a project in Peel that slipped through before the NDP ban was imposed. In operation since 1992, the modern incinerator in Brampton has always been able to operate within Ontario's stringent air-quality standards.

And the premier's strong stand should provide needed encouragement for Dufferin County and Southgate Township councils, both currently examining gasification as an option for dealing with this area's solid wastes in a manner that we see as environmentally preferable to using landfills, and can have an added benefit in the form of energy production.

A recent report on garbage incineration by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy warned against making it the sole key to a waste strategy, but doesn't discount the technology.

There's surely no reason why incineration and recycling should be mutually exclusive, or even why permitting incineration should involve any retreat from recycling.

One tactic municipalities can surely employ is the imposition of higher deterrent fees for those who treat their wastes as garbage rather than recyclable materials.

For example, once any municipality offers its residents both blue-box recycling and green-box composting, there should be no need to continue "free" garbage pickups. We think Orangeville council is on the right track in opting to start charging households a $1-a-bag fee for garbage beyond one bag per week and contemplating a further step that would see a charge of up to $2 a bag for any wastes not put out for recycling or composting.

Ontario is clearly in a waste-disposal crisis, with municipalities and businesses currently sending nearly four million tonnes of garbage each year to Michigan. Under an agreement, that option is to end in 2010, leaving our municipalities precious little time to come up with alternatives.

All told, the province's residents, businesses and the construction industry produced 13.3 million tonnes of waste in 2005, and only 3.3 million tonnes of it - 25 per cent - were diverted.

In the circumstances, short-circuiting the normal environmental assessment processes for pilot gasification schemes makes eminently good sense in an era when even green energy projects are encountering long delays from opponents who persistently deny their Not In My Back Yard status.