Recycled to the Landfill

(Toronto, Ontario) The Toronto Star investigated organic waste recycling in the city, known as the green bin program, to document how food scraps and similar garbage are processed into compost for save-the-planet efforts on farms and gardens.

Reporter Moira Welsh went to the Newmarket, Ont., recycling facility of the Halton company and videotaped steaming loads of compost being dumped onto tractor-trailer trucks. The trucks were then followed for hundreds of miles to a landfill near Flint, Michigan. Reporters observed the trucks dumping the compost load into a section of the landfill.

So, instead of putting table scraps in regular garbage for customary trucking to a Michigan landfill, Toronto residents must pay a premium to separate the organic waste and place it in special "green bins" which are collected in special trucks and transported 60 miles north of Toronto for processing at a Newmarket compost facility which ultimately loads the composted waste into a truck that then travels at least 300 miles to Flint, Michigan, for dumping in the same landfill that customarily receives regular Toronto garbage.

Halton Recycling has admitted to sending organic waste to the landfill.

Jack McGinnis, a spokesperson for Halton, told the Star this week that Halton could not process some of the organics because they had turned "liquid" by the time the company received them.

Managers were also worried about health and safety issues for their workers, so they felt they were "doing the right thing" by shipping the waste to the landfill.

Therefore, the company asserts that the identified episode was isolated and resulted from circumstances beyond its control. Interestingly, the landfill manager added inconsistent clarification.

The first five loads were so contaminated with plastic and glass that they were dumped in the landfill with the rest of the day's garbage.

The final two loads were sent to the landfill's "compost" section, an isolated spot where unfinished material is left in outdoor piles.

I would suggest that all parties involved are not on the same page with their stories. In any event, the City of Toronto reportedly fired Halton Recycling.

[Add.] Oh, by the way, Toronto and the whole province of Ontario should be used to criticism of their recycling efforts. In a report from earlier this year, sharp criticism emerged when it became known that 20,000 tons annually of Toronto's recyclables were being transported across the continent by train to Vancouver where the trash was loaded on ocean freighters bound for South Korea and China.

People have questioned the logic of recycling Toronto-produced trash in Asia when such a "huge carbon footprint" is created in the process.