ONTARIO MULTI-MATERIAL RECYCLING INC
PICKERING AJAX CITIZENS TOGETHER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
CANADIAN RESTAURANT
AND FOODSERVICES ASSOCIATION
QUICK SERVICE RESTAURANT COUNCIL
ENVIRONMENT AND PLASTICS INSTITUTE OF CANADA
CENTRE AND SOUTH HASTINGS RECYCLING BOARD
CONTENTS
Thursday 15 July 1993
Municipal Statute Law Amendment Act, 1993, Bill 7
County of Victoria
Sharon McCrae, warden
Wesley Abbott, waste management engineer
Ontario Multi-Material Recycling Inc
Bob Flemington, president and chief executive officer
Pickering Ajax Citizens Together for the Environment
Lloyd Thomas, chairman
It's Not Garbage Coalition
Brooke Bell, spokesperson
City of Etobicoke
John Hastings, councillor
VQuip Inc
Doug Vanderlinden, vice-president
Regional Municipality of York
Craig MacFarlane, solicitor
Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association; Quick Service Restaurant Council
Hal Gregory, board member, CRFA and chairman, QSRC
Anne Kothawala, manager, government affairs
Environment and Plastics Institute of Canada
Dr Fred Edgecombe, executive director
Centre and South Hastings Recycling Board
Georgina Thompson, chairman
Jill Dunkley, recycling coordinator
Continued overleaf
Continued from overleaf
STANDING COMMITTEE ON GENERAL GOVERNMENT
Chair / Président: Brown, Michael A. (Algoma-Manitoulin L)
*Acting Chairs / Présidents suppléant: Kwinter, Monte (Wilson Heights L); Phillips, Gerry
(Scarborough-Agincourt L)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Daigeler, Hans (Nepean L)
Arnott, Ted (Wellington PC)
Dadamo, George (Windsor-Sandwich ND)
*Fletcher, Derek (Guelph ND)
*Grandmaître, Bernard (Ottawa East/-Est L)
*Johnson, David (Don Mills PC)
*Mammoliti, George (Yorkview ND)
Morrow, Mark (Wentworth East/-Est ND)
Sorbara, Gregory S. (York Centre L)
*Wessenger, Paul (Simcoe Centre ND)
*White, Drummond (Durham Centre ND)
*In attendance / présents
Substitutions present/ Membres remplaçants présents:
Eddy, Ron (Brant-Haldimand L) for Mr Grandmaître
Hayes, Pat (Essex-Kent ND) for Mr Morrow
Kwinter, Monte (Wilson Heights L) for Mr Brown
Lessard, Wayne (Windsor-Walkerville ND) for Mr Wessenger
Phillips, Gerry (Scarborough-Agincourt L) for Mr Brown
Wiseman, Jim (Durham West/-Ouest ND) for Mr Dadamo
Clerk / Greffier: Carrozza, Franco
Staff / Personnel:
Franco, Tara-Lynne, assistant to the clerk
Luski, Lorraine, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1003 in committee room 1.
MUNICIPAL STATUTE LAW AMENDMENT ACT, 1993 / LOI DE 1993 MODIFIANT DES LOIS RELATIVES AUX MUNICIPALITÉS
Consideration of Bill 7, An Act to amend certain Acts related to Municipalities concerning Waste Management / Loi modifiant certaines lois relatives aux municipalités en ce qui concerne la gestion des déchets.
The Acting Chair (Mr Monte Kwinter): Good morning. Can we call the standing committee on general government to order. The committee is dealing with Bill 7, An Act to amend certain Acts related to Municipalities concerning Waste Management. The presenters will have 20 minutes. You may use 10 minutes for your presentation to have questions or any part that you want.
COUNTY OF VICTORIA
Mrs Sharon McCrae: Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. My name is Sharon McCrae and I'm the warden of the county of Victoria. I'm here to speak in support of certain of the concepts of Bill 7 as they affect county government and our ability to manage waste materials effectively and efficiently. I am, however, also here to speak to a significant shortfall in the draft legislation, as it fails to address the question of assets and liabilities reconciliation.
Victoria county is one of the province's upper-tier municipalities which has utilized Bill 201, now part of clause 209(9)(a) of the Municipal Act, to assume certain waste management responsibilities from its member municipalities.
In brief, the county has passed bylaws under this authority to, first of all, clarify that all member municipalities are a party to our waste management master plan; secondly, to take for the county the right to comment on new waste management facilities that may be created within the county of Victoria; and lastly, the assumption of authority and responsibility for municipal waste disposal as of January 1, 1992, for all of the county of Victoria.
This last bylaw, in our minds, gave the county ownership and operating authority over some 16 open municipal landfill sites and the obligation to provide for the disposal of household waste for Victoria county residents.
At this time, the county has endorsed in principle the complete assumption of waste management responsibilities, subject to further reports, inclusive of cost estimates and resolution of questions relating to provincial expectations regarding diversion targets.
Bill 7 very properly provides power to establish user fees for all aspects of waste management. While the county appreciates these enhanced powers, your committee and the provincial government should not lose sight of the fact that rural Ontario lags behind the urban areas of the province in terms of our waste management practices and in terms of our ability to pay. I hope this new power to charge a fee for service or impose a form of "sweat equity" on our ratepayers is not a signal that the MOEE grants to rural Ontario for new or better waste management facilities will disappear.
Rural Ontario is still attempting to control pollution, while urban Ontario, through extensive diversion, is attempting to prevent pollution. Provincial funding for low-population-density waste management units will need to be continued to prevent and/or control pollution in all of Ontario.
I would also like to take this opportunity to express the county of Victoria's support and appreciation for those provisions of Bill 7 that streamline the ability of a municipality to enter on to private land in the course of an environmental assessment investigation of alternatives.
The transfer of waste management authority is a rare example of jurisdictional change between municipal tiers with a compensation clause. That clause, we suppose, is intended to reward those area residents who through either good management, planning or timing have an asset such as a landfill capacity or more modern equipment on the date of transfer that is greater than the average assets of the other municipalities. It does, however, create significant problems for county governments and must be clarified into a workable system that does not depend on the courts, with opposing lawyers and accountants.
The process that was created to resolve the issue is inappropriate for an upper-tier municipality dealing with its constituent parts on a case-by-case basis. All deals are subject to scrutiny by other potential deal makers and are therefore constrained by the need to negotiate similar arrangements with all member municipalities, in spite of dissimilar situations.
Victoria county has attempted to simplify this issue by suggesting a $6-per-tonne credit for usable space, based on an estimate of the cost of greenfield site acquisition costs, and a $2-per-tonne debit, based on conservative estimates for no problem in closure costs of the larger sites, for household waste placed in the landfill site in the last 20 years as of the date of transfer. Only if endorsed unanimously will our process work. A single objection could nullify the whole arrangement and all the time it's taken to come to that stage. In our case, we have a member municipality that sent us a lawyer's letter indicting that $75.866 million was the price of its 24-hectare landfill, which is licensed to serve only its municipality. We feel they vastly overstated the number of the available variables. However, in other jurisdictions OMB decisions on worth have been made on cash flow analysis. We feel this is wrong and will continue to be wrong under a user-fee system that expects disposal tipping fees to generate revenue for more than landfill operational costs. Neither tier of municipal government can win in these disputes.
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We strongly recommend that legislation and/or regulations be introduced that would endorse the county approach, inclusive of setting the rate to be used, with worth being based on the total estimated cost of the creation of a greenfield capacity or tonnage and liability being based on estimates for the average cost of remediation per tonne, on a site-specific, upper-tier basis.
Failing the imposition of a mandated solution as described above, we suggest that compensation should be based solely on the decision of the upper-tier council following a majority vote.
In conclusion, certainly we are here in support of Bill 7 and what it will do for us in the waste management field, but we do feel there were some areas that could be enhanced. We're looking forward to seeing some legislation that will help us in this movement of waste within municipalities within our own county.
Mr Bernard Grandmaître (Ottawa East): On the user fee question, you're very concerned that if user fees are permitted, your grants from this government will be diminished to sort of compensate for your profits, I guess, if we can call them profits; I don't think there will be any profits. What assurance or what conversations have you had with the ministry that the government will do this if user fees are used?
Mrs McCrae: I'm not sure we have any assurances that any grants are going to be available in the future, so certainly we're looking at what the taxpayers in the county can bear as far as costs for waste management. We recognize it as a need, but the difficulty is that with a smaller population base the targets the government is setting are sometimes difficult to achieve in a rural area.
Mr Grandmaître: What are your thoughts on user fees?
Mrs McCrae: I think user fees are a deterrent for people to overuse the waste system. By and large, people are sometimes unaware of how much they are creating and a little extra reminder by tipping fees being based on per-bag rates, I think, will give them that kind of deterrent to go towards a better understanding of the waste stream and diversion targets.
Mr Grandmaître: Because user fees can be used, especially in rural Ontario, do you think people will take advantage of this municipal bylaw, or this imposed law by the government, to get rid of their waste in another way instead of tagging it and you're going to find it along rural roads or whatever?
Mrs McCrae: Yes, you're right, that's true. We are finding that the user system is creating that problem.
Mr Grandmaître: What's your experience now?
Mrs McCrae: We're finding that many of the 16 landfill sites that were taken over at the time of the bylaw in 1992 did not have a user fee system in place for either ICI garbage or household garbage. Unfortunately, they were just doing it on a basis of the taxpayer paying, but they weren't meeting the targets that were projected from the ministry level. I think we've improved on our system, but the difficulty is that it's also very expensive to set up diversion-target methodologies in the rural area because of the fact that you might go down a road that's five miles long and see three or four houses, and that's a lot of miles to travel.
I think the user fee system will also create the problem of garbage on these roadsides and we've certainly had a lot of that since we've instituted user fees, tipping fees, where there were none before. But I think it's a case of education of the public as well that they're basically causing themselves a double load if they're going to dump it on the side of the road in anybody's municipality, because it has to be picked up by somebody.
Mr David Johnson (Don Mills): Warden, I'm trying to understand the problem over the last page and a half that you've described here. Is it basically that the county has assumed some 16 sites, and these are spread through the constituent municipalities, and you're trying to create an arrangement with them, because they had the authority before and now you've taken over the authority from them?
Mrs McCrae: In the assumption of the authority, we were obligated to set up a system of assets and liabilities in compensation to the municipality for the asset that it had and the liability that we were assuming, and we struck a measurement of $6 per tonne and $2 per tonne.
Mr David Johnson: The $6 is if there's space that's open and in a sense the county would be using that space?
Mrs McCrae: That's right.
Mr David Johnson: The $2 is if they're putting garbage somewhere else, is it, or what's the $2?
Mrs McCrae: That's for the garbage already in the ground, yes. That's the space that was already used up.
Mr David Johnson: It's already used, so they get a credit for that.
Mrs McCrae: A credit, yes.
But the difficulty we've run into is that very few municipalities are willing to sign off the assets and liability agreement, and yet we've been managing the garbage for them, the waste for them, for a full year. They won't sign the agreements because they're afraid that municipality X is going to get a better deal than municipality Y, and so everybody's fighting to see who's going to make the best deal and then they're going to fall in line. If it was universal across the county then we wouldn't have that pulling and tugging. There are already enough reasons for pulling and tugging in a small municipality without having this added to it. So we're looking forward to some way of resolving that issue.
Mr David Johnson: This is a new one on me. Are you suggesting there's some clause in Bill 7 that could address this situation or be helpful?
Mrs McCrae: Certainly, that was the understanding that Bill 7 was going to be helpful in that area. I would ask Wes Abbott, who's our waste management engineer, to answer that more technical question.
Mr Wesley Abbott: When they had the public consultation period a year and a half ago, when they went out to municipalities and asked what powers the municipalities wanted, we at that time spoke to the people who went around and asked for those powers to sort of internally resolve our assets and liabilities. It wasn't included and we're just here reminding them that maybe some day it would be nice.
Mr David Johnson: So you're hoping that it will be included.
Mr Abbott: Yes. We see a real problem with the willing buyer, willing seller model in a situation where waste management is essentially a monopoly, not a free-enterprise situation. We have townships coming to us expecting large sums of money because they see huge tipping fees and say it's a profit, but essentially all that revenue is needed to pay for our household hazardous waste days, our composting etc.
Mr David Johnson: So this is really your number one problem then, I guess, is it?
Mrs McCrae: That one and the question of service areas, but that's not addressed in Bill 7 either. It wouldn't be fair to bring it up.
Mr David Johnson: You mentioned your concern with regard to ongoing provincial monetary support. That's a question I've raised a couple of times and haven't really had an answer to it. What is your hope or expectation in terms of ongoing provincial monetary support in this whole issue?
Mrs McCrae: I would think initially Wes may have to answer the more technical side of this, but the difficulty we're concerned with is that the provincial targets that are set for diversion, for instance, at 50% by a certain year and so on, may be difficult to achieve in a rural area with the kinds of dollars that we have available as resources, because we don't even have the industrial tipping fees we were anticipating when we took over the landfill sites. Those industries in rural areas are few and far between, and certainly with the economy the way it is, that's dropped off significantly.
Mr David Johnson: If it's any consolation, in the urban areas it's going to be very difficult too. In Metropolitan Toronto, they estimate that they'll need material recovery facilities, that they'll need huge composting plants, and these are going to cost millions and millions of dollars. My guess is that in the rural areas you would need the equivalent of these kinds of facilities. The question is, where is the money going to come from to pay for them?
Mrs McCrae: Well, I think there's a natural resistance to any new facility coming in, even if it is going to help the waste diversion that we've targeted.
Mr Abbott: I was going to say that we see user fees as a good way of raising a lot of the money in rural Ontario to pay for some of these costs, but there's a limit in rural Ontario as to how much we can charge before it ends up on the roadside. We feel that we still need some grant support in order to keep user fees at a level where we don't drive people to do illegal acts by dumping waste on the road.
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Mr Pat Hayes (Essex-Kent): Have you seen the draft service area regulations from MOEE that were circulated to --
Mrs McCrae: The staff may have but I haven't.
Mr Hayes: Okay. Can I get your opinion on that? Would that address some of your concerns?
Mr Abbott: Yes, we have seen it, and it would address a lot of our concerns and allow the county to do what it originally intended to do about solving some short-term problems with regard to municipalities that are quickly running out of capacity.
Mr Hayes: So that would give you a better tool to control the waste, the service area, then, would it?
Mr Abbott: Yes, it would allow some municipalities that are running out of capacity to use their neighbour's landfill without a lot of expense and unnecessary hearings under the Environmental Protection Act.
Mr Hayes: If the county assumes the authority on the 3Rs, would you look on user fees as favourable as long as they are fair?
Mrs McCrae: As long as they're fair. That goes without saying. I don't know, an interpretation of "fair" is sometimes questionable.
Mr Hayes: That's a control, though, that you would have yourself.
Mrs McCrae: That's right.
Mr Jim Wiseman (Durham West): You say you have 16 landfills. How much capacity is in these landfills? How much have you got available?
Mrs McCrae: We have a considerable amount available in the present landfill, but of course it's only available at the moment to the municipality that's named in the service area. We have one municipality with 1.5 million tonnes of capacity, but we don't know whether or not in fact it could be shut down tomorrow. That kind of question in anyone's mind is always there. I mean, 16 landfill sites are valuable only if they're open and they can be used on a regular basis. But right at the moment we have some difficulty in some municipalities. We have three, I think, that are on an emergency certificate.
Mr Wiseman: We could go down the road there, but I don't want to.
Mr Grandmaître: Go on.
Mr Wiseman: The cost per tonne: Previous to that you used to tip for free? You would just be able to bring your waste in and dump it and now you have to pay per tonne?
Mrs McCrae: In many municipalities, it was part of the tax burden to have the ability to take your bags of waste to the landfill site, and some of them were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With the assumption of the power, the county tried to make it a more equitable system and we instituted tipping fees.
In some municipalities, particularly in the urban area of the town of Lindsay, there were tipping fees inasmuch as they had a tipping fee for ICI. Up to five bags were free for the household waste and after that then there was a fee. There were some rudimentary fees, but they weren't equitable across the county. Perhaps Wes could give you a more detailed analysis of that.
Mr Abbott: Most municipalities had no tipping fees. Some had small tipping fees. When the county took over, we instituted a tipping fee which was essentially a $70 per tonne universal fee, with small exceptions for small residential users.
Mr Wiseman: Have you established --
The Acting Chair: I'm sorry, Mr Wiseman, that's all the time. Thank you very much.
ONTARIO MULTI-MATERIAL RECYCLING INC
The Acting Chair: We now have the OMMRI corporation in support of recycling, Mr Bob Flemington.
Mr Bob Flemington: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you. My name is Bob Flemington. I'm the president and CEO of OMMRI corporation in support of recycling.
OMMRI, if you're not familiar with us, is the industry funding organization which helped bear the burden of cost in terms of the blue box recycling program in Ontario and bringing to the attention of industry the need to support this initiative and to change its habits in terms of how it produces and markets its products.
Essentially, I would characterize what we're doing in this province, both as a cooperative venture by government in terms of legislation and by industry in terms of their actions and the public in general, as to convert the waste management system we have in place, which is primarily a disposal-based system, to one that concentrates on resource recovery while still responsibly dealing with those things that must be disposed of.
That's an activity that isn't going to be done by legislation alone nor by public demand alone nor by industry alone, but by a cooperative effort among all three of those components in order to ensure that everyone is moving in the same direction and in agreement with the direction we're going in.
I think certainly the experience of developing the blue box to date in Ontario has been unique, indeed in the world, in terms of achieving that kind of cooperation. I would hope that as we move into a more regulated, legislated approach, that level of cooperation doesn't diminish but in fact is enhanced by regulations and legislation such as Bill 7 and its forerunner, Bill 143.
Certainly, the blue box itself in Ontario, as I said, has been an unprecedented success to date and has a lot more things that can be done with it. It's raised the consciousness, the environmental awareness of the public that they individually can make a personal contribution to waste reduction, both in how they deal with their products once they get home and put them in the blue box, but also in judicious purchase patterns on their part, knowing what goes into the blue box and what is and isn't recycled.
Secondly, I think the blue box has been a significant player in achieving the government's targets of 25% waste diversion by 1992, and I look forward to it being a major element in achieving the 50% target by the year 2000.
A hidden benefit and certainly one that is dynamic and continues to be dynamic is the impact it's had on industry and the members of OMMRI in terms of changing how they deal with their packaging and taking a more responsible role in terms of stewarding those packages through the system. It's provided a forum through OMMRI for those members to get together and talk about means by which they're going to reduce, reuse and recycle.
I'm here basically in support of Bill 7, and I'd like to tell you why. My sense is that Bill 143 helped to set the stage for this conversion I talked about in terms of the waste management system to one that concentrates on resource recovery. It builds in a lot of the mechanisms to do that. We built the blue box system based on municipal cooperation. A lot of what municipalities have been doing has not been formalized in terms of giving them the powers and the roles and responsibilities to do that. Bill 7 is an attempt to achieve or to catch up with what municipalities are already doing in many of these fields.
It certainly also signals an intent on the part of the government to create a level playing field with respect to industry and industry's funding and involvement in the process. Bill 7 doesn't do that specifically, but it's one more step towards a full system that will involve industry with a level playing field with all industries playing their role.
The second thing it does in Bill 7 is give municipalities the powers that relate to markets and marketing of materials. Certainly, it's important to note that here in Ontario, unlike some other jurisdictions even in Canada and around the world, we've been able to cope with the supply-demand balance of materials coming through the recycling system by ensuring that we had cooperation between municipalities and industry and the provincial government.
This legislation, Bill 7, gives the municipalities the power that most of them are already using, and that is to market materials and to work with industry to ensure that these materials are captured and go to a recycling market. Here in Ontario, we haven't sent any of the recycling materials to landfill. I think we can all be proud of that because I think we all worked to ensure that this has happened and that we continue to balance that supply and demand of materials in the system.
Bill 7 also gives municipalities the responsibility and the power to educate the public on a lot of these issues. Again, OMMRI at the front end was financing and continues to finance the educational component for municipalities in introducing the blue box and municipalities have been the key spokesperson to their constituency to do that, and I think it's appropriate that they continue that initiative.
The issue of user fees: Obviously, the more you can identify to the public that there is a cost to waste management and that the products they buy and put into either the blue box or the waste system have a cost burden associated with them, the better. I think that's a good public education technique. How it's applied is going to be tricky, and I think Bill 7 has left enough latitude for municipalities to deal with that, each in its own way.
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The long-term success of converting a waste management system to a resource recovery system really depends very much on integrating our recycling system and our other waste management initiatives in reduction and reuse with our disposal systems. What I mean by that is, it seems ridiculous to be sending a recycling truck around to the curbs separate, with a separate crew, from the waste collection truck. It had to be done incrementally. We had to grow the system piece by piece and step by step, and we've done that, but it's time to start to look aggressively at finding ways to rationalize the cost by putting those two systems together in a form that keeps uncontaminated materials coming through the recycling system but minimizes the cost of collecting and processing those materials.
I think that's the next wave. The next wave is to say, "Let's treat resource recovery as responsibly as we have waste removal and waste management, and let's make it an integral part of the system so that we can reduce the cost of both systems."
Certainly the provisions for moving the initiative to upper-tier government make sense from the perspective of the blue box program, specifically because once the materials are collected and taken back to a processing centre, that processing centre tends to be better centred at the upper-tier level. In the areas where you have a county and a lot of municipalities that are all trying to achieve the same objective in terms of waste reduction and collection of recyclable materials, for example, in the Bluewater Recycling Association programs around Sarnia in the Grand Bend area, you need to have that cooperation of all those municipalities together to make the program work in the processing and marketing side of the system. Concentrating on upper tier, the system was tending to move towards that at any rate, in terms of processing and marketing materials, so I think the initiative makes sense again in that regard.
As I said, OMMRI supports Bill 7. We think it's one more step in the process of this conversion. The step that's still missing is the level playing field, the need for all industries to pay and all industries to play. We need some regulation to do that. That's under Bill 143, it's not under Bill 7, but it is the key element that is now still missing in the process of achieving that cooperation of all the partners in the process of diverting our waste system. I would encourage the government to take that next step, the last step after Bill 7, to secure the financial underpinnings of the blue box system and the waste management system that converts to resource recovery.
Mr David Johnson: Let's maybe pick up on that point, Bob, because over the years I guess we've talked about funding a little bit. Your industry has been primarily involved in the funding of the capital, on the capital side, and has put a lot of money, certainly, into the blue box program, the trucks and various facilities, but there's a lot of money that's going to be required in the future.
We've had discussions around here through this committee about what sort of funding. It comes up over and over again with every deputation. If you look into your crystal ball, what do you see? What sort of partnership, what sort of percentages do you see in terms of funding of the -- I'm looking at the capital side of the recycling process: the blue boxes, the trucks, the facilities, maybe the MRFs, that sort of thing, the compost plants. What formula do you see involved: industry, provincial government, municipal governments, user fees? How do you see that working?
Mr Flemington: The original concept was that industry would help out on one third of the cost of the capital of launching the blue box program, and that was the initial step, and at the time, as I said, incrementally developing the system. That was the logical step.
Now that the system is in place, we've got 80% of all of the households in Ontario serviced with a blue box or equivalent kind of system for recycling. Now we have to look at how we're going to operate the system. "Operations," in my view, includes replacement capital. The system, from my perspective, is essentially capitalized in terms of its initial trucks, boxes and processing centres. What needs now to be done is to operate the system. From my perspective, the next round is an operating issue. We have to expand the number of materials in the box and we have to operate that system with, primarily, a municipal-lead focus because they are municipally based programs.
In terms of the cost of that program or the formula by which one might identify how the costs should be borne, it seems reasonable that there be some recognition that recycling contributes to waste diversion; that is, that there is a cost savings on the part of the system to not having to dispose of those materials. So there is a municipal contribution, from my perspective, that needs to be part of that equation.
The formula needs to involve an industry contribution in some form. There needs to be a recognition that revenues come from the materials, which is, in a sense, part of that industry contribution if you look on it that way, but I tend to separate it out as an element in the formula.
If you look at that formula, it would make sense to say, "What is a reasonable amount of money that would have been saved by not disposing of those products?" and call that the municipal share, and then find a way to finance the balance, and I would see that financed by user fees. I see user fees as a mechanism by which municipalities pay their share.
I then see industry stepping forward with programs like the stewardship program that the Grocery Products Manufacturers of Canada and the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors have brought forward to the government -- I know you've had a deposition on that already -- and the one that soft drink manufacturers are already administering through OMMRI by paying top-ups for their fair share cost of municipalities dealing with soft drink. I think that needs to be expanded beyond those grocery products and soft drinks into many other products. That's the essence of the level playing field regulation I was talking about.
Mr David Johnson: Do you see OMMRI as a continuing funder?
Mr Flemington: I certainly hope so. My sense is that OMMRI is a vehicle by which we can roll out the system. We can accumulate industry funding and then properly administer that funding into the system.
Mr David Johnson: We're talking about one third, one third and one third again, then? Perhaps one third OMMRI, one third municipal -- you haven't mentioned provincial in here either.
Mr Flemington: I don't see a similar formula to the way we did capital in the past. My sense is that we need a formula that reflects, ultimately, the true cost of handling a specific element through the system.
That's going to take a little time in terms of transition, but I think it's important that the individual elements, packaging element or newspaper or whatever, that are going through the system in fact attract a true externalized cost of that product. If it's good for the system, it will encourage its adoption; if it's bad for the system, it will encourage it to modify itself in order to be good for the system.
When you start to differentiate costs, it's very complicated, and I see the role of OMMRI as helping to do that internally within industry to differentiate the levies among industries.
But I don't see a one-third, one-third, one-third kind of an approach to this. I think we need to look at what is the true cost of disposal and what savings the municipalities have by not landfilling and then industry looking at what is the true cost of recycling those materials after revenue from the materials.
I think it's an altogether different formula.
Mr Wiseman: You said you have not sent any materials to landfill, but we constantly hear people in their infinite wisdom, like Gary Herrema and Mel Lastman, indicating that in fact lots of material goes to the landfill sites, and it's stockpiled all over southern Ontario just waiting to be dumped.
Mr Flemington: It's an interesting concept. You might have noticed that Mel has stopped saying that because he now has the facts, and I've been giving him the facts since the beginning.
Mr Wiseman: Gary Herrema has not.
Mr Flemington: No, and I think it's a way of drawing attention to the issue. I once was arguing at a committee meeting with Howard Moscoe and I said, "You know, you're wrong." And he said, "I have a right to be wrong." I said, "Not always."
Mr Grandmaître: So he's always right.
Mr Flemington: And not always wrong.
My sense is that I think in this case it's misinformation. That is not true. There are no warehouses full of materials. Any stockpiles of materials are waiting for accumulation of volumes large enough to market. There have been no materials going to landfill other than contaminated materials that were just not collected and processed properly.
Mr Wiseman: That leads me to my next question. The next question is contamination. I have maintained in the beginning that certain municipalities, Metropolitan Toronto being one, have designed their systems to fail and that they don't really want to do the recycling because they make money out of tipping into Brock West and Keele Valley at such rates that it subsidizes other programs in Metropolitan Toronto to the detriment of those communities.
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My question is that given that they have the blue box program and that the material is sorted at the curb and then all dumped together into the truck when it is being picked up, wouldn't that indicate sort of a dinosaur approach to recycling and add huge costs to a system that needn't be there?
Mr Flemington: Actually, it's the opposite, and it's what I mean by integration in the system. Sorting at the curb is a very expensive process. Sorting in the processing centre is far more cost-effective, so ultimately commingled collection makes sense, like the city of Toronto is doing in the packer.
Mr Wiseman: But they wind up sending an awful lot of contaminated glass at low tonnage costs to Consumers Glass.
Mr Flemington: Yes, and this is a processing problem, not a functional problem in the blue box system. It doesn't have to be that way. I guess what I'm pointing out is that we can, I think, engineer a system that does effectively collect commingled materials in a truck that collects those things both for landfill and for the recycling centre, if we put our minds to it and really deal with the issues.
I think it's back to what you're saying: The key here is that we haven't really attempted to integrate the recycling system into the waste management system. I don't subscribe to any kind of a sinister plot on the part of either city of Toronto or Metro to scupper the system by putting in something that doesn't work. I think it's really a function of it being baby steps at the front end. You had to introduce the concept first, have people buy into it, have municipalities accept the fact that it is a reasonable thing to do and can be done at reasonable cost and that it is the right thing to do.
I think we've crossed that bridge. I think we're finally there. I think the public has said: "I want my blue box. I want recycling no matter what, and if it costs me more, I'm willing to live with that." I think we've passed that point, but we had to do some of those halting steps to get there.
So Metro said: "Yes, we need four processing centres. Let's build one to start." When you build one to start and then the city of Toronto collects it all on Wednesday and dumps it on the tarmac, you get contamination problems. But that doesn't mean that either their intent wasn't right or that the system doesn't work. It just means we're on the road to the right direction.
Mr Wiseman: I guess I'm just a tad bit more cynical, coming from Pickering and the incompetent administration of Brock West and its own engineers condemning it for its inefficiency and its lack of concern.
I have one last question and it has to deal with the cost. There are some materials that we'll be able to collect in the blue box program that we'll be able to sell in the marketplace, and we'll be able to command a price higher than the raw materials needed. But there is a large number of products that will consistently not command a price in the marketplace to be recycled and be sold.
To me, that seems like that's going to be a detriment. If we're going to really make this integrated system work, we've got to find some way of making sure all the products that are capable of being reused are reused, and that the price is not an inhibiting factor in that. So that means always having the price of the recycled material lower than it would cost to use natural material. How do we achieve this kind of goal?
Mr Flemington: My sense is that using the price of recycling materials as the market mechanism to make this work is not necessarily the answer, particularly not the answer while we're incrementally growing the system. We're going to have cost-inefficiency in the system until it's integrated, so my sense is that we need a bridge that identifies those costs to individual -- let's pick a product -- let's say boxboard in the system or film plastic in the system, and have them bear that cost until such time as they've created the markets, generated the price mechanisms etc.
So market development is part of the issue, but I don't think it's the answer today in terms of how to finance the system. I think we need subsidies, as we have had from industry through OMMRI. I think we need to expand those into the operating side of the equation. I think there are signals from certainly soft drink and the GPMC within OMMRI that this is what they're willing to do. I think it's the right direction to go.
Ultimately, I still am convinced that the system can carry itself, but it's going to take some time and it's going to take a lot of cooperation between industry and basically municipal governments in terms of running these programs and operating them properly. Frankly, I'm anxious to get on with that. I think we've been treading water for a good deal of time now. It's time to get off dead centre and start to move forward.
Mr Grandmaître: I agree with you that the blue box program has been a tremendous success in the province of Ontario, and also with the cooperation of municipalities and the provincial government to get involved in the blue box program. The main responsibility was to achieve the 25% by the year 1992.
Being in the resource recovery business, I read an article just a few weeks ago that the 50% objective or target by the year 2000 will be practically impossible to achieve if the provincial government gets out of its grants program. Do you agree with this or not?
Mr Flemington: I don't think it's tied to the grants program per se. I think you've got to fund it in some way. Certainly you don't want to have a system that just downloads on to municipalities and say, "It's your problem; you have to pay."
I think we have to find an appropriate cost-sharing formula that doesn't do that, because the bottom line, if you lose the cooperation of the municipalities, if they don't do things in good faith, if they don't move forward to integrate the system, for example, it isn't going to work and you're not going to reach that 50% target. So my sense is you have to balance the legislation in a way that corrals everybody in a cooperative mode but doesn't hamstring them in such a way that they can't negotiate and cooperate among themselves.
I think provincial funding may be a bridge to go from here to when it's fully funded by both municipalities and industry. That's part of a negotiating process of figuring out where does the money come from, who pays, how much and what's equitable, but my sense is that level of negotiation hasn't even begun in that regard. I think that's what I'm talking about in terms of a level playing field.
We need to sit down and talk about it. I think there's a role for the provincial government as a coordinator and an initial funder, as has been the case for municipalities, because they basically have essentially the waste management responsibility, and for industry, because consumers are buying their products and putting them into the system. We need to get on with that.
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much.
PICKERING AJAX CITIZENS TOGETHER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
The Acting Chair: The next presenters are not here, so we're moving on to Pickering Ajax Citizens Together for the Environment. Could you please identify yourself for Hansard and then you may begin.
Mr Lloyd Thomas: Good morning. My name is Lloyd Thomas and I'm chairman of PACT, Pickering Ajax Citizens Together for the Environment. What I'd like to do today is give you just a quick overview of who PACT is, what we've been involved in, give you a general overview of our thoughts on the act and then give you some specific comments on it.
Pickering Ajax Citizens Together for the Environment is a citizens' group with a wide public membership that has been actively involved in environmental and waste management concerns in the regional municipality of Durham and specifically in the towns of Pickering and Ajax since the mid-1980s. PACT spearheaded the fight against the establishment of the P1 dump site in Whitevale which was proposed by the previous Liberal government.
Currently, for the past months PACT has been actively striving to change the Interim Waste Authority's undemocratic, closed, top-down, arrogant process into a democratic, open, bottom-up and responsive process which places environmental factors first.
PACT has been actively involved in all aspects of solid waste disposal in the region of Durham and as such has become a strong and authoritative voice on these issues.
PACT is a non-profit, registered corporation without share capital and has as its primary objectives the maximum reduction, reuse and recycling of waste and the safe and responsible landfill of waste.
PACT strongly supports legislative action that will in fact strengthen and increase the continuing success of reduction, reuse and recycling programs. Reduction of garbage is key to ending the enormous dumps that have become a nightmare for the people of Ontario. Reduction of garbage is key to ending the frustrating, costly and endless struggles by the people with governments to make the search for dump sites open, fair and democratic, with environmental concerns the only consideration in dump site locations rather than the processes currently being used by the IWA and its predecessor, the Solid Waste Interim Steering Committee.
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While in general PACT regards Bill 7 as a positive and constructive step towards achieving the objectives of greater reduction, reuse and recycling, it also has some serious concerns and questions about the bill. In addition, with today's recession and with other major reductions in transfer grants to municipalities, the government has an obligation to see that its fiscal policies don't sabotage and derail its critical and long-standing commitments to reduction, reuse and recycling. Municipalities must be given every incentive, including financial, to continue and increase the reduction, reuse and recycling programs they have undertaken.
Former Environment minister Jim Bradley began the blue box system in 1985. On March 10, 1989, Minister Bradley announced a diversion of 25% of waste from landfills and incineration by 1992 and a 50% reduction by the year 2000. Two years later, on February 21, 1991, Ruth Grier, Minister of the Environment, confirmed the goals established by Jim Bradley in 1989.
PACT strongly believes and has said so many times that the target of 50% reduction in waste by the year 2000 is far too low. In a brief to Minister Grier dated October 10, 1990, PACT urged that the goal for waste reduction be set at 80% for the year 2000. Again in PACT's submission on Bill 143 in 1992, PACT urged higher recycling goals.
Increasing the daily reduction of all garbage by the highest possible percentage is the most environmentally sound, the most economical and the most efficient policy for everyone, people and governments, to pursue with determination and vigour.
In clauses 208.6(2)(c), (d) and (e), Bill 7 states that municipalities may provide incentives for ratepayers to increase the amount of waste that is recycled, reused, composted or reduced. That is excellent. Positive encouragement for every ratepayer and householder in the form of tax credits or rebates is the best incentive to get everyone involved in achieving the reduction targets. A system of tax credits will reinforce the need and provide an incentive to take part in all waste reduction initiatives and methods.
The province of Ontario must provide similar incentives and rewards for the municipalities. In this regard, PACT recommends: that a new line be introduced into the provincial and municipal budgets and that line be designated the "waste reduction grant"; that a basic, separate annual waste reduction grant be given to all municipalities in addition to all other provincial transfers; that the waste reduction grant be increased annually as the tonnage of garbage going to landfills or incineration is reduced and as the tonnage being recycled, reused and composted is increased.
In addition to the environmental wisdom and necessity of waste reduction, such waste reduction grants will provide a significant financial incentive to municipalities to achieve as high a provincial waste reduction target as possible each year.
At present, the soft drink industry contributes financially to the cost of the blue box recycling program. PACT recommends that any industry or business whose waste is collected in the blue box program must, along with the soft drink industry, help pay for the blue box program. Canners, grocery manufacturers and distributors, supermarkets, newspaper publishers, wineries and distillers create waste. Each of these industries and businesses should gladly help to pay for the collection and marketing of the waste that they create and distribute daily.
On February 21, 1991, Ruth Grier, the Minister of the Environment, stated:
"I intend to develop an aggressive marketing strategy to encourage a strong and sustained demand for source-separated used materials. Market development is one of the most challenging aspects of our action plan."
More than two years have elapsed since that statement. PACT recommends that the province immediately redouble its efforts to promote the marketing of recycled products and to assist actively municipalities in their marketing strategies. The provincial government has taken far too long to get its marketing strategies in place. Consequently, this has become a great source of frustration and has hurt the financial incentive to recycle. The more successful the marketing plans and strategies, the greater the revenue that municipalities will gain and the more economically advantageous recycling will become for all concerned.
I've got some specific concerns on Bill 7 now.
Section 208.1: Bill 7 defines "waste management system" as follows:
"`Waste management system' means facilities and services for the management of waste, including the collection, removal, transfer, processing, storage, reduction, reuse, recycling and disposal of the waste."
Section 25 of the Environmental Protection Act defines "waste management system" as follows:
"`Waste management system' means any facilities or equipment used in, and any operation carried out for, the management of waste, including the collection, handling, transportation, storage, processing or disposal of waste, and may include one or more waste disposal sites."
The question is, why are two different definitions of waste management required? Are there other definitions of waste management system in other acts? PACT recommends that there be one and only one definition of waste management system which includes and stresses the requirement for reduction, reuse, recycling and composting. The statute will therefore confirm that the inclusive definition of waste management system stresses the positive, constructive alternative to establishing dumps and incinerators in the total reduction of waste.
Section 208.2: PACT emphatically supports giving the municipalities the power to establish waste management systems that support and strengthen the reduction, reuse, recycling and composting of waste.
Section 208.3: PACT opposes any appeal to the OMB under this subsection. The decision of the local elected council should be final.
Section 208.5: PACT opposes user fees because they are negative and are regarded as punishment rather than an incentive. At all times ratepayers and householders must receive every positive encouragement to reduce, reuse, recycle and compost. In addition, PACT's experience has been that to evade higher fees at dump sites, some persons and businesses will dump their garbage on roadsides and in fields. In the next section we want to talk on some more positive recommendations in this regard.
Clause 208.6(2)(a): PACT strongly supports all efforts to separate all recyclables and organics at the source. If the householder separates, it saves money and it makes the collection more efficient and less subject to contamination.
PACT regrets that section 208.6 doesn't have a subsection requiring the composting of kitchen and some yard waste. After all, 31.6% of all residential waste and 5% of industrial, commercial and institutional waste consists of kitchen and yard waste. Much more aggressive initiatives are required to increase the number of households that have backyard composters. PACT recommends that a subsection be added that requires dwellings with backyards to compost kitchen and some yard waste.
Clause 208.6(2)(b): Again, PACT opposes user fees.
Clauses 208.6(2)(c), (d) and (e): PACT supports all positive initiatives that encourage people to reduce garbage sent to dumps and to encourage reuse, recycling and composting. In addition, in section 4.1 of our brief PACT recommends a waste reduction grant -- and I'll elaborate a bit on that -- to the municipalities that increases annually as tonnage to the dumps and incinerators is reduced. As the tonnage is recycled, reused and composted, it is increased. PACT further recommends that as an incentive to householders to recycle the annual municipal tax rate be reduced by the amount of the annual increase to the waste reduction grant paid to the municipalities, regions and counties.
What we see is that right now, currently, municipalities receive tipping fees and royalties on garbage they produce. In effect, we're rewarding municipalities for dumping garbage. It should be the other way around, that as those tipping fees and royalties decrease, the amount of waste reduction grant increases, so it's an offsetting type of grant.
Sections 149 to 160: Subsection 160(2) states:
"On the 1st day of January, 1997, a regional council shall be deemed to have passed a bylaw under section 150 to assume the waste reduction powers from all of its area municipalities effective on that date."
In light of subsection 160(2), PACT cannot understand why this bill does not confer immediately all the waste powers given to the regions in sections 149 to 160 on the day Bill 7 becomes law. No matter what happens, the regions will have all the responsibilities of Bill 7 on January 2, 1997.
To avoid delays, duplication and unnecessary expenditures and to get on with this task, give the critical responsibility for the reduction of garbage and reuse and recycling and composting to the regions now. In addition, Bill 7 should make it clear that the area municipalities are responsible for such matters as source separation and collection and the region is responsible for everything else, including handling, storage, processing and marketing.
Clause 151(1)(c) states:
"The regional corporation may give its consent to a person or to a municipality, other than a participating area municipality, to provide such services or facilities, which consent may be given upon such terms, including the payment of compensation, as may be agreed upon."
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PACT strongly objects to the regional corporation being given the power to allow any municipality outside of Durham region to operate such services or facilities within Durham. PACT wants the council that is elected by the people of Durham to be directly responsible for the manner in which it handles waste reduction and waste disposal. PACT, and especially the people of Pickering, have suffered for 18 years under the management of Brock West by an outside municipality. No one who runs that dump is accountable to the people of Pickering. Enough is enough.
Subsection 152(1) states that:
"If consent is refused under subsection 151(1), or the applicant and the regional council fail to agree on the terms related to the consent, the applicant may appeal to the Municipal Board which shall hear and determine the matter."
PACT strongly objects to any appeal to the OMB under this section. If the elected council decides it does not want to give consent to the person or the municipality or cannot agree upon terms, that decision should be final.
Specific comments on part X, section 154: I think we made some comments earlier. I've got copies here. I'll leave these with you. See PACT's comments on section 151 in our brief. PACT supports agreements with persons and local area municipalities but not with any outside municipality.
Specific comments on Bill 7, the Regional Municipality of Durham Act: There are some questions here that we'd like to get some clarifications on.
What is the intent of Bill 7 in repealing clauses 36(5)(a) to (e) and subsection 36(13) of the Regional Municipality of Durham Act and replacing them by adding the new subsections (5.1), (5.2) and (5.3) in Bill 7? PACT seeks a full clarification so that it may comment further.
Do these clauses referred to above allow Durham to operate and derive revenue from the new dump to be established in Durham by the IWA? We need some clarification.
Subsection (5.1): Why is section 208.5 of the Municipal Act in Bill 7 omitted from subsection (5.1)? We need some clarification there.
Does this and other sections of Bill 7 give the region of Durham full power to own and operate every type of waste disposal facilities, including waste disposal sites and facilities for reduction, reuse and recycling and composting, now and in the future?
Does Bill 7 take precedence over Bill 143? Please clarify the relationship between the two.
As stated in PACT's brief on Bill 143 dated January 22, 1992:
"PACT believes the responsibility for solid waste disposal should remain primarily with the regional municipalities. The regional municipalities must be required to fully and properly discharge their responsibilities under the provisions of the Environmental Assessment Act with public hearings and full open public participation at every stage."
On the Municipal Affairs Act: Does the classification of "a site for the disposal, transfer, reduction, reuse or recycling of waste" as a public utility mean that these sites will be subject to property taxes? If this is not the reason, what is the reason for that?
That's all I have. Thank you.
The Acting Chair: We have time for one question from each caucus and one minute each.
Mr Hayes: You mentioned that you were certainly not in favour of user fees. Of course there are some, and probably many, people who feel that this would be an incentive to reduce the amount of waste, but what alternative would you see to making it a successful program?
Mr Thomas: Coming from a rural area, we see that as a negative because we see a lot of dumping that's done on the roadsides now and in the ditches and in the fields. We see a lot of trucks pulling up at night, pulling in down deadend roads and that and just unloading everything in the area. We see that as very negative, to discourage people from going to the landfill and to discourage them from paying whatever cost it is. Lower tipping fees, maybe the rate; I'm not sure what the solution is.
Mr Hayes: Have you got something quick, Jim?
Mr Wiseman: I'd just like to thank Lloyd for coming. Again, PACT has done a thorough job and has raised a number of questions that I guess we're going to have to take out of Hansard and get back to you on some of them.
My quick question has to do with dumps. Do you think that dumps are going to go the way of dinosaurs, that we don't need them any more?
Mr Thomas: I can see that happening. I can see that disappearing. Eventually, you get to the point where you can make use of everything that is produced. You get so that packaging is down to an absolute minimum, that everything is reused, everything is recycled. I can see the actual end of dumps at some point in time.
Mr Grandmaître: I was interested in your comments about municipal financial support and also even rewards to municipalities. Can you --
Mr Thomas: You have to reward the people to get them recycling, and if grants were given to the municipalities and if those grants were passed on through the people, through their municipal taxes, the incentive is there for the people to cut down their garbage as much as possible, to recycle as much as possible. So instead of rewarding them for taking garbage to the dumps, what you're doing is rewarding them for taking recycling to the recycling depots.
Mr Grandmaître: I will keep my promise: one question only.
Mr David Johnson: I just wondered, in view of your comments about the Interim Waste Authority being closed and arrogant and that you were looking for a more open, fair and democratic process, and your comment that hopefully the target would be 80% rather than 50%, but the likelihood that it will stay at 50% and that landfills will be required and that the people of Durham have suffered over the years, would your group consider supporting an environmental assessment on the Adams mine site, which would be certainly removed from Durham, with the likely alternative being, if we don't look at all of the alternatives, Durham being quite likely a candidate for a landfill site in the future again?
Mr Thomas: We've always felt that every region should be responsible for its own garbage and it should look after it. The idea of sending the garbage somewhere else to dump on somebody else has never been a feeling that PACT has endorsed. We're doing that now. We're receiving Metro's garbage at Brock West, so they're in effect dumping on us, and it's not something that we have control over. When there are problems at Brock West, we have nobody we can go to who's accountable to the people, because it's all elected councillors who live in Metro. We have real concerns there, so we would never really endorse something like that.
The Acting Chair: Thank you. This committee stands recessed for 15 minutes.
The committee recessed from 1108 to 1122.
IT'S NOT GARBAGE COALITION
The Acting Chair: Our next presenter is It's Not Garbage Coalition. Please identify yourself for Hansard, and then begin.
Mr Brooke Bell: Good morning. My name is Brooke Bell, spokesperson for the It's Not Garbage Coalition. The It's Not Garbage Coalition is an informal but broadly based coalition of community, labour, business and environmental groups which have joined together to advocate the implementation of an aggressive campaign to reduce Metro Toronto's solid wastes. Our action agenda is supported by CUPE and the OWMA, ie, the public and the private sector organizations that manage Metro's wastes.
We believe that the largest proportion of materials in the municipal solid waste stream of Metro Toronto can be diverted from disposal. Most of the materials that are currently being disposed of as waste can be reused, recycled and composted.
I've distributed, via the clerk, Mr Carrozza, briefs for eight members, one for each caucus and additional copies for those who requested it. That's all we could afford, as a non-profit organization. Can I confirm those are passed around?
Mr Hayes: Excuse me, is there is any reason the PA doesn't get a copy?
Mr David Johnson: There's a message there.
Mr Hayes: Is there a message there?
Mr Bell: There's no message there.
Mr Hayes: Oh, you're trying to reduce waste.
Mr Bell: I'll speak to you at the end. We're trying to reduce it, yes.
Mr Grandmaître: They know you, Pat.
Mr Bell: If policy commitments to waste reduction are to be honoured, then Metro Toronto, under powers conferred by the province, should approve a waste reduction action plan or should approve a set of reduction, reuse and recycling plans based upon the following principles:
(1) Mandatory separation by all waste generators; (2) secure storage of used materials for which effective separation and recycling methods exist; (3) the allocation of funding to waste reduction initiatives that reflects the priority of these waste management strategies; (4) the creation of a waste reduction office that would exclusively be dedicated to implementing an ongoing program of waste reduction; and (5) the assistance and cooperation of community groups to establish environmentally sound sorting, recycling, storage and compost facilities.
The action agenda for waste reduction is a 3Rs approach to materials management and to programs which create community benefits. Reduce, reuse, recycle: We mean to signify by those 3Rs terms the diversion of materials and products from disposal facilities by source reduction, reuse or recycling.
Source reduction is any measure that reduces the consumption of materials or products and that minimizes the quantities of post-consumer materials that must be processed for reuse, recycling or waste disposal. Reuse denotes the return of used materials to productive use without treatment and without changing its form or use. The use of used materials as replacement for all or part of primary material in manufacturing best describes recycling. Lastly, leaf and yard material composting denotes the breakdown of organic material by aerobic decomposition using bacterial action and other micro-organisms for the production of stabilized compost fertilizer. With respect to creating community benefits from 3Rs, we believe developing reduce and reuse programs can qualitatively improve community-based businesses, neighbourhoods, schools and healthy activities. "Our economy, a subsystem of the finite and non-growing earth, must eventually adapt to a similar pattern of development," note Meadows and Meadows in Beyond the Limits. In sharp contrast, growth scenarios for the waste management sector show increases in its size, as well as dramatic increases in the production and therefore collection of non-sustainable materials.
On June 17, ministry staff introduced members to an environmental bill. I would encourage the committee to be mindful of that when reviewing the municipal powers. The bill will provide municipalities with powers to design and execute one of the largest and most successful pollution prevention programs in the world, namely, the Ontario waste reduction action plan. For other members, the provincial strategy for the waste crisis in the greater Toronto area may be your basis for seeking municipal powers, now an issue square in front of you.
Aside from broadening solid waste management achievements under powers in this bill, there are other programming areas for municipal governments. I know of one municipality which has reported it's reduced air pollution from the use of blue box materials in manufacturing. By substituting blue box materials for primary materials, that assists this government's environmental program in reaching federal CO2 reduction goals.
Still, for other governments, local enterprise/small business development accompanied by new employment programs can be the basis for acquiring new municipal powers. In the paper Local Jobs From Secondary Resources: 3Rs-based Community Economic Development, there's a long list of reduce, reuse and recycling applications: green storefronts; reuse, repair and recycle stores; home composter distribution; midscale composter installation; public education on and promotion of waste reduction; bottle washing; tire reuse; white goods disassembly; construction demolition reuse centres; local waste exchange centres; compost sales.
Some of these initiatives would need cooperative ICI recycling collection, specific zoning for community-based collection or separation requirements for residential materials collection. New municipal powers extend important 3Rs powers, so municipalities can execute the parameters of their own program, region-specific.
With respect to amended sections of the Municipal Act (208.2 to 209), we strongly support the content of the bill. Without these amendments, the provincial strategy for action on the GTA waste crisis would fail. Note in particular the definition of "waste"; the definition of "waste management system"; note subsection 208.5(1); section 208.6; the definition for "waste management power," all of which establish an effective, permissive power extended to municipalities.
We consider the amendment to the Regional Municipalities Act's definition of "waste" and the inclusion of waste reduction power both to be very positive in the bill. Lastly, we strongly support subsections 8(1) to (4) of the bill as well. Members from Metro and York will especially appreciate the importance of these amendments and urgency in their respective local councils for speedy waste reduction.
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I wanted to refer to one of the documents in your package that accompanies this statement. If you tab into the green dot, the document named "Resource Management Systems, an Alternative to Current Waste Management Systems, it is a new document released this March, endorsed by 16 groups broadly scattered across the province.
From its summary, these groups support the following points: "Our objective is to be a society in which we have the least possible negative effects on the natural environment, we maximize our use of used materials, we use only those raw materials that are necessary to fulfil our needs, and we share our resources with each other."
Note this next point: "We should immediately set targets of 85% diversion of used materials from disposal by the year 2000 and 98% diversion by the year 2010.... A major step that must be taken to move us forward is to replace municipal waste management master plans with municipal official used materials plans," or a variation thereof. These plans should focus on making the best possible use of used materials."
I'll move on to the last piece in your package, and that is the first eight pages of a report released April 1993, Blue Box 2000. I want to illustrate to the committee some innovative and forward-looking policy and programming areas to underline the importance of strong 3Rs policy or permissive powers at the provincial level.
The centre and South Hastings waste management program, also known as the Quinte regional recycling program, has been very successful since their introduction in 1991. I'm going to read a couple of points from pages 2 and 3 that's in the accompanying package.
"The Quinte regional recycling launched the Blue Box 2000 recycling program to demonstrate how a traditional blue box program can be expanded to its maximum potential." Further down, "(1) There's no single method or technology to reduce residential solid waste." Another point, "People are willing to participate in a pre-collection sort of recyclables. (7) "Cost per tonne declines with economies of scale." (9) "It is more efficient to sort some materials at the curb than at the processing facility." (10) "There's a synergistic effect in waste diversion."
Further: "Public involvement, so essential in a source-separated, multistream system is reinforced through all the programs. The cumulative results of personal efforts become readily apparent and give the diversion system credibility and reinforces the system of an integrated program." (11) "There are community spinoff benefits of the system. A multistream source separation system is a labour-intensive program. Over 30 people work on the collection processing program, while several others are employed in coordinating roles, compost manufacturing and distribution, and separating textiles at a training centre for the severely employment disadvantaged."
This program largely compartmentalizes residential waste into a single vehicle and it's one of the most forward-looking programs, I think, in Ontario. It's something that the Metro and York regions should look to quite closely or carefully.
I want to resume, back on my statement on page 4. In regard to strengthening planning for 3Rs, the coalition is recommending that the committee make waste reduction policies requirements in official plans.
Municipal plans or their equivalents should be amended to (1) incorporate by reference the waste reduction policies set out in a municipality's waste reduction bylaw; (2) provide that the use and development of land within the municipality occur in a manner that promotes the realization of all practical waste reduction opportunities; and (3) set appropriate policies to guide the development and selection of sites for various types of recycling facilities.
In conclusion, the municipal powers in Bill 7 are important and very much needed for waste reduction, other related environmental programs, the development of new, small enterprises/businesses and the greening of communities. Keeping the sections related to integrated municipal planning and planning for wastes, including industrial wastes, will strengthen long-term planning as well as support action plans such as the one designated for the greater Toronto area waste crisis.
Lastly, I would like to strongly encourage members of the committee from Metro and York regions to support the bill in this form. More than any other members, you will be making decisions that immediately and directly bear on the success of environmental programs in your regions. Thank you. That's the end of my statement.
Mr Grandmaître: On page 1 of your presentation, fourth paragraph, "If policy commitments to waste reduction are to be honoured, then Metro Toronto, under powers conferred by the province, should approve a waste reduction action based upon the following principles" -- I'd like to address your third and fourth principles. I'll start with number 3: "The allocation of funding to waste reduction initiatives that reflects the priority of these waste management strategies." Can you give me your thoughts on that one?
Mr Bell: Okay. The allocation of funding in Metro's instance is particularly important. There's an inherent conflict in one department, the solid waste division of the Metropolitan Toronto works department, dealing with disposal and the conflict there over revenues and where they are designated. The goal under this action plan, which is elaborated on in the accompanying package, is to separate the two departments to keep the integrity of the financing systems that are dedicated to their goals.
Mr Grandmaître: I see. Number 4, "the creation of a waste reduction office": Don't you have faith in the ministry?
Mr Bell: As I understand it, the policy proposals and the content of the bill are meant to confer on regions extended powers not presently found in the Municipal Act and other acts. It's our position that from here on in, the region is capable of having these powers and incorporating and integrating into other planning exercises official plans or discrete waste reduction bylaws or other policy-oriented exercises.
Mr Grandmaître: But what would be the main responsibilities of this waste reduction office?
Mr Bell: In the document that's accompanying the statement, it can be done, 50% diversion achieved by 1993. Section 4 is really the kernel of that document.
This waste reduction task force discovered that there are roughly half a million tonnes of organic material in Metro Toronto's waste stream and just under a million tonnes of fibre, as it's called in the report: wood and wood-derived products. That's the first strong step that members of this task force identified: composition, and then integrating material types into present community programming.
The committee needed to take the next step. Metro Toronto was reluctant and slow on waste reduction generally and didn't adopt a community-based approach, and I think a waste reduction office can help to achieve some of those goals.
Mr David Johnson: Just carrying on, then, with item 5, which is the community-based approach, what are we talking about, 100 or 500 communities? How many communities are you talking about in Metropolitan Toronto?
Mr Bell: Personally, I live in the area that creates the most waste in residential-sector Metro and the ICI sector, and that's unit generation area number 1. There are eight such units inside Metropolitan Toronto and there has not, to my knowledge, been an attempt by Metro to identify --
Mr David Johnson: I was just asking how many community groups you see within Metropolitan Toronto.
Mr Bell: The answer to that is closely linked to the planning models that are now there --
Mr David Johnson: And the answer is?
Mr Bell: -- and it may be 18.
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Mr David Johnson: Eighteen. Now, within these community groups, you envisage some volunteers and some staff, obviously, and you were talking about, I think, disabled people. I don't know if that was the same linkage or not and maybe I won't sidetrack you on that, but there would have to be people doing sorting, recycling, storage and that sort of thing, so obviously there would have to be staff involved. Where would the money come from to pay for the staff?
Mr Bell: We hadn't addressed that. In the appendix of the task force is a proposal by a community group to enter into an arrangement with Metro Toronto for identifying in its community, South Riverdale, a spot for a composting plant. An interim steering committee was struck. It sat for a year and languished for six months after. The community was investigating composting facilities in the States. The funding mechanisms weren't clear, and I don't have an answer for that based on the community-based approach.
The results from Quinte show that the costs per tonne are comparable to residential solid waste collection, so we shouldn't be too far off the mark if we model it after that. All we're doing in the residential waste programs is compartmentalizing wastes that are there, generation of waste in residential section is largely constant.
Mr David Johnson: Without being too specific on the community groups, then, in terms of the waste reduction program in general, how much money do you see in terms of percentage terms from the province, how much from user fees, how much from municipal governments, how much from the private sector? Where do you see, roughly, the money coming from?
Mr Bell: We don't have a figure specific to Metro.
Mr Wiseman: You've raised an interesting point in terms of the contradiction in Metro between the collection of refuse and the revenue that they raise from that, and the mandate to recycle. There's no way that you can reconcile those. Metro's making huge dollars from landfills in other communities, not in its own, my community being one of them. This argument, you've probably heard more than once.
The ownership of the landfill site was raised by the previous group, by PACT, and whether the municipalities should have it. They also raised the issue of having a reverse grant system in that you are not rewarded on the basis of how much you collect, but you are rewarded on the basis of how much you eliminate. Would you care to comment on what you might think of that kind of an approach in terms of the administration of the waste system?
Mr Bell: Waste specifically, not 3Rs?
Mr Wiseman: Waste -- I don't even like to use the word "waste" because I think they're all natural resources just waiting to be reused, and the next aspect of the question then has to do with cost.
When OMMRI was in here, they were talking about finding markets to pay for the waste, and I made the point, at that time, that in order for you to really develop markets, the costs of your diversion material have to be less than what your natural raw materials are going to be coming into the system for a demand system to be created.
Mr Bell: My approach to this is that the cost avoidance, moving materials out of disposal systems, will cover you long into the future. Your theme or other ideas on the cost of the Beare Road landfill being excessively high, and that's the reason for Metro for not closing, I think is quite valid. We just don't know those post-closure care costs, and Metro hasn't disclosed.
That was one component in the SWEAP environmental assessment Metro didn't touch, and we were at a loss for so long on financing and costs. That's why, right up until today, we don't have a lot on what Metro's approach should be. Their component study on regulatory measures was really good, but they didn't go that next step to financing.
Mr Wiseman: I know that in Brock North landfill site, they are on a daily basis removing one tanker and sometimes two of leachate from that landfill site. There were 143,000 tonnes put in there almost a decade and a half ago, and yet it's still leaking and they have to build these wells to collect it. We don't know how much in leaching into Duffins Creek. The same is happening at the Brock West landfill site, and now we understand that they're having to put into place monitoring wells around the Beare Road landfill site.
Nobody's talking about those costs, nobody's talking about the opportunity costs that are lost, except maybe when we heard Alcan talking about the opportunity costs in terms of loss of the aluminum.
The Acting Chair: I'm sorry, time's come to an end. Thank you very much.
Mr Bell: You're welcome.
CITY OF ETOBICOKE
The Acting Chair: Could we have the representative from the city of Etobicoke, please? Could you identify yourself for the purposes of Hansard?
Mr John Hastings: I'm John Hastings, councillor, ward 12, city of Etobicoke.
Thanks for the opportunity for letting our views be known today. Basically I'm not going to read the brief; most people can read that themselves, I'm sure.
What we would contend from our city is that -- and I think I reflect at least a good majority of the members of our council -- if this bill becomes law, which it's probably likely to, then before it becomes law there ought to be some specific test demonstrations done by Metro to demonstrate clearly what the cost advantages would be for Metro to assume, through this bylaw, that it can take over garbage collection and do it better.
There's nothing in the bill, as most pieces of legislation that are drafted around here, that shows what the economic cost impact would be to the taxpayer, whether the taxpayer is in Scarborough or anywhere else. They all pay the same amount of money per property, based on non-market value assessment. So if Metro thinks it can do it better, then at least it ought to undertake a pilot test project to prove that it can do it better, because the way we see it now, this present proposition is just another comfortable arrangement by Metro to take over garbage.
Essentially, if you're going to take over garbage, as we have suggested is another possibility, then why not do it in the context of a complete takeover? If you're going to show that Metro, as a regional government, ought to be a unitary government and you do away with the local area municipalities, then do it in terms of a study. Have a task force of eminent citizens look at it in terms of all the powers and responsibilities of Metro vis-à-vis the local area municipalities. Let them bring forth figures, whatever the item is; in this case, garbage. Let them show that on a per-gross-tonne basis, on a net tonne basis -- whatever the numbers you use, let the citizenry have the opportunity to view that.
I don't want to argue that we're opposed to it simply because we're opposed to it. I prefer to argue that we have some substance to the opposition. If you can prove better that Metro is the best way to go, then let it prove it on an economic basis, which it hasn't done. This bill is not good legislation from that viewpoint, in our estimation. It simply is the old, regulatory, restrictive prescription for dealing with an issue. It doesn't even show us what the costs would be.
In fact, our works commissioner has a memo for us -- another delightful surprise for tomorrow morning for our council -- which clearly shows how Metro is operating even in its staff-level communications between the works commissioners and the commissioner of works from the Metro Toronto federation. I'd like to quote to you, sir, this illustration of this attitude. This is from Mr Mitcham, our works commissioner, re "User fee industrial, commercial and institutional waste collection." This is a quote directly:
"On July 13, 1993, I received a telephone call from R.G. Ferguson, commissioner of works, with regard to Metro Toronto's position with respect to ICI waste collection and disposal."
This is the part I really love: "We are advised that Metro Toronto will be seeking a user fee for all municipally collected ICI waste, commencing in 1994. Such recommendations will be presented at the works committee" -- that is, Metro's works committee -- "on July 28, 1993. The user fee will be paid by the city of Etobicoke. The fee will approximate the commercial tipping fees currently in effect ($90 per tonne).
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"Our decision to discontinue service to industrial commercial locations will mitigate the potential cost impact of this action. Metropolitan ICI user fees could increase 1994 city of Etobicoke costs by $1.125 million, should council rescind the earlier decision to change the level of service."
Out of the blue. We knew this was coming. Mr Ferguson, on many occasions, denied that they would even try it. The present legislation in Bill 7 accommodates Metro. It hardly does anything to accommodate the area municipalities, which -- and I'm not speaking for all of them -- have proven, with difficulty, that we can get together and resolve an issue on a consensual and cooperative basis.
This legislation does the very reverse. "It doesn't matter what the previous history was, it doesn't matter how good it was, how bad it was. That's irrelevant. We know best. This is it. We're going to give Metro the capacity to have a bylaw to take over garbage."
Even if you provide a stipulation of 50% of the Metro population plus 50% of the cities, it still doesn't really get to the point of cost-effectiveness for the local taxpayer and tenant. I think they get completely ignored in this situation and it becomes, unfortunately, in the media a battle of jurisdictions. We're not interested in that. I'm just saying, personally, if Metro can do everything best, then let's do it in one fell swoop after a study instead of this little bit here, little bit there in terms of creeping Metroism.
If Metro knows the way to do it, it certainly hasn't proven it, either in garbage collection -- because you don't have any data to demonstrate it. They have problems just maintaining the responsibilities they're supposed to be dealing with. One small example is the cutting of the grass on the road allowances on Metro roads, not the city roads of whatever municipality in Metro. It's a minor example, but it's a big irritant for folks.
To be fair to Metro, it has done a lot better this year, surprisingly, but it had to get a lot of phone calls, because people really don't know where to go when they see the grass about the height of these tables, certainly last year and the year before.
Those are my basic remarks. If this bill passes, it should be at least held in abeyance until Metro can prove, through a pilot project, that it can carry out the costs on a per tonne basis as effectively as the city of Etobicoke has proven in the appendix I provided, and also in other areas of the whole garbage activity.
The Acting Chair: Thank you. Given the fact that we are going to be called for a vote pretty soon, I would like to keep the questions as short as we can.
Mr David Johnson: I don't think it will be quite that soon. At any rate, John, as best I can make out of it, the way the province is anticipating funding in the whole area of waste disposal is that Metro would be able to charge the local municipalities a tonnage fee, and then the local municipalities would be given the right to charge a user fee. Of course, that would involve that you would somehow charge each home in Etobicoke for the number of bags it uses or whatever. That's how you would raise the money to pay for the waste system in Etobicoke.
I wondered what your views would be on such a system, how popular you think that would be, how easy that would be to implement in Etobicoke.
Mr Hastings: If the user fee philosophy prevails, we'll make sure that the Metro councillors will get all the phone calls, every one of them. I'll make sure that the phone numbers of all the Metro councillors and the MPPs who are responsible for this piece of legislation are well advertised. We can't even get through an ICI change in service regarding business and institutions in the city.
Right now we have approximately 8,000 businesses, 5,300 of which have made their own private contracting arrangements. We had decided on July 2 -- and we've just gone through it the third time with people from the business community coming in -- that there are about 2,300 others who will have city service removed. They're saying this is unfair etc. A major number of people have already said, "I've paid my money in taxes. If you're going to put a user fee in, how are you even going to enforce it?"
Mr David Johnson: Let me tell you the rebuttal on that. The rebuttal on that is that if the user-pay system pays for the cost, then you in Etobicoke will be able to take that portion out of your budget, and therefore taxes will go down and people will be so happy with you because their taxes have gone down.
Mr Hastings: Unless this bill or an accompanying piece of legislation would allow a local -- imagine a local area municipality having the capacity to decide intelligently which users should get a reduction in taxes. This is a theme that comes through in many instances with people who are opposed to the change in ICI. They think we have the capacity to get a reduction in taxes. I said: "You have to go to an appeal tribunal, and even there you will not probably get a favourable decision because they look at only comparable assessment of properties, not what somebody is paying in terms of taxes for whatever service."
Mr David Johnson: I saw a lot of flak coming from the residential, from the home owner, as a result of user-pay because they'd have to pay $10 a bag or $20 a bag or whatever, but you see a whole lot of flak coming from the ICI sector as well.
Mr Hastings: Just based on what we're trying to do in our own area in terms of trying to make ourselves more efficient.
Mr David Johnson: Okay. Since my time's probably running out soon, you mentioned that Metro should be able to prove that it can collect garbage more efficiently. But I don't think Metro will be able to do that, because the local municipalities surely can do that most efficiently.
Another suggestion that has come forward is that 50% of the municipalities representing 50% of the people of Metropolitan Toronto, so that would be at least three municipalities representing at least half the people in Metropolitan Toronto, would have to give their consent before Metro could take this over.
Is there any other modification of this that you could suggest to us today as a secondary position beyond the one that you put forward as your primary position?
Mr Hastings: Well, either demonstrate it on a pilot-project basis or give the area municipalities some capacity to reduce taxes. I think what's going to happen is that you're going to diffuse accountability even more under this approach. People out there don't really care whether it's Metro or the city of Etobicoke. Just get the service done and get it done efficiently.
We're saying, okay, if a larger level of government is going to do that, then they ought to be able to prove it. I think maybe Metro could do it in terms of what they're attempting with yard pickup. The city of Scarborough, ourselves and North York -- I think North York has already decided to probably have Metro pick up yard waste. That would be the beginnings of proving to the taxpayer that they can do it better.
Mr Hayes: John, are you just representing ward 12.
Mr Hastings: No, I'm here representing the city of Etobicoke?
Mr Hayes: This is what council was supportive of?
Mr Hastings: Yes.
Mr Hayes: Okay. In follow-up to Mr Johnson's question, if in fact the requirement for Metro's assumption of the powers was changed from a simple majority to at least 50% of the councils of the area municipalities, representing at least 50% of the population, would that make a change? It wouldn't be simply giving Metro total control.
Mr Hastings: I don't think it's really a matter of who gets control. I think we're really now into the budgetary implications of legislation. Whatever the issue, in this case garbage, you have to prove to the taxpayer and the tenant that what is happening is better service and that it's done at a fairly reasonable cost.
A lot of people probably came in here and got involved in the control issue. Most of them don't know where Metro is, and don't really care. They just want their stuff done, and they want it done not yesterday but today at a reasonable cost. If you can't do that, I guess we're going to have to get somebody in there who can run our affairs more effectively. They don't care about jurisdictions. All of us politicians get all wrapped up in, "It's got to be us, because we did it best."
Although I may present that argument, what I'm really saying is, "If you're really going to do it, prove it." Even my own council said, "We're opposed to Metro Toronto imposing user fees." I've expanded on that, on area municipalities for waste disposal, direct an area municipality to deliver waste to a specified location.
Everybody's opposed to everything today basically. I'm trying to put a little meat on the loaf of bread, put a little better than minimal margarine, say why. I think it's an issue of economics. If the larger unit can do it effectively, they ought to be able to prove first they can do it. If they can do so over a year, then, hey, let them have it. Then they can have all the phone calls.
The way it is now, the local area municipality, the councillors, are going to get the flak. I don't mind taking flak for something that I directly screwed up, but I'm sure as hell not going to take the flak when it's a little bit over here and a little bit over there.
Mr Hayes: That's exactly the way I felt when we became government. It was the same thing.
Mr Hastings: Right. I'm giving you an alternative that if you're going to have this legislation go through, have Metro set up a pilot project. I don't care whether it's part of Metro -- actually, Metro has done that with our wet-waste dry project, to prove costs.
The other thing I would bring up, and I haven't mentioned in the bill, is that under the present arrangement, with all its flaws, there are certainly flaws here, there is a bit of innovation going on. In fact Mrs Grier, when she was the Environment minister, authorized $100,000, maybe even a little more money, to create a vehicle -- and we have it right now; we're trying to get all the kinks out -- where you can collect all types of garbage basically on the same delivery day, make it even more efficient.
That's where I think we should be driving the stuff, market development for recycling and all that, not getting into, "Oh, we'll give Metro this and then they'll be able to do it better, 50%." The taxpayer out there is looking for real, effective costs and good service delivery.
The Acting Chair: Thank you. This committee is going to have to recess until 4 o'clock because there's a vote being called.
Mr Hastings: My apologies, Mr Chair, for not having your general government committee on there. I thought it was resources development.
The committee recessed from 1202 to 1601.
The Acting Chair (Mr Gerry Phillips): Ladies and gentlemen, I wonder if we might begin the meeting. My name is Gerry Phillips and I'm acting as Chair this afternoon.
Mr David Johnson: A new Chairman every day.
The Acting Chair: That's true.
Mr Wiseman: Is this part of the shift work, Gerry?
The Acting Chair: Yes. My understanding is that the group that was due to be here at 4:20 is here now. If it's all right with the committee, I would suggest we start with the group. Just by way of background for the group, we've allocated each group 20 minutes. I'm required to stay very much on that time and so we will stick to that time. You have until 4:20.
You can spend the full 20 minutes, if you want, on your remarks, but I think it's more useful for the committee if perhaps you spend 10 minutes or so on your remarks and give each of the members an opportunity to ask questions of you, if that's all right. If you have a 20-minute presentation that can't be changed, you can do whatever you want.
The last thing I'd say is, could you identify yourself, because we have something called Hansard here that records off those microphones. It's important that they record who you are and your testimony. With that, perhaps we could begin.
VQUIP INC
Mr Doug Vanderlinden: Good afternoon. My name is Doug Vanderlinden. I'm the vice-president of VQuip Inc. Joining me here today is Tom Boushel, vice-president of VQuip Inc, and Kevin Neufeldt, vice-president of HaulAll Equipment of Lethbridge, Alberta.
VQuip appreciates the opportunity to provide our comments from the perspective of a supplier, designer and distributor of recycling equipment in Ontario. Our work involves many Ontario cities and their consultants to provide cost-effective equipment solutions for recycling and composting, collection, handling and storage. HaulAll is a manufacturer of engineered depot collection systems for recycling and refuse as well as specialized recycling and composting collection equipment.
Our comments today are directed at three basic points which stem from Bill 7 and its interrelationship with the 3Rs regulations.
We are supportive of the expansion of recycling efforts, but have some deep concerns about the direction of government policy introduced in Bill 7 and the 3Rs regulations. We appreciate the need for coordinated efforts in regional municipalities to permit the control and use of new and existing landfill and recycling facilities as set out in Bill 7. We are encouraged that the scope of recycling in the 3Rs regulations has been broadened to ensure that major generators are included and that the requirement for both mandatory and supplementary materials was addressed.
We applaud legislation which will aid in Ontario's goal to achieve significant landfill diversion by the year 2000, provided it is done in a cost-effective manner which is responsible to the taxpayers of Ontario.
Our specific concerns with the proposed legislation are as follows: (1) the elimination of alternative methods of collection, (2) the loss of the ability of cities to control the costs of recycling collection, and (3) equal accessibility and treatment for all segments of the population to recycling. I'd like to touch on those briefly, if I may.
With respect to the elimination of alternative methods of collection, innovative efforts to reduce the total cost of recycling in cities and towns has been stifled since the introduction of Bill 7. Prior to the release of this proposed bill, many cities were actively exploring alternative methods to collect and transport recyclables. Consideration for these new methods included our depot collection system in conjunction with their existing curbside collection services. This proposed bill has eliminated these initiatives and the potential cost savings which might be realized. Proposed pilot programs designed to test the HaulAll depot system's cost savings have all been placed on hold.
As subsidies are eliminated for curbside collection, the cost to the taxpayer will continue to escalate. The combination of Bill 7 and proposed amendments to the Waste Management Act regulation 347 will not leave cities and regional municipalities with any option but to pass rising costs on to an already overtaxed general population unless new alternatives can be found.
At a time when municipalities, institutions and the public are searching for cost savings without sacrificing the quality of service, we believe they should be afforded every opportunity to implement such programs. As an example, we have enclosed an excerpt of a newspaper article highlighting the significant cost savings achieved by the use of depot recycling systems in the city of Calgary. Such systems are under active consideration by cities and consulting engineers across the province of Ontario, but will be eliminated from the selection process in most parts of Ontario by virtue of Bill 7 and the 3Rs regulations.
Innovation and field testing of these proven systems such as depots must be encouraged if we are to reduce the costs of refuse and recycling without sacrificing our landfill diversion goals and costs. We ask for your support to consider the relaxation of the elements in Bill 7 and the 3Rs regulations which inhibit innovation and the piloting of alternative or supplemental systems to curbside collection.
With respect to the issue of cost control for recycling collection, Bill 7 allows regions to dictate the flow of material to designated sites and will mandate source separation for the blue box in addition to the control of yard and leaf collection. This has the potential to substantially increase collection costs for cities and resultant taxpayers.
We believe cities should be allowed to select the collection vehicles and storage systems which allow them to operate at the lowest possible cost while meeting material diversion standards. The mandating of collection types and sorting methods without regard for alternatives eliminates the latitude for cities to cut their costs.
With respect to the issue of equal accessibility and treatment for all segments of the population, we believe that the accessibility to recycling will not be consistent for all residents of Ontario. Accessibility will not be equal for residents within cities who have different types of accommodation, since service differentials exist already for families who live in single-family dwellings, town homes and high-density housing. In addition, different services are provided to taxpayers depending upon the size and location of the community in which the taxpayer resides. For example, depot systems are allowed in northern Ontario but not in southern Ontario, where curbside collection will be mandated and further enforced by Bill 7.
As suppliers of equipment who have successfully harmonized household blue box usage with HaulAll engineered depot collection systems in cities such as Calgary, Lethbridge and Squamish, BC, we object to the regulations limiting the use of depots to northern Ontario. Definitive studies by the city of Calgary have demonstrated cost savings of up to 70% per household over conventional curbside collection systems by using our depot and collection method.
A copy of the final pilot report of the city of Calgary has been included in this submission for your consideration. If you refer to pages 12, 20 and 41 of the study, further details of the actual cost savings and participation rates are detailed. These savings were achieved without adversely affecting material contamination or participation rates. The Calgary depot system provided full access and equal opportunity for all residents to participate, regardless of housing density or type of dwelling.
The combination of mandating source separation and the assumption of waste management powers by the regions under Bill 7, coupled with mandated curbside collection methods and frequencies under the 3Rs regulations, will not permit depot systems a chance to test-pilot in southern or eastern Ontario. Accordingly, we ask for your support to ask the Ministry of Environment and Energy to relax the requirement for curbside collection in southern Ontario.
We are committed to enhancing recycling efforts in Ontario. Our corporate mission is to provide the most effective recycling equipment at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer and the cities. We appreciate your consideration of our comments to assist us to continue our efforts to achieve this goal in Ontario.
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The Acting Chair: We've got about 12 minutes left. We'll start with the Liberal caucus for four minutes.
Mr Ron Eddy (Brant-Haldimand): I want to thank the presenters for their presentation, which is a very damning condemnation of the bill. It appears to me that you very strongly believe in democracy and that's one of the reasons you're so critical of this bill. As a former municipal representative, of course, I have great concerns about it as well.
In your opinion, should the bill go forward, can it be salvaged or should a new bill be prepared? Would you be prepared to list some important ingredients in that? I know you've already said some of the things that are wrong, but could you submit something like that -- it would be most useful -- and what mainly would it contain?
Mr Vanderlinden: We'd be more than willing to do that. I guess the fundamental issue for us is the combination of the bill itself and regulation 347. Our position is that those two should be looked at together, that right now the operation of the two individually will remove a lot of freedom of choice for the cities and for the taxpayers. We'd be more than willing to specifically itemize our concerns and make some suggestions.
Mr Eddy: If there's one thing that needs to be supported, it's freedom of choice and indeed the opportunity for municipalities to look at a cheaper way of doing things, providing it's proper and in order. Many municipalities want to do that, and I really appreciate the views you've expressed. It's not the first time, of course, that Ontario has looked to things that have happened in in the west to be the right thing. I believe the depot stations are in use in Ontario in many places but this would eliminate them.
Mr Vanderlinden: No. The depot stations that are currently in use in Ontario are a much different configuration or type. When Calgary took a look at its situation two or three years ago, it evaluated all the alternatives and basically decided there were two choices for it to handle its recyclables. They set up three basic evaluation criteria. They were essentially participation rates, the material quality and processing requirements, cost of operation and public input and acceptance.
They chose to take a look at two different systems. One was curbside collection, which is currently mandated by the MOE and is basically being pushed through the 3Rs regulations. The second alternative was the depot collection using the HaulAll engineered system. They ran those two concepts side by side in the city with approximately equal populations, and at the end of a one-year full trial that's completely documented here, the final result was that on a per-household basis the depot collection system was 70% cheaper than curbside collection.
Our point is that we've been working with a number of consultants across Ontario, we've been recommended to pilot in a number of areas and the combination of Bill 7 and the 3Rs is preventing us from doing that. If nothing else, we think it's essential that people give us the opportunity to pilot the system and to go out and prove that the cost savings that were achieved in Calgary may be achieved here.
We're not at odds with the blue box program. We just think it's tremendously expensive and we think that some things could be integrated with it to bring the overall cost of recycling down. We oppose legislation which doesn't allow freedom of choice to do that.
Mr David Johnson: One area where the depot system is used right here in Metropolitan Toronto is for apartment buildings. There are varying types of situations. I'm not entirely certain what the government has in mind for apartments in the future. Is it your reading that either Bill 7 or the regulations that you referred to disallow the possibility of having depots associated with apartment buildings in urban areas?
Mr Vanderlinden: At this point that's our understanding.
Mr David Johnson: Does that come under the regulations?
Mr Vanderlinden: It's our understanding that it's coming from the 3Rs regulations, that from the 3Rs regulations the type of equipment that's going to be used for collection is being mandated and Bill 7 is backing up that mandate.
Mr David Johnson: Maybe I'll come back to that, because I can't fathom what they've got in mind if it's not some sort of a depot system.
Mr Vanderlinden: Right now a lot of municipalities that are looking at collecting materials at apartments are using large, high-volume auto carts and are rolling them out to the corner. We're not aware of a lot of apartment buildings that are using large depot collection systems. Metro has some blue bell systems. Our concept is quite a bit different than that.
Mr David Johnson: One of the problems, I guess, that'll be thrown at you is the participation rate. I've just flipped to page 41. I may be interpreting this incorrectly, but there's a column entitled "Drop-off." Is that where you comment on the participation rate? Does that 47% mean that with the blue box system you get 72% participation, but with a depot system you get 47%?
Mr Vanderlinden: It's a fundamental issue again with respect to curbside collection and a depot. Calgary, in its study, achieved a 72% participation rate but its participation was limited, or from our way of thinking, it's discriminatory. It only looked after single-family homes to fourplexes, so in the distribution of curbside, they picked up 72% of their target. When the city of Calgary took a look at the participation rate for dropoff, it was 47%, but that was of general population.
If the city of Calgary was to fairly present the numbers, it would have taken the entire population, whether that population lived in single-family homes to fourplexes, and it would have added to it apartment dwellers, town homes and all the other people who could not be serviced.
Mr David Johnson: Have you done any study looking at the single-family home owners, what the participation rate would be with the blue box, which in Metropolitan Toronto is about 90%, and what it would be with the depot system, not including the apartments but just the single-family homes?
Mr Vanderlinden: I guess that's the difficulty right now. Without putting names to places without their permission, we have been under discussion with a number of major municipalities within the GTA that have wanted to pilot the system. Since the introduction of Bill 7, everybody has had to walk away and say, "I'm sorry, we can't take a look at any lower-cost alternative." That's the difficulty for us.
I think I would like to make one more point, though, with respect to participation. If we're going to shoot for 50% diversion by the year 2000, participation is one factor, cost per tonne is another, and public acceptance is a third.
Everybody right now is very concerned, and I understand the concern, that you don't want to alienate people who are currently using blue box systems. The way Calgary got away from that was it gave everyone a green box, but the green box was taken to the depot. What the depot is really doing is only acting as a cheaper form of collection and sorting. In our area here, everybody will still get a blue box, but it would be their choice to bring it to the station.
One thing we are finding is that now, as the frequency of blue box collection starts to step out to two and maybe three weeks, a lot of people are winding up with recyclables that they faithfully collect in their house at the end of a week. They would like to get rid of them, they would like to get them out of the house, but now they have to wait for the truck to come.
Mr David Johnson: Good point.
Mr Wayne Lessard (Windsor-Walkerville): I can understand when you're talking about the costs that it would be cheaper to have a depot than to pick up at everybody's house individually. I can understand that, but I guess by taking the blue box either to the roadway out in front of your house or down the street some place, to me there'd be a difference in the number of people who would take that extra step to take it down the street.
In Calgary, how do people do that? Would they be taking them in their car or would they be walking down the street?
Mr Vanderlinden: They used a variety of methods. One thing that there is a differential with in the city of Calgary is that there was already a fairly strong deposit program.
I would liken your comparison to, many of us in this room probably enjoy the occasional beer. Everybody is very happy to take the beer bottles back to the beer store to go and purchase more beer. The way the depot system worked was that you're going shopping every week, and they were able, through public acceptance -- really, when it came down to it, it was a cost issue and when the public looked at the cost of paying over 70% more for the privilege of having recyclables picked up at the curbside, they were willing to take the material to the shopping mall where they were going anyway.
One thing it did, the study pointed out that it provided a level. In one way, it's an inconvenience to take your material; on the other hand, it gives you complete freedom to take the material when and where you want to.
Mr Lessard: It seems to me that in Ontario we have a high participation rate with respect to the blue box at the present time. People are used to it. If you gave them that freedom of choice, my fear is that they may just not decide to recycle so often. They wouldn't see that incentive there to do that.
Mr Vanderlinden: I understand.
Mr Lessard: You talk about participation rate, and I take it from that, that's the number of families who actually participate in recycling. But if we're talking about waste diversion and we're talking about rates of recovery, what weight per capita do we actually get using each of these different methods? Do the studies here reflect that, not just the participation rate but how much you actually recover by the blue box and by actually taking it to a depot?
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Mr Vanderlinden: What was addressed in the study were the four basic criteria: participation, cost of operation, the material quantities which were actually recovered as well as the material quality and contamination.
Mr Lessard: You never said anything about the quantity of recovery.
Mr Vanderlinden: The recovery quantities were within 15% to 20%. I guess our whole point is that all we're asking for is an opportunity to allow the people of Ontario and the municipalities who want to take a look at it to take a look at the depot collection alternative. The regulation is preventing that right now.
Mr Wiseman: I'm looking at page 41 as well in terms of the dropoff. The numbers concern me to a considerable extent in that the material quantities collected is a dropoff of 2% in the Metropolitan Toronto area on residential waste, which is about 1.3 million tonnes a year. That dropoff is 20,000 tonnes. At $90 a tonne, it's a considerable amount of money, whatever $90 times 20,000 is: $1.8 million. Also, the dropoff would certainly be exaggerated the more outreach you go, the further out you go in terms of what you're trying to collect.
This study, from what I've been able to read so far, did not take into account the increased cost in tipping fees projected against the loss of revenue included in the cost of dropoff. So I don't know how successful this program would be, given also that this type of program was the rationale behind 1972-73 in Metropolitan Toronto, where they created depots for people to drop off and it just didn't catch on. It killed the program.
Mr Vanderlinden: I understand your concerns. I'd be happy to meet with you and go through the study in detail. This study was effective enough that the city of Calgary opted for depot collection across the entire city.
Mr Wiseman: This study would probably be effective enough for Gary Herrema to go for it, but he doesn't know what he's talking about either.
Mr Eddy: That's a little low. Let's stick to the question.
Mr Vanderlinden: I'm not involved in the politics today, gentlemen.
The Acting Chair: I hate to play the role of timekeeper here, but I think that's my job.
Mr Vanderlinden: May I make a closing comment, sir?
The Acting Chair: A closing comment, sure.
Mr Vanderlinden: I'd be happy to meet with anyone to discuss the soundness of the Calgary study. We have taken customers out there, major municipalities who have toured the city of Calgary, met with their people and taken a look at their experience. Well over 50% of Calgary's population are displaced easterners. A lot of people look at Calgary and say it's a different place, it's a different time, the dynamics are different.
The bottom line is that what we're concerned about is getting the proper rate of diversion at the lowest possible cost. We met the diversion targets and we saved 70% of cost, and for the taxpayers of Ontario not to be at least looking at the concept, or closing the door on piloting, is something that we can't understand. We think it's something that should be looked at.
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much. I appreciate your being here today.
REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY OF YORK
The Acting Chair: The next presentation is from the regional municipality of York. Just so you understand the ground rules here, each group has 20 minutes, and we have to stick to that fairly tightly. The committee would appreciate any opening remarks you want to make, but if there's an opportunity for questions, we've found that most useful. Identify yourself and speak into the microphone so we have a good record of this.
Mr Craig MacFarlane: Good afternoon, Mr Chairman and members of your committee. My name is Craig MacFarlane. I'm a York regional solicitor. I'm here on behalf of York regional council to express our views on Bill 7. I'll be very brief, to leave time for questions, and I've provided a brief summary of our comments on the legislation.
First of all, I'd like to say that we support the general thrust of the legislation. We think it's extremely timely and we're pleased that it finally provides the regions with the power to establish and operate waste diversion facilities. That's something that has been lacking in our legislation. We need this, of course, as an important adjunct to our existing responsibilities in providing waste disposal for our residents.
We appreciate the flexibility that the bill provides in the division between the area municipalities and the region so that the details as to who does what can be worked out between the two levels by the 1997 deadline. Also, the inclusion for the setting of rates for collecting and disposing of waste by class, volume, weight etc is important.
Also of importance to us are the provisions in the bill providing for joint municipal-private sector arrangements in recycling and waste disposal. We have a large recycling facility in Markham all set to go, which is a joint venture between the region and a major private entity. Of course, York does support the continuation of the right to compensation for waste disposal facilities. That's continued into the act as well as the ability to set the terms and conditions of this.
There is one suggested recommendation for legislative consideration in the bill. It's really a point of clarification. I think it's there already. But you might just want to consider a provision that would allow the industrial-commercial-institutional sector to continue to have a choice in terms of what its disposal arrangements are. We are not looking for, at this point in time, mandatory flow control from the ICI sector. We don't think that's appropriate and it would certainly not be appropriate given the fact that we the region, or any of the regions, can't assume overall responsibility to receive that waste. We just simply aren't equipped to handle it.
One tangential point that I think is very important: There is a recent court decision which has now held that recycling facilities can be considered waste disposal sites and therefore have the requirement of a full hearing under the Environmental Protection Act. Right now, our Markham recycling facility is on hold because the operator can't get a certificate of approval for this.
So I would recommend -- and I think Ministry of Environment staff have put together a package of amendments -- immediate consideration to amending the EPA regs to exempt recycling facilities from being considered waste disposal sites. I know the court decision will probably be under appeal, but those appeals take quite a long time to deal with. Just so that everybody can proceed with their plans for recycling in the province, I think that would be an important point to clear up.
Mr David Johnson: I just wonder, in the region of York there really isn't a whole lot in here in terms of general funding. There may be a reference or two, but was there any discussion about funding of the whole waste management program, the recycling program, the mixed waste?
Mr MacFarlane: It's going to cost money. There's no doubt about it. In effect, we're subsidizing it out of our general revenues. There's no doubt that the products you've got to market just don't cover the cost of recycling today.
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Mr David Johnson: Has the region of York put forward any kind of a recommendation with regard to how waste should be financed in the future? I think what's being contemplated through this bill is that the region would charge a fee to the local municipalities and the local municipalities would have a user fee to go back to the individual home owners. Now, that's going to be greeted with certain amounts of favour.
Mr MacFarlane: I don't think we can really get away from that. I think, in terms of the user-pay system for recovery/recycling, that's --
Mr David Johnson: But will that cover the costs? It's my estimation that unless the user fees are very steep, there'll be a whole lot of money that's going to be required to meet the 50% reduction by the end of the decade. Somebody else is going to have to be on the hook, and if so, who should it be? Has your region given any thought to that?
Mr MacFarlane: We haven't taken any formal position on that, but our environmental services department is certainly looking at that, along with our treasury department. That's something we are looking at, together with other user rates in the region for other forms of services.
Mr David Johnson: You've commented on the Environmental Protection Act. Many municipalities which have the requirement to go and find a landfill site have indicated that the whole environmental process is very difficult, very convoluted and takes a long period of time. I guess with Peel, the Interim Waste Authority is assuming that responsibility right now, but did you have any other comments with regard to the environmental process?
Mr MacFarlane: Absolutely. York region is on record as supporting a full and complete environmental assessment of all alternatives to landfill. We currently have a constitutional challenge under way which is seeking the help of the courts to provide for a full environmental assessment process so that York region residents are not left with having possibly no site whatsoever. If the joint board ultimately decides, on the hydrological and other studies, that the final site doesn't work, Metro and York are left with nothing, so we are seeking to have an inclusionary approach of all alternatives examined.
Mr David Johnson: Such as the Adams mine site.
Mr MacFarlane: Adams mine, multiple landfill sites, incineration -- there are other technological advances in the area that have been made.
Mr Hayes: The Ontario Waste Management Association has proposed amendments that would clearly remove the flow control of the ICI from municipal jurisdiction. Do you support that, or would you like to comment on that?
Mr MacFarlane: The Ontario waste management amendments, I believe, go too far. What they do is seek to take the municipal regulatory power away from the waste management system, and that's clearly not appropriate. It goes way beyond flow control. All we're saying is that the ICI sector ought to have a choice in terms of final disposal. In other words, we shouldn't prohibit export beyond the jurisdiction for waste for the ICI sector. If export is more cost-effective, more competitive, that's where it should go, especially in the GTA municipalities where we have existing municipal landfills with a finite life. In the case of Keele Valley we've got maybe nine years left at best, providing the ICI people don't come back.
There is a practical concern about mandating non-export of ICI waste from a region such as York, simply because we've got nowhere to put it. By the time all the environmental assessment matters are concluded, we have to husband our existing landfill resource very carefully.
Mr Hayes: Do you support that? Do you support taking it away -- I mean, not putting all of the authority on to the municipality for flow control, the ICI?
Mr MacFarlane: No, I think the municipalities ought to have that authority, but there also should be the option of the private sector to be able to make their own arrangements for disposal. They should be permissive, not mandatory.
Mr Wiseman: I was concerned about the comment you made about the judicial decision to --
Mr MacFarlane: Yes. That's the county of Northumberland.
Mr Wiseman: Yes. I believe that section 309 of the Environmental Protection Act has been altered under the certificates of approval in terms of what you need to have to short-circuit or to make the process a lot faster, and I was just saying that in terms of concern, it's a major concern to me, because if it takes too long to get a certificate of approval for the diversion of a natural resource from a landfill site, then that will be counterproductive.
Mr MacFarlane: Exactly. Based on our latest discussions with MOEE staff, there is still going to be a significant delay involved in getting this off the ground. However, we're meeting with them again next week, and if they can come up with something for us that's great, but I think, just given an examination of this decision, it might be prudent to clarify the definition of "disposal" in the Environmental Protection Act, because that seems to me to be what the court got hung up on.
Mr Wiseman: Is there wording that could be done in Bill 7 or would it have to be done under a regulation?
Mr MacFarlane: I would do it by regulation. I think a regulation could take care of it, or you could change the definition in the Environmental Protection Act.
Mr Wiseman: That would take an amendment to the act, which would be a long time.
Mr MacFarlane: I would say by regulation would be the most appropriate.
Mr Eddy: Thank you for your presentation. I'm interested in your proposed amendments. I feel that they're very much in order and should be looked at and considered. I can't believe that it has been interpreted by the court, waste disposal sites, designation of recycling facilities, although I know there certainly are some problems depending on just what's being recycled and the amounts and etc.
You probably heard the prior presentation, I expect, and the plea to allow alternatives.
Mr MacFarlane: I didn't catch the full story.
Mr Eddy: You have mentioned, however, that alternatives need to be looked at and municipalities should be allowed alternatives in recycling programs. Could you comment on that, and to what extent?
Mr MacFarlane: I guess we were referring more to the ultimate disposal. I mean, our municipality fully supports the diversion targets and that whole approach. We're very supportive of the thrust of the legislation. But in terms of the ultimate disposal, that's where we need to look at alternatives, whether they be energy-related, rail haul, such as what's going in Europe and the United States. Rail haul has now become quite a viable alternative, and especially when we have a very scarce resource of arable agricultural land in southern Ontario.
Mr Eddy: Getting scarcer every day.
Mr MacFarlane: That's right.
Mr Wiseman: As we cover it over with subdivisions and urban sprawl.
Mr Eddy: Well, I appreciate the suggestions you've made, and yes, in landfill sites.
You've made the two proposed amendments. Are there any others that you feel should be made? You've mentioned about regulations, and of course anyone dealing with the act automatically deals with the regulations as well, but it's more difficult for the general public.
Mr MacFarlane: The regulations that I was referring to are those under a different act --
Mr Eddy: Oh, right.
Mr MacFarlane: -- the Environmental Protection Act. It's just simply a regulatory clarification that would assist in the implementation of Bill 7. That's what we really are all looking for, and if the MOEE staff get some help in that regard to clear up this decision, that would certainly help us get our recycling facility going, because we've laid out a lot of dollars and so has Miller, our joint venture contractor. We have a building leased. Everything's ready to go, except the decision is standing in our way in order to implement it.
The Acting Chair: Mr MacFarlane, thank you very much. We appreciate you being here. Have a good day.
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CANADIAN RESTAURANT AND FOODSERVICES ASSOCIATION
QUICK SERVICE RESTAURANT COUNCIL
The Acting Chair: The next groups are the Quick Service Restaurant Council and the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association. It's a combined presentation.
Mr Eddy: Any samples?
The Acting Chair: I was thinking the same thing. Thank you very much for joining us. We're operating on kind of a 20-minute cycle here, so we'll hold you to that fairly firmly. I think what the committee appreciates is your opening remarks and then, if possible, leaving some opportunity for discussion with you. Ideally, I suspect, it's sort of half and half: half presentation and half discussion. With that, what our committee would also appreciate is if you would identify yourself for what we call Hansard so we can get a record of who you are and then your presentation.
Mr Hal Gregory: Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on Bill 7 today. My name is Hal Gregory. I'm vice-president of purchasing and environmental affairs with McDonald's Restaurants of Canada. I'm also a member of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association's board of directors and chairman of the Quick Service Restaurant Council, which is a subcommittee of the CRFA.
The CRFA does work closely with the Ontario restaurant association on several federal and provincial policy issues. With me today is Anne Kothawala. Anne is government affairs manager for CRFA as well.
I guess the CRFA's approach to environmental issues is to incorporate the realities of the industry into a strategy which endorses reasonable and practical waste reduction targets, such as the national packaging protocol and Ontario's waste reduction action plan. We work with large, multi-unit foodservice companies that have the expertise and resources to identify and implement workable solutions and use successes achieved by these larger companies to help the independent operators, who, I should add, control 78% of the approximately 108,000 foodservice operations across Canada.
I think it's critical to emphasize that the foodservice industry is the sum of thousands of parts, spread evenly in every corner of the province; maybe not evenly, but they're in every corner of the province. Even the largest of the foodservice chains is comprised mainly of individual owner-operated types of restaurants, and we work together. It's this reality which is central to the foodservice industry's concern with Bill 7.
Just to give you a bit of background on QSRC, the Quick Service Restaurant Council, we were formed in 1991 by the leading quick service restaurant companies in Ontario and across Canada, such as the hamburger chains, Burger King, Wendy's, Harvey's and McDonald's; the chickens, Scott's, Colonel Sanders; Pizza Hut. I can go on and on; the doughnut chains, Tim Horton Donuts. Basically, we put together a mandate to meet or exceed waste reduction goals established by both the federal and provincial governments.
As a group, the first thing we did was to get a better understanding of the quantity and the nature of waste produced by our industry and develop a strategy to reduce that waste. This process was undertaken in a major research study. We commissioned a company called RIS, which you may be familiar with, to do a research study for us. Out of that study, the waste generated by our quick service restaurants in Ontario, our sector, was 71,100 tonnes in the year 1991, or approximately 0.6% of the total waste generated in Ontario.
The study also found that typical quick service restaurant establishment waste was generated in the following manner: back of the house, 59%; front of the house, 24%; and takeout packaging, 17%. In terms of the composition, our waste was quantified and it was found that back-of-the-house organics/food waste represented the largest component of the waste stream at 39%. Based on this research, all parts of the waste stream have been addressed with equal resolve. Individual operations are proud that in some cases, not in all cases, we are exceeding federal and provincial waste reduction goals.
As members of the QSRC, we are constantly testing new programs and sharing successes with each other. Most restaurants are able to focus on environmental programs in the back of the house and in the front of the house that are effective. The success of these programs is based on the technology and services offered by private sector waste management companies. Our most successful programs have been developed by innovative companies to suit the needs of our industry. I should say that these programs can work only if the flow of waste between municipalities is not limited.
As I mentioned a little earlier, the Resource Integration Systems study found that back-of-the-house waste represents 59% of the total waste. We have better control of that waste, because it's in the hands of our restaurant staff. Consequently, it's where we feel the greatest impact in waste reduction can be made. But in order to achieve this goal, we have to work with our suppliers to discuss reductions in both packaging as well as the deliveries coming to the restaurant. We've had many successful programs. I think we've outlined a few of them in the handout we've given you, so I won't go into them too much.
We've worked closely with our suppliers to develop programs that would also be successful in diverting waste from the front of the counter. I've put in a few examples of what we've done there, and there are quite a few. Given the backdrop of these environmental initiatives that the food service industry has taken, it's clear we've taken a proactive and serious approach to waste management. The response to Bill 7 is based on a concern that in its present form, the bill will severely restrict the initiatives we have taken to date.
The definition of both "waste" and "waste management facilities" must be clarified in order for the foodservice industry to support this legislation. While it is necessary to resolve municipal funding crises for residential waste, there is no need to stifle the initiatives of the ICI sector.
The foodservice industry believes that there a few concerns with Bill 7 which I'll just take a minute or two to outline.
First, the bill contradicts the spirit of Bill 143, which empowers the province to legislate waste management. Ontario has just completed a major undertaking with the recently released regulations under Bill 143. I should say that we worked closely with the Ministry of the Environment to ensure that a level playing field was established between both industries and jurisdictions.
Bill 143 contains a list of items to be source-separated. The province invested a lot of time in this process and the list was a result of extensive research. The MOE had the resources of their policy staff working with private sector organizations that were able to identify what items were appropriate for mandatory source separation. This list takes into account factors such as the availability of infrastructure in the province and the waste stream of each industry involved. These resources might not be available to the municipal governments and might lead to decisions based on inadequate information or on infrastructure.
The QSRC strongly supports the work that was completed under Bill 143 and opposes potentially endangering this cooperative effort by permitting each municipality to unilaterally change the source separation list mandated by the province.
The ability of our industry to engage in waste management programs is directly linked to the availability of new technologies developed by the private sector. Companies have invested a lot of time and money developing comprehensive environmental programs that reflect the nature and composition of waste and address the entire waste stream.
For example, I can talk about McDonald's a bit. We use the services of a company called Reliable Recycling. What they've done for us is developed customized vehicles that come into our restaurants and pick up source-separated materials, take them to a MRF and then distribute them to be recycled from there. The majority of our waste ends up with Reliable and the program we have there.
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I think the success of programs like this lies in their ability to achieve the economies of scale across the province. This can be achieved under Bill 143. However, Bill 7 could easily result in a patchwork of regulations which would serve as a disincentive to innovation in the private sector, consequently restricting the ability of the foodservice industry to move further on the environmental front.
Our concern is that if each municipality had different concerns as to what would be source-separated, it could end up with a program such as ours not being very effective. With our program to date, I think we're effective in reducing our overall waste by just over 50%. In order to keep that program going, we'd like to see a few changes to Bill 7.
A good example of how Bill 7 extends too much power to municipalities is found in clause 208.6(2)(d), which states that a local municipality may pass a bylaw to "establish different rules, fees and incentives for different defined areas of the local municipality, different classes of premises and different classes of waste."
Our franchisees rely on the expertise provided by head office to ensure that a successful and feasible waste management program is implemented. At McDonald's, we provide a centralized plan for our restaurants across the province. This plan is based on the guidelines provided by Bill 143, and in some cases the program, as I mentioned earlier, exceeds the provincial goals.
Similarly, the waste haulers establish programs that meet the requirements under Bill 143 for restaurants. If foodservice companies and waste management companies are faced with a patchwork of regulations, the effectiveness and efficiency of the recycling programs are greatly diminished. I know that our program at McDonald's would be put in serious jeopardy.
As I noted earlier, I take care of both purchasing and environmental affairs for McDonald's. We found that the two are very similar. Purchasing is done nationally in order to achieve economies of scale. Similarly, we have found that the success of our whole waste management program is contingent upon realizing economies of scale there as well.
I'd like to point out that the QSRC agrees with the Ontario Waste Management Association's amendment to the definition of "waste management facilities." CRFA staff have had the opportunity to review the amendments proposed. The OWMA clearly shares our concerns regarding the definition of "waste management facilities." QSRC supports their amendment to section 208.1, which makes a distinction between public and private facilities. As was noted in their brief, Minister Philip made a statement in the Legislature regarding the application of this bill only to residential waste. Since the intent of the government is to address residential waste, we would suggest that the legislation be amended to remove any ambiguity on that point.
We would also recommend that the legislation be amended by inserting a new section on the preamble which would clearly state that Bill 7 does not apply to the ICI sector waste. This new section could be inserted after the definitions in the legislation and would read something like, "This bill does not apply to industrial, commercial and institutional waste collected by private waste haulers."
This approach, we feel, would ensure that municipalities had more control over residential recycling programs while encouraging the private sector to continue to provide new technologies tailored to suit the commercial sector.
The Quick Service Restaurant Council welcomes the opportunity to cooperate with government to address the environmental issues facing the province and to work to implement policies which facilitate the development of the infrastructure to enhance recycling. Government and industry have a common interest in ensuring the development of infrastructure and should work together to that end.
That's the end of my formal presentation.
Mr Hayes: First of all, thank you for your presentation. Also, we realize the hard work that your organization has put in to setting up the 3Rs regulations.
What I wanted to ask you was that, of course, the composting facilities are not really available or in place now, but has your industry got any plans in that way, in the composting of food waste?
Mr Gregory: We're working in several areas. As recently as this morning we had a QSRC meeting. We had some fellows in from Canada Composting. I don't know if you're aware of them. Paul Blanchard was in. We've been dealing with him now for over a year. He's trying to set up a facility in Newmarket which looks like it could meet our needs very well. It's like an in-vessel composter and it could handle all our waste. He's got his permit now and they can handle, when they're open, 120,000 tonnes a year, which more than meets our requirements.
We're also pursuing today food waste from the back of the house, not from the front of the house, not partially eaten food but good wholesome food that becomes waste in the restaurant, at the back, going into animal feed. We've been doing quite a bit of research on that. There are other areas that we're exploring as well.
Mr Hayes: Have you had another industry approach you on the food waste, for turning it into animal feed?
Mr Gregory: With the QSRC, I believe we've had one; with McDonald's, I've had several. We work with one company now.
Mr Eddy: I want to thank you for your presentation. It's very helpful. I think commendation is in order in view of the fact that you have in many cases exceeded the goals of the province, so we note that.
Your concern about local municipalities passing bylaws to establish different rules is the main concern, I understand, in this whole bill. Given that you indeed have outlets in many municipalities, and you can have many in a locale but in different municipalities just because of boundary lines, have you had any discussions with municipal representatives at any level regarding this matter and the concerns you feel so strongly about in this regard?
Mr Gregory: No. We've talked to different municipalities, but not so much on Bill 7, Anne, have we? We've met with a few.
Ms Anne Kothawala: No. We've had conversations with municipalities to keep them up to date on the programs that we're looking at. They're aware of our concerns about the potential of a patchwork of regulations and they're aware of what we're doing under Bill 143. We have not yet met directly with municipalities to talk to them about Bill 7.
Mr Eddy: The reason I asked that is that I would expect that many municipal councils would be sympathetic to your views in view of the fact that you do handle all of your own garbage disposal or collection. It's very important. Thank you.
Mr David Johnson: I was just picking out one of the concerns of the restaurant association. It was that the user fee may apply to them, although they are charged through their taxes in a sense for waste disposal as well. It's sort of part of the broader municipal tax. You haven't raised that particular concern in your brief. Have you discussed that possibility, that municipalities could impose a user fee on your constituents?
Ms Kothawala: There's definitely a concern there as well in the sense that what we're really trying to get at is that if the original intent of Bill 7, from what we understand, was to look at residential waste, there would be no concern about any kind of what we call double-dipping, where you'd face a double payment. Our view on user fees is that we're paying them through our tipping fees. The private sector has taken a lot of initiatives to make sure that it's taking care of its own waste stream.
Mr David Johnson: So through your amendment here, you think this has been directed simply to the residential stream and therefore there wouldn't be any double-dipping. But you're obviously not in favour of double-dipping.
Ms Kothawala: That's what we hope the amendment would address.
Mr Gregory: Our waste for the most part is picked up by private haulers, which we pay, and doesn't go to the landfill.
Mr David Johnson: Exactly. So why should you be charged user fees? Of course, maybe it wouldn't apply anyway.
In terms of the concern that Mr Eddy was just talking about, I wonder, is there an amendment that you've put forward or do you simply suggest that clause 208.6(2)(d) be deleted?
Ms Kothawala: No. The amendment that we put forth is towards the end of the brief. We haven't had actual legal wording proposed. We're essentially saying that all that would need to be added to the bill to clarify it would be, "This bill does not apply to industrial, commercial and institutional waste collected by private waste haulers." There are a couple of restaurants, certainly in Metro, that are using the blue box, so we wouldn't want to put that at jeopardy. Essentially, that would clarify it.
Mr David Johnson: That covers it again, that the ICI sector is excluded, so that would be that the ability to "establish different rules, fees and incentives for different defined areas of the local municipality" would not apply to the ICI sector.
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Ms Kothawala: Precisely. That would just set the pace of the bill to make sure that there was no ambiguity, because from what we've heard so far, really the biggest question surrounding this bill has been the ambiguity. Does it mean flow control or doesn't it? So why not just clarify at the beginning and then nothing's left up to guesstimating what it does mean.
Mr Gregory: I should just point out as well that I've had several conversations within the last couple of months with different people who are looking to establish new recycling facilities in the area, and their concern is, how is this going to impact on them and does it make sense to do it and we'd better take a wait and see attitude rather than a let's get the job done and do it.
I think there are betters ways we can handle our waste. There are always ways of improving on what we're doing, and that needs some capital investment, some specialized plants and recycling facilities to get the most out of it. I mean, composting is a valuable way to recycle, but I think there are better ways, especially for organics waste, where it could be of a higher value added than just simply going into compost.
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. We appreciate it. Have a good day.
ENVIRONMENT AND PLASTICS INSTITUTE OF CANADA
The Acting Chair: The next presentation is from the Environment and Plastics Institute of Canada. Dr Edgecombe, if you could join us, please. I think you probably understand, but we're keeping each presentation to a total of 20 minutes, including any questions or comments from the members. I think we've now got your presentation. In the interests of Hansard recording, if you could mention who you are and who you represent, then we could get on to the brief.
Dr Fred Edgecombe: I'm Fred Edgecombe. I represent the Environment and Plastics Institute of Canada, which is a program of the Society of the Plastics Industry of Canada, Canada's principal trade association dealing in the area of plastics.
I had intended to use the overhead projector, but I think because of time constraints I won't today. But I do appreciate whoever brought it into the room for me.
Waste management regulations, in particular those aspects which affect the use of packaging, can have a major impact on the structure of economic activity in Ontario. With close to 39% of Ontario's $9-billion plastic industry involved in packaging, our comments will focus on Bill 7's impact on the management of plastic packaging waste.
In January 1992 the plastics industry made representation to the standing committee on social development of the Ontario Legislature regarding Bill 143, which among other things amended the Environmental Protection Act.
Our submission at that time was organized under four headings: (1) regulation without consultation; (2) the arbitrary nature of proposed waste management legislation; (3) an uneven playing field; and (4) regulations before voluntary action.
Our submission regarding Bill 7 highlights, I believe, similar concerns as we raised when we appeared before the committee considering Bill 143. Whereas Bill 143 gave substantial power to the Minister of the Environment, Bill 7 of course passes on much power to individual municipalities, which raises the spectre of increased balkanization of waste diversion activities.
In fact, by shifting powers to municipalities in the manner proposed, Bill 7 seems to subvert the Ministry of Environment and Energy's attempt to coordinate the pace at which materials are designated or source-separated. The regulations flowing from Bill 143, which have recently been promulgated, attempt to organize what should be source-separated.
I believe this problem is compounded by the fact that somewhat vague definitions of terms such as "waste management system" could be interpreted in a way which extends municipal control well beyond what was intended.
The uneven regulatory landscape regarding waste management in Canada has the potential to severely disrupt the competitiveness of Canadian industry. To compound the issue within the industrial heartland of the country by permitting the rise of city states dealing with waste management could result in the demise of, for example, the packaging industry in Ontario.
If you take our first point, regulation without consultation, we do recognize and from time to time have observed the frustration of some municipalities as they have attempted to deal with specific waste management issues, only to find that they lack the jurisdictional authority to implement their plans. Bill 7 attempts to overcome these deficiencies but in so doing removes the checks and balances which permit the introduction of perspectives broader than those of a single region or municipality.
Opportunity for regulation without consultation resulting in regional disparities within the province flows from certain clauses of sections 208 and 209 which Bill 7 will add to the Municipal Act.
There is no legal requirement laid upon any region or municipality to hold multistakeholder consultations regarding bylaws dealing with waste management. Onus is placed on those interested in intervening to determine when and where a local council will discuss a particular issue.
Even if knowledge of a potential bylaw exists, there is no designated route whereby comment can be made. Once a bylaw has been enacted, the only recourse generally available is an appeal to the municipal board, which of course can be a lengthy and costly process.
We believe that Bill 7 allows the potential for regulations to be arbitrary. Section 208.1 provides the first indication of the potential for bylaws which can be described as arbitrary. The definition of "waste" can include "such other materials as may be designated by bylaw of the council of the local municipality." As a result, a material may be designated as a waste by a specific council and subject to the rules, fees and incentives for that class of waste as permitted by section 208.6(2)(e), while a few miles away a totally different regime exists.
Subsection 208.3(c) provides a local municipality power to "extract, produce, manufacture, advertise, sell, supply and distribute products...obtained from waste and waste byproducts, including products obtained by recycling, reducing and reusing waste and waste byproducts."
Subsection 208.3(c), together with subsection 209(10) as amended, which provides for exclusive jurisdiction for providing services or facilities, could result in one municipality causing economic damage to an industrial venture which has invested capital to provide a manufacturing facility, the feedstock for which is domestic waste.
Once operational, a particular municipality might arbitrarily raise prices for the waste or otherwise restrict collection, thereby affecting the viability of the industrial venture. Taken to its extreme, the municipality could, by exercise of flow control, decide to reprocess the material itself once industry had pioneered the markets for the products and probably sunk the capital.
We also believe that Bill 7 could cause a more uneven playing field than already exists. Ontario must remain a competitive jurisdiction within which industry can operate. Bylaws regarding the use of the waste management system, subsection 208.6(2), must recognize, I believe, the nature of global trade.
We're not suggesting that Ontario not work to improve its waste management practices to levels exceeding those currently in place, but rather that the province be constantly cognizant of the nature of global trade and the province's ability or inability to restrict and control international and interprovincial trade.
By allowing municipalities to enact regulations specific to their region, the fallout, whether it be economic or social, will affect Ontario industry before it impacts on imports of any sort. All public policy and its attendant regulations must be examined in the context of these issues.
In our submission regarding Bill 143, we pleaded for recognition of the need to level the playing field for those serving Ontario markets. With Bill 7, we plead for uniform measures within the province so that even local provincial business will not be subject to a patchwork of regulations across the province.
Industry already faces a chronic lack of provincial policy harmonization across this country that is having an increasingly negative impact on competitiveness. Put in this context, the potential for the regulatory landscape to become balkanized on a municipal basis is likely to invite even greater problems of economies of scale for industries trying to comply with a myriad of varying regulation. Already companies that are trying to sell their products nationally find that the existence of varying provincial waste management regulations makes the cost of compliance prohibitive and therefore acts as an interprovincial barrier to trade.
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To this end, the problem of balkanized regulatory policies is compounded by other aspects of Ontario's business climate. Compared with many US states, for example, Ontario plastics processors face higher wage costs, a more onerous tax regime and, in many cases, higher energy costs. Arbitrary environmental regulations which place additional costs on manufacturers or users of products will make it increasingly difficult for them to remain competitive. We also believe that voluntary action should be given a chance to occur before regulation.
The plastics industry is a subscriber to the national packaging protocol and representatives of the plastics industry have sat on Napp since it was set up. The industry has worked with this multistakeholder group to bring about a rational national approach to the diversion of packaging waste which is a highly visible segment of municipal waste. Napp is a voluntary program and its goals have been endorsed by all of the provinces.
The plastics industry has contributed much to the reduction in weight of packaging both by lightening its own products and replacing other materials. Its products are more often reused in industrial applications than in consumer applications because of regulations involving health. Plastics recycling is growing and the industry is working to develop markets for recycled materials collected through the waste stream. These activities are often conducted within the purview of a multistakeholder group. The strategy task group for plastics established by the office of waste reduction in this province is such a multistakeholder group.
We believe that voluntary action is working well and the list of accomplishments is growing. The necessity to intervene in the trenches of municipal politics if control measures or readily attainable means of redress are not included in Bill 7 will distract from current action to no ultimate benefit, not even that of the environment.
To conclude, I emphasize that the plastics industry supports the government's commitment to waste diversion. However, we believe that Bill 7 could hamper rather than support this policy objective.
The policy orientation of Bill 7 will lead to a situation where the regulatory landscape varies from one municipality to another. I don't believe that is the foundation upon which any industry can enact comprehensive waste diversion programs.
Mr Eddy: Thank you, doctor, for your presentation -- very enlightening and, considering we live in the plastic age, I'm very pleased that you concentrated on the plastic recycling, a very important part. I note particularly item 3, the uneven playing field, because if there's one thing I hear about in my riding constantly it's this matter of uneven rules. I think it behooves us, wherever possible, to have province-wide rules and I appreciate your particular concern with the possibility of different rules in different areas. It's very important.
You see definitely the act should be amended in that particular case and some others. Would you care to elaborate on those changes?
Dr Edgecombe: Yes -- an amendment to the act or some safeguard built into it whereby there would be a need for public hearings, public consultation, and that the province perhaps would maintain some control based on a broader perspective than that of just the municipality.
Mr Eddy: Yes, I think that's it. A very good point. Are there other amendments you feel very strongly about?
Dr Edgecombe: I would like to see "waste" defined more explicitly than it is at the present time, because it's up to the municipality to say that this is waste and something else isn't.
Mr Eddy: Thank you for your contribution.
Mr David Johnson: First of all, I had the impression that perhaps you were simply suggesting that the bill be defeated, or are you suggesting that with certain amendments you and your industry, I guess, could be in support of the bill?
Dr Edgecombe: I think with the safeguards built into it, we could be supportive of it.
Mr David Johnson: So one of those amendments, then, would be the consultation obviously; that would be built in. That's what you're suggesting?
Dr Edgecombe: Yes, and some mechanism of redress other than going to the municipal board.
Mr David Johnson: All right. Can you suggest such a mechanism?
Dr Edgecombe: I'm not a lawyer and consequently I'm somewhat lost to do that for you. But I think there needs to be some overseeing body to determine the reasonableness of a particular bylaw dealing with waste diversion.
Mr David Johnson: Did you hear the previous deputation, the one from the restaurants?
Dr Edgecombe: Yes, I did.
Mr David Johnson: They were suggesting that it be clear that this doesn't apply to the ICI sector.
Dr Edgecombe: That's right.
Mr David Johnson: Does that address any of your concerns?
Dr Edgecombe: No. My concerns are largely oriented towards the post-consumer sector, household collection.
Mr David Johnson: Could you give us a specific instance as to how that would work? I guess what you're saying is, some municipalities would define your products as being waste and some wouldn't. What would that do? How would that be done?
Dr Edgecombe: May I be very candid with you? We have observed in some other environmental areas where a municipal council feels, close to election time, that it can get a lot of publicity by suggesting that it remove something from the municipality. For example, there was a threat here in Toronto to drive newspaper boxes off the street if the newspaper publishers didn't take a particular action. That is the sort of thing.
There's been a lot of confusion -- you don't have any here today -- about foam polystyrene cups. Several years ago, of course, they were held up as being very environmentally unsound, but there is a mechanism to recycle those. Often the reasons that they were held up as being environmentally unsound -- people said they contain CFCs, when in effect 90% of the cups we're familiar with never did. But that was enough actually to cause some councils to literally ban them from their cafeterias and workplaces, but it wasn't done well.
Mr Lessard: Are you aware of an organization in the States called the American Plastics Council?
Dr Edgecombe: Yes, they're a sister organization of ours.
Mr Lessard: I've been provided information from the Ministry of Environment. It was a press release indicating their potential investment in plastics recycling infrastructure in the United States --
Dr Edgecombe: Of $1.2 billion.
Mr Lessard: Well, $1.5 billion. Maybe what I have is in Canadian dollars, I don't know. I wonder how much your organization or the plastics industry may be prepared to commit here in Ontario.
Dr Edgecombe: We're doing exactly the same survey at the present time as the APC did in the United States, and I hope to be able to pass that on to Ron Clarke next week and then Richard Dicerni; we're meeting with him on the 29th. So I hope to have that information, and we'll certainly see that you get a copy.
Mr Lessard: We're looking forward to hearing from you.
Mr Wiseman: I had a presentation in my constituency office by a couple of inventors who are using microwave technology to microwave plastic, and not just plastic but other products.
I read in Discover magazine that plastic in its clean form, I guess -- my understanding is that there are different kinds of plastics, and that what really makes it difficult for recycling is when they're all mixed together. My understanding is that this technology will allow the plastics to be separated. Can you shed any light on what your industry is doing in terms of supporting that kind of technology? I know the government has put in a fair amount of money.
Dr Edgecombe: The microwave technology -- this is the gentleman in Cobourg, perhaps?
Mr Wiseman: Yes. They actually live in Ajax.
Dr Edgecombe: What he is doing is a form of pyrolysis to recapture the feed stocks. There's a lot of work going on around the world in what is called tertiary recycling, feed stock recovery. Microwaving is one way of doing it. You can just apply heat in the absence of oxygen and do it, and ultimately you come up with an oil which you feed back into an oil refinery. That is possible.
The other item you were referring to is sorting of plastics. The post-consumer stream has about five different major components: polypropylene, polystyrene, high-density polyethylene etc. In order to get the maximum value from them, it's necessary, actually, to sort them into the components, and then if you have a stream of high-density polyethylene, that can be reprocessed quite easily.
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The technology is almost available to do that automatically. You can certainly pass materials by sensing heads and say that this is polyethylene; that's polypropylene. The problem has been in how you present a bottle which has been crushed in a bailer to this device and be able to do it at two or three items a second. There is work going on now at Eaglebrook, New Jersey, which has been sponsored by the APC. I believe we're getting close to solving that problem.
There is another approach to dealing with plastics in the environment, in the waste stream, and that is to recover the energy. Polyethylene is frozen natural gas. Its calorific value is about 19,500 BTUs per pound and natural gas is 21,500. Polyethylene in a modern energy-from-waste plant will probably burn more cleanly than natural gas straight from the well.
So you can recover that energy and convert it into electricity, if you would, and some provinces and some other jurisdictions in Europe are starting to look at that approach as well.
Mr Wiseman: Since we were talking about the sorting of this --
The Acting Chair: You have about one minute left.
Mr Wiseman: The SortCo facility that was suggested many years ago, where were you with that?
Dr Edgecombe: SortCo did not get off the ground. This was for the industry to build a demonstration plant to sort plastics. What we're proposing now is that we will work with the existing infrastructure, and through the use of industrial engineering improve their ability to sort. We'll be discussing that with Mr Dicerni again next week.
The Acting Chair: Dr Edgecombe, thank you very much for your presentation. We appreciate it and have a good day.
CENTRE AND SOUTH HASTINGS RECYCLING BOARD
The Acting Chair: The next group is the Centre and South Hastings Recycling Board, if they could join us, please. Welcome. As you probably know, we keep to a fairly tight 20-minute time frame just so we can hear as many deputations as possible. We would appreciate your leaving some time for discussion, so if there's a way to keep your presentation to perhaps 10 minutes or so, that would be appreciated. With that, perhaps you could just introduce yourself and the group you represent, mainly for Hansard purposes, and then we'll get on to your presentation.
Mrs Georgina Thompson: My name is Georgina Thompson. I'm councillor of Thurlow township. I sit on the steering committee for the centre and south Hastings waste management plant and I'm also chairman of the recycling board for centre and south Hastings. I'm here today to make a deputation to the Bill 7 standing committee.
First of all, I want to thank you for the opportunity to respond to Bill 7 on behalf of both the waste management board and the recycling board in centre and south Hastings.
The centre and south Hastings waste management board is responsible for the long-term planning of the waste system for the next 25 to 30 years. We recognize the importance of waste diversion and have thus adopted one of the most aggressive waste diversion programs in Ontario, with a commitment to diverting 71% of ICI and household waste by the year 2000.
A key step towards this target is the blue box 2000 program. On November 18, 1991, the Centre and South Hastings Recycling Board, with the support of the Ministry of the Environment, launched the blue box 2000 recycling program. The purpose of the program is to demonstrate how a traditional blue box program can be expanded to its maximum potential. Combined with backyard composting, waste reduction initiatives and an expanded blue box recycling program, the goal of the blue box 2000 is a 50% diversion in the household waste stream.
The first year of blue box 2000 has been a success. The public has shown itself able and willing to fully participate in a broad range of waste diversion programs. Diversion tonnage has gone up drastically while costs have come down. The report circulated to you details many of the insights and findings gained in 1992, the first year of operation.
With respect to the proposed amendments to the Municipal Act, centre and south Hastings clearly supports increased powers to develop and operate waste management programs, particularly the 3Rs. But will increased responsibilities lead to increased costs? The board wonders when the document relating to the financing of municipal waste management will be released.
The board supports the provisions in the bill which would assist in the gaining of access to private property for the purpose of testing the suitability of the lands as part of the site selection process. We propose that subsection 208.8(1) be improved by adding the following words to the end of the section, "in any municipality." The additional wording is necessary in order to make it clear that the inspector may enter on to any lands, even where such lands are outside of the local municipality that appointed such an inspector. This is required as some candidate sites may be located within municipalities that no longer have membership on the waste management board.
We are also concerned that there is nothing in the proposed legislation that gives specific powers to joint boards of management. It has been hoped by many waste management boards throughout the province that the legislation would specifically empower the joint boards of management to directly undertake the same powers and actions that their constituent municipalities can undertake.
The board trusts that you will carefully consider the concerns as outlined in this deputation. If you have any further questions, either I or Jill Dunkley, who is our executive for the recycling board, our coordinator, will endeavour to answer them for you.
Mr David Johnson: First of all, let me say it was a very excellent presentation. I'm sure we all wish you the best of luck. It seems you're very determined to meet those reduction targets.
I can also say that I share your concern at the top of the second page about the increased costs. I've asked that question, where is the money going to come from? We don't seem to be getting much of an answer. Has your board or your municipality made any recommendations in this regard in terms of how waste management should be funded?
Mrs Thompson: No, we haven't, actually. I feel they're waiting to have some input back from you as to where the funding's going to come from.
Mr David Johnson: They'll have to wait two years.
Mrs Thompson: We are looking at ways the ministry has mentioned, sort of user-pay fees and different things like that. We are looking at those type of things. Some of our municipalities are looking quite favourably on it. I think the big thing with this, the problem with the board, is that as a board we have spent multidollars to get this thing into play and organization. If we go, as a board, to different municipalities and try to enact any proposals we come up with as a board, we run into a stalemate with the municipalities. It's like you're batting your head against the wall.
We're given the money to initiate these things, but if we go to, for instance, my municipality, to try to sell user-pay to, it's sort of like, "Agh." They don't want to do that. What right do we as a board have to say: "Okay, but this is the way legislation's going. This is what we have to do in order to cut costs"? I think we all realize that the government isn't going to fund this for the rest of our lives, that we have to start looking at ways to fund it ourselves and that the money is slowly going to be cut back. We are as a board, I think, trying to be responsible enough to do that, but we don't have the power to take it to the municipality and say, "Okay, this is what we have to do," without it saying no.
Mr David Johnson: It seems to me, the best I can make out, that the provincial government is going to phase out its funding. User-pay is going to be the bulk of the funding for this. Now, I wonder what's going to happen to your program if really the only sources you have for it will be the user-pay system and whatever moneys the municipality can throw in, plus perhaps some from the private sector. I don't know exactly what the contribution from the private sector is.
Mrs Thompson: I think right now, for the recycling plant we're doing quite well. Correct me if I'm wrong, Jill. We recycle a lot of our programs. We have a fairly large market for our recycling programs. There are 15 municipalities. I don't know if you know the history of central and south Hastings. There were originally 15 municipalities that joined together to form this management group to look at the 3Rs as well as a landfill site. We have our plant up and running, and anything we're bringing in to the plant we have markets for at this time. Providing the markets hold up, then our plant will stay in play quite nicely.
We're looking at the landfill site right now. I presume it's like any other landfill site, even like the one we have in Thurlow township: Eventually there are going to be user-pay tipping fees to get into the landfill site. These are ways we're going to have to look at keeping ourselves viable at the same time.
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Mr David Johnson: Did you ever do an analysis of what percentage -- revenue coming in from your recycling program -- is the revenue to the total cost?
Mrs Thompson: Yes, we have. Go ahead, Jill.
Ms Jill Dunkley: Hi. I'm Jill Dunkley. I'm recycling coordinator for the program.
We have quite an innovative program in that right now we have achieved a certain base tonnage coming into the recycling plant. We really encourage increased tonnage through increased participation rates and capture rates to come into the plant, because we are charged by our contractor at an incremental fee which is less than the base processing cost. Currently, that incremental dollar per tonne cost equals our revenue on a dollar per tonne basis. Essentially, any additional tonnage coming into the plant is offset by the revenue, so it's a good situation to be in.
Mr David Johnson: But if you look at the total, in Metropolitan Toronto there was an estimate, at one point, and this may be a little out of date now, that the revenue was about $20 a tonne and the costs were about $200 a tonne.
Ms Dunkley: If we looked at our revenue as just an average basket of goods, it's about $33 per tonne right now. We have an expanded materials program. We've got a good price on boxboard right now. I know that Metro doesn't have that particular material in that program, and that's an argument, I feel, for expanding materials: economies of scale essentially. If you carefully plan out your collection program so that you have clean, source-separated material, then you have a higher value at your market.
Mr Hayes: The blue box program is really quite impressive and I'd certainly like to compliment you on all the hard work you've done. When we talk about the 3Rs program, do you feel that can be very cost-effective and assist you in your project, your blue box program?
Mrs Thompson: Yes, I believe that the recycling, reuse and reduce program will assist us in our program, because, as I say, we do have a lot of markets for the products that we're bringing in. With our household hazardous waste program into play now, there are a lot of products in there that are coming in that we are able to recycle by way of paints and different things like that. We don't, mind you, sell that to the people who are coming in for it.
The biggest one is our recycling plant. We've gained a profit in the last two years that we've been able to build back into the 15 municipalities to offset their cost of belonging to the program. This what we're hoping, that as we go on, as Jill said, we can recycle more products, that it will expand. We know that some of the products will fade out as well, but we're always looking for new products and new markets. That's going to be a on continuous basis.
Mr Hayes: There's a lot of talk about the user fees. Some people, I won't mention any names, want to think it's just a great tax grab or whatever you want to call it or another burden on the residents. I guess the fact of the matter is that when we talk about taxes, they all come from the same people. But do you think the user fees would be of assistance to you in your operation?
Mrs Thompson: Personally? I think so. Yes, I do. The way it's been approached and the way we're looking at approaching it and, I'm sure, the way you know -- correct me if I'm wrong Jill -- with user fees, for one, they're going to come off the taxation roll for garbage and everything else. So you're only going to pay for what you use. If you put out 20 bags of garbage, you're going to pay for 20 bags of garbage. If you put out one, you're going to pay for one.
I think that will be a lot easier on the taxpayer and a lot easier to swallow, where they see exactly what they're paying for. Whereas now, when it goes on to the tax bill, they're saying, "What am I getting for these taxes that I'm paying?" They can see what they're paying for, and paying $10 gives you 10 bags of garbage. I think what you'll find is that with that, people will tend to compost, recycle, reuse a lot more than what we do right now. We have a good involvement in our program in our area, but I think if they had to actually pay for what they're putting out, they'd do more.
Mr Hayes: Right. You fellows were listening to that, weren't you? Yes. Okay, thank you.
Mr Wiseman: I'll be very quick. I want to congratulate you. I can see why your program is successful if you're representative of the kind of driving force behind it. I compliment you.
The cost per tonne: What is the cost per tonne for picking up your waste? The reason I ask that is that we just received a deputation from a company called VQuip that says it can do it more cheaply and meet the same target levels as you are doing.
Ms Dunkley: I'm going to give you two costs per tonne. I'm going to give you one just for the collection, processing and marketing of materials just for the recycling facility. This is after revenue and before subsidy. You're looking at approximately $120 per tonne.
The second figure I'm going to give you is what we're trying to emphasize in our program. We're looking at it as a system. We're looking at the total tonnage diverted not only through recycling but through our aggressive backyard composting program, our household hazardous waste program and our waste reduction initiatives. If you take the total tonnage diverted, you're looking at around $50 a tonne.
Mr Wiseman: That's impressive. Thank you.
Mr Lessard: Actually, that covered my question. I was going to ask you what you thought about depot collections as opposed to blue box, because you have an emphasis on the blue box system. I just want to congratulate you for the success of your program as well.
Mr Eddy: I also commend you, certainly with the commitment to diverting 71%. Very good. That's just tremendous. I see you operate and have not allowed upper-tier boundaries to prevent you from operating and being a success. I think of another group like you, Bluewater Recycling, which serves north Lambton, north Middlesex and south Huron counties, because the people in that area banded together with a number of municipalities and could do it on an economical basis. So that's great.
I also want to assure you that, as well, we've been asking about when the document relating to financing of municipal waste management would be released and pushing for it.
Finally, on the matter of joint boards of management, you make a good point. I hope the government will look at that and the powers they're giving to municipalities and to such joint boards that municipalities so designate and in some way recognize the operation of your organization, because we have to face it that upper-tier boundaries are not always the best, and in some cases they're the most inappropriate boundaries you could use.
I notice on the front of your report you have a picture of the blue box and other things. You've gone considerably further in collection and recycling than many municipalities have, because that's what you actually do. These other things are collected at the same time you come through. We'll have two collections, one for all of these recyclables and then the general garbage, is that right? I know it's in the report, and I look forward to reading your report.
Mrs Thompson: Yes. Most municipalities have a different company picking up the general garbage, but our blue trucks pick up everything that you see here on their roundabout. There's a specific day for each area, and everything is put out basically the way you see it laid out there in the blue box -- the cardboards are tied, the newspapers are tied together, this type of thing -- and laid out at the curbside.
Mr Eddy: Our compliments; very good.
Mrs Thompson: On behalf of the 15 municipalities and ourselves, thank you for allowing us to come.
The Acting Chair: Next week the committee will deal with clause-by-clause on the bill. If anyone wants to get amendments in, the clerk would appreciate them getting in fairly quickly. Is there a time when the committee has agreed the amendments will be in?
Clerk of the Committee (Mr Franco Carrozza): The standing order simply says two hours before we begin, so Wednesday.
The Acting Chair: Two hours before we begin, and the committee begins on Wednesday, is that correct?
Clerk of the Committee: Thursday.
Mr Hayes: We will have our amendments in by Wednesday to give the members an opportunity to look them over and make any comments. I don't think there are any amendments that I know of from the opposition.
Mr David Johnson: You're in for another surprise.
The committee adjourned at 1740.