The Decibel - Is Canada’s waste program trash?

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Many municipalities across Canada are choosing profit over the environment when it comes to waste management options. This has left many Canadians questioning the country’s alleged commitment to long-term environmental protection.Dr. Cassandra Kuyvenhoven has a PhD in Environmental Studies with expertise in waste management. She breaks down the systematic issues surrounding Canada’s waste management system and what we could be doing better overall.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So I look pretty funny walking around with my compost bag. It's also kind of gross. It's oozing stuff. Our summer producer, Nagin Nia, recently moved to Toronto from Vancouver. And she was surprised to find that her new building has nowhere to put organic waste. But I do see a compost bin of another building pretty close to me, so let's go see if I can put my compost there. So this building has a green bin, a blue bin,

and a regular landfill bin. Okay, well, that wasn't too bad. It was a three-minute walk from my building. I don't know if I'm supposed to be doing that, but I don't really have a choice if I want to be composting. Nagin's building is one of many that doesn't have green bins,

which are used for composting. And that means that all that organic matter is usually ending up in a landfill. It's one of a number of issues when it comes to our waste collection systems and how we dispose of our trash has impacts on Canada's environmental plans. Dr. Cassandra Kivenhoven has a PhD in environmental studies with expertise in waste management. She joins us today to explain why our waste management systems aren't working as well as they could and what we can do to make things better.

I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Cassandra, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to talk trash. I am excited to talk trash, too. It's interesting because I think, you know, we don't often think about trash. We just kind of put it out in the bin and it disappears, right? But I guess you actually look at this and study what happens here. Can you explain who's actually picking it up? And where does it go? It doesn't go where we think it goes. I think that part of our Canadian system is really, it's built on that idea that we put our

waste out to the curb, and somebody magically collects it. It goes somewhere, we think we're doing the right environmental good, but we never really know where it ends up. And what's really interesting is oftentimes the municipality might not even know where its waste ends up because as it's contracted out and subcontracted out and subcontracted out, it really only then becomes the responsibility of that last contractor. So when I was doing my PhD, I was looking at Kingston, Ontario's waste. So because it didn't have an active landfill, 100% of the waste moved outside of this municipality. Some as close as, you know, another municipality down the 401, some as far away as South Korea. And so that

transportation piece is so key to our Canadian waste management systems because we really have the space. We are still burying our waste. We're still landfilling. And because we have the space, we are trucking it all over the province, all over the country, to other countries. And there have been a lot of waste crises in the last couple of years. There are a lot of times that we move our waste and it goes much further than we think and

sometimes ends up in places we're not even sure about. You talked about contractors there. So who is actually picking up our waste when we leave it on the curb? Every municipality really has its own legislation. The policies are provincial, but the actual enactment of these policies are up to the municipality. So there are some guidelines. So anybody, any waste companies can bid for a contract of maybe three years, maybe five years, and then they then become legally responsible for that municipality's waste. So if anything were to happen, if Kingston's waste were to be transported somewhere like another province and they'd say, we don't want it back, it wouldn't be Kingston's responsibility.

It would be that waste management company. And how is it different for people living in single family homes, for example, versus in an apartment building or a condo? How does your waste collection differ there? It can really be substantially different because when you're in a standalone home, your waste is managed then by the municipality, but in those condo buildings and high-rise buildings, they have the option of going in on municipal waste collection services or finding their own contractor, having their own company come and provide those services for them. So they don't necessarily need to opt into that municipal waste collection system. They kind of do the same thing that the municipality does on a much smaller scale. So if, you know, a developer owns a couple of buildings, they may

contract a company like Waste Management just to then collect all of the waste for those buildings. And so does that mean that the waste collection per building, it can differ basically building to building then? Absolutely. And so some condos, and we have been seeing this more and more, there is a push to have more source-separated recycling organics programs. So things that aren't actually available in every building, but that might be what we're kind of moving towards. But as of right now, really, building to building, it's very different. Why would an apartment building not have an organics program? We're thinking about space in where would the organics go? How would they be stored?

I think also, this is always the issue, I think, with any environmental problems such as waste collection. There is what we would like to do, which is to divert our organics from landfill, and then there's what we're able to do. And oftentimes organics, they do smell if they're not stored properly. There is the likelihood of animals. And in condo buildings, a lot of times they've got garbage chutes or they've got recycling areas, but they might not actually have the space for organics. Because right now we're trying to divert our organics from landfill, but that hasn't really been the main priority at the provincial or municipal level until just more recently in

the past 10 years. It's been something we've been thinking more about as we understand what actually happens in a landfill when you have organic materials, the methane gas, and those kinds of consequences of having so much organics in the landfill. Oftentimes, a lot of times our landfills are on fire. Like literally they're burning? Like literally they're burning. They're on fire. We can't see it. Sometimes we see, you know, the top of the landfill on fire, but sometimes there are fires underneath. And what's happening is with all of the different materials, when the organics are added in there, there is something called leachate in the landfill. And that's that kind of slurry sludge of organic juices, you know, all of these kinds of things that are moving through the landfill.

And when leachate leaches out from the ground, that's when we have contamination. That's when we're talking about an environmental health issue. But a lot of that is the organics. It's that idea that the organics are co-mingling with a lot of other things that we don't really know about. And what we do know is that it's releasing greenhouse gases. And what we do know is that the presence of organics increases the methane that builds up. And that actually causes the fires. Methane is very flammable. And then we have, you know, plastics.

We have all different types of waste, human waste, bodily waste, medical, all of these things kind of co-mingling and on fire. I want to ask you about plastics in landfills as well, because The Globe looked at this a few years ago. It found that 2.8 million tons of plastic waste still end up in Canadian landfills as well, because the Globe looked at this a few years ago. It found that 2.8 million tons of plastic waste still end up in Canadian landfills every year. So that seems like a significant amount. How is it that we're putting stuff in a recycling bin? How is it ending up in a landfill? When we think about recycling, we know that we need to separate the materials, you know, but sometimes what happens is contamination. Contamination can be something as small as your neighbor not properly rinsing their peanut butter jar.

Not only can it not be recycled, anything that touches is then also considered contaminated and goes to landfill. So if I, I'm Cassandra, I'm a good recycler, I'm a great environmental citizen, I've got all of my recyclables clean, they're at the curb, but my neighbor has accidentally put a plastic bag that's not recyclable, or even worse, somebody is walking by, they've got

a dog poop bag, they've thrown it in the recyclables. Not only are their recyclables contaminated, anything that that touches is also contaminated. So then what we think is recycled actually goes to recycling facilities, is deemed contaminated, and ends up in a landfill by a more circuitous route. Wow. And so I think we don't realize how easy it is to contaminate recyclables. And that's why a lot of the things that we put out in good faith, we think they're going to go to be recycled, actually end up landfilled. You know, we've been talking about waste management here, but how does that play into the broader environmental plans? Canada's climate goals, for example, how does this

play into that? Our waste management system is definitely a huge environmental issue in Canada. We are in a climate crisis. And I think that we need to start thinking very creatively and very quickly about all aspects of our systems that impact our environmental health. our waste travels is something that's important to think about, not just for human health, but for our environmental health. Because humans don't exist in a vacuum. We exist in our environment. Environmental health and human health, in my mind, are synonymous. So we need to start kind of thinking about what we want our environment to look like. And right now, it is on fire.

All of these kinds of environmental issues that are coming up are part of the same larger issue that we're encountering right now, which is that we need to think a little bit differently about the way that we're relating to and using the earth. We'll be back in a minute. I think, yeah, a lot of people want to do the right thing. They want to recycle. They want to reduce their waste.

So when we are so concerned about improving the environment and doing any little thing that we can, how has this not become more of a priority where we've sorted out kind of at a systemic level how to do this properly? I think a lot of it lies in the fact that this isn't very transparent. There's this idea that we're being good citizens, but we don't really know where the waste goes and we don't really have control. Even the municipality, as this kind of contracting happens, they're also giving up the control about where those recyclables end up. So it really feels sometimes like it's out of our hands. But what I've seen is that communities, almost in protest, do a lot of local organizing. And they're the ones that are looking at upcycling. They're looking at

putting pressure on municipalities to think about this, to bring this to the fore. Because really right now, we're not thinking about it in the way that we ought to. You know, well, we even had just a few years ago when our waste was in the Philippines and there was an issue with the responsibility for who was going to take that waste out of the Philippines. It was languishing in a port in Manila. And Prime Minister Trudeau said, there's a loophole here.

There's something wrong with the way that we're contracting waste out and that there's no through line of responsibility. I want to bring it back to the curb a little bit here. So Nagin, our summer producer, she was out in the streets of Toronto trying to find a place for her compost because the building that she was in didn't have that kind of access, right? So she noticed that there were tons of garbage bags, though, and cardboard boxes just on the streets of Toronto, not even in bins, just like on the side of the road. That that seems bad to me. Like, is this a normal process for municipalities?

Municipalities don't want that. They don't want that. And yet citizens sometimes feel constrained by the waste collection services that are offered. And I think that shows we're wasting too much. We're consuming so much that our bins runneth over. What we have at the curb is not contained just by bags anymore. On a waste day, when I walk in my neighborhood, I like to look into the different bins and think about which might be contaminated or not. I don't think I've been able to walk down a street in my neighborhood without seeing more than half with some kind of contaminants in the recycling bins,

which I then know is going to contaminate the other half. You're kind of bursting the bubble for me a little bit, Cassandra, right? Because, you know, as we all think we're doing a good job with putting out our recycling and stuff, but you're saying, you know, even if there's one little bit that's contaminated, the system is really, it's constructed in a way that it's so easy to break. Absolutely. I'm very fun at dinner parties. But this is an issue. And I think that it is so shocking when I have these kinds of conversations. People are always shocked. But I think that that's also part of the structure. If we really knew, we wouldn't have that good feeling when we put our blue bins out to the curb.

And I think that it is purposefully kind of mystified. We're not really supposed to see how the sausage is made. But when we actually are looking at this and looking at the amount of recycling we think goes to be recycled and doesn't, what's actually happening in landfills with our organics, the situation feels more dire. What's one or two things that we could think about to kind of start improving this situation? I think oftentimes that cognitive shift from something we love to something we then deem as waste, that's not always necessarily true. That doesn't mean that that product is no longer utile. It just might be that we don't want it anymore. So I think community

based organizing and groups that upcycle, groups that look into repurposing things. And it is very difficult because we are living in an era of planned obsolescence, that we can't fix everything that we used to be able to, that things are intended to break down quickly. So finding kind of ways to extend the utility of these products, of thinking kind of more in a circular way, closing the loop. And I think really we talk about the three R's, There are four R's. That fourth is refuse. We can refuse to buy things with excess packaging. We can refuse Canada. We buy too much food and we waste it. But I think that there are different ways. Like I know in Vancouver, some farmers markets will say, bring your organics materials to the

farmers markets. We'll compost them. We'll give them to the farmers. So there are a lot of local things that can be done. And I do think that that community organizing and getting creative about what community members can do is what we have to start thinking about, that local responses to what is really a very large problem. Yeah. Just very lastly here, Cassandra, a lot of the solutions we've talked about are really kind of at the individual level, right? How you personally can kind of reconsider your current practices and how you use items. But what do we need to happen long term for the waste management system to work properly? I don't think it's always the individual who needs to be made to feel responsible for this system, because a lot of times it's out of our hands. We're operating in a municipality. We don't

actually have that much agency. It's not really an individual problem. We're being made to feel like it is. But I think in the larger scale, we have to start thinking a little bit more long-term. I think we also need to have a deeper understanding of Canada-specific problems. And I think we need to look to the different countries and other places that are doing it better by virtue of having to be more creative because they don't have the space we have. We still bury our waste because we have the space to do it. We're still dealing with this massive amount of consumption, but I think that that will be the most fruitful is starting to think about our consumption instead of just our waste. Yeah. Cassandra, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you very much. It was a great conversation. I'm sure you can

bum out a lot of your friends and family now with the truth about the garbage. Yes. The truth about the garbage, yes. The truth about the garbage. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Welms. I'll be off for a few days, but not to worry, our producer Cheryl Sutherland is going to be here in the host chair, so you'll be in good hands. Michal Stein helped produce this episode.

Our summer producer is Naginia. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.