Bury and Whittaker: Bag-tag system needed to reduce Ottawa’s garbage

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Ottawa faces a looming waste crisis, with the city’s Trail Road Landfill expected to close as early as 2036, just over a decade from now, before it overflows. Fortunately, our city can make the choice to reduce waste, and we individually and collectively can play a powerful role in reducing the harmful emissions that come from excessive consumption and waste generation.

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Replacing Trail Road will be a massive, expensive task. City staff report that any kind of replacement system for managing residual waste — be it a new landfill, a mixed waste processing system or a polluting waste-to-energy incinerator — could take 15 years and cost up to $450 million. There will be protracted struggles over where to build such a facility, technology choices, environmental approvals, and a big hit to property taxes. We cannot afford a $450-million expenditure given the other financial pressures that the city is currently facing and is likely to face in the future.

City waste audits show that 58 per cent of what is collected curbside and disposed of at Trail Road should either have been recycled or put into the green bin. The landfill is filling up more quickly than necessary because many households do not use the blue and black box recycling program or the green bin organics program.

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One proven, effective way to reduce waste in households is a “bag tag” user-pay system, a well-established program in other cities in which unnecessary and excess waste has a price, and where composting and recycling are free. This incentivizes residents to reduce waste in the first place, and to recycle and compost instead.

City staff’s proposal, released on May 4, is to annually provide each household with 55 tags per year, paid for through the existing property-tax solid-waste fee. A limit of two bags or containers every two weeks would be established, with additional items above that limit requiring a $3 tag.

User pay will improve the city’s currently mediocre waste diversion rate of around 45 per cent by at least six percentage points; reduce garbage tonnage per capita by up to 28 per cent, and put the city closer to the much better performance of most other major Ontario municipalities.

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User pay systems have been around for more than 20 years; are standard operating practice; and have been proven to reduce the amount of waste going to disposal. In Ontario, 132 municipalities have a user pay garbage collection system, including Toronto and the big regional municipalities of Peel, York, Niagara, Waterloo and Durham. Kingston has had a user pay system since 1999 and Carleton Place for more than 30 years.

To ensure the user pay system is effective and positive, Ottawa should ensure equity considerations are central to implementation, including a targeted education and awareness campaign to prevent undue impact to low-income and larger families. In addition, as experience elsewhere teaches us, illegal dumping can be mitigated through enforcement, promotion and education, especially in the system’s early months.

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Ottawa’s proposed user pay system alone will not solve our waste crisis but it is an essential part of moving away from the current reliance on waste disposal. This is one important part of a more significant shift to embracing a low-waste, circular economy, where we, individually, and the city in all its operations, reject the take-make-waste status quo. The city has endorsed a zero-waste vision in which we can redesign waste out of our products in the first place; reuse what we can; refuse what we do not need; reduce food waste; focus on services and repair rather than products; and repurpose items such as building materials so they have another useful life.

Reducing waste is critical for tackling climate change, protecting nature used to make things in the first place, and building a sustainable waste management future with minimal reliance on disposal. A partial user pay system must be part of the city’s upcoming Solid Waste Master Plan, and by extension our city’s collective future.

Duncan Bury is co-founder of Waste Watch Ottawa. Alice Irene Whittaker is Executive Director, Ecology Ottawa.