Waste is a toxic element in our society. We thought this poisonous element had been dealt with years ago. Deep land fill. Dump our garbage in an open pit mine near Kirkland Lake. Nope! Too much danger of leakage into Ontario's water systems. There was a massive hoo-hah about a land fill site in Adjala Twp in Simcoe County, Luckily this proved to be too much of a political hot potato and another idea was dropped. The current solution in Toronto appears to be using hundreds of trucks daily taking garbage to a landfill site in Michigan. Now piling bags of garbage in the heat of the summer in municipal parks is promising to overload the sensibilities of a tolerant population. And Toronto wastes are in the headlines again.

A proposal was made back in the days of the Rae government to develop waste disposal factories whereby city wastes as well as our own would be dumped on assembly line belts and sorted by hand. Useable materials would be diverted to secondary belts. Glass, metal, paper would be collected and either transported to manufacturing sites or reduced to bricks and stored above ground as future resources. This would reduce transportation costs, provide employment and build up inventory of suitable material. The initiative would either augment or replace blue box collections and would increase the usage of waste materials.

I have written before about redevelopment of a Brazilian city, Curitiba, described in Natural Capitalism (Hawken, Lovins and Lovins, 1999). The mayor introduced a system of exchanging 2 bags of garbage for 1 bag of fresh vegetables. Transportation routes for essential services were inadequate particularly in slum areas. Residents were encouraged to carry bags to central location where the waste materials were collected to be sorted centrally. Sale of suitable materials paid for purchasing healthy food from rural farmers in need of markets for their produce.

An interesting Canadian initiative was the development of a gasification process which was effectively used during the years of mad cow disease threats. Every effort was made to implement this new industry in Canada but to no avail. However a ready market arose in Scotland where whole herds of suspected diseased cattle had to be disposed of. The process involved reducing carcasses to gas with intense heat. The end product was a small quantity of ash but with no significant emission of toxic gasses. Thousands of animals were successfully disposed of over several years of operation.

The technology evolved in Ontario and had potential for dealing with waste materials here. Because emissions were minimized this had potential for destruction of toxic wastes, such as hospital materials and even dioxins.

A possibility existed for establishment of such industries on Aboriginal lands but no permission was attainable for use of provincial highways to transport such dangerous materials. One can only surmise how such technology might have affected the debacle surrounding the Walkerton situation. Could such destruction of wastes have avoided sickness and loss of life of so many people due to impurities in the water supply from dumping agricultural wastes on farm lands to infiltrate the water supply?

Now society is facing an evergrowing problem of societal wastes. The blue box system has reduced the wastage of household resources, turning much of it to profit for the community. The logical solution to production of waste is for people to exert the effort to reduce the amount of material thrown out each week but it has been shown that this is not about to happen. Is landfill the only alternative? It has been suggested that our many dumps will one day be the mines of the future.

But surely there are better ways. Certainly one would be to sort through and make use of what so many classify as wastes (maybe even profitably!)

In the final analysis unusable materials will present a waste disposal probability. Surely the technology is in place to destroy this element without creating a danger to either society or the environment. As the blue box was one gigantic step forward there remains plenty of opportunity to rethink an age old problem and advance us toward a cleaner world to live in.