Toronto is in Catch-22 when it comes to the city’s trash.
The Green Lane landfill near London, where the city’s garbage is trucked, will run out of space by 2034, and no other municipality is willing to take Toronto’s trash.
The conundrum has Toronto considering incineration.
At the same time, a small Brampton incinerator — Emerald Energy from Waste — is moving forward with a plan to burn six times the garbage it does now, a jump from 150,000 tonnes annually to 900,000 tonnes when the new plant is finished in 2030.
The expansion has been fast-tracked by the Ford government, which approved the plan after Emerald provided an environmental screening report, denying nearly 450 requests for a full environmental assessment. Peel Region has also expressed concerns to the environment ministry about the plant’s potential nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.
The move by both the City of Toronto and the province has kicked off a passionate response from environmentalists who question whether incineration is really any better than landfill. Environmentalists say a better alternative would be reducing trash.
“They’re going to be needing garbage to feed that incinerator for 30, 40 years into the future,” said Emily Alfred with the Toronto Environmental Alliance.
“So no matter how much the residents of Brampton cut down their garbage — no matter how much people in Toronto move toward zero waste and we all recycle and do our part — there will still be almost a million tons of garbage burning every year at that facility in the middle of Brampton.”
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In Ontario, residents are arguably more familiar with the hazards of landfills, which have been widely publicized, than they are with burning trash.
The province has only two small incinerators, the Durham York Energy Centre in Clarington and the Emerald plant in Brampton, both of which burn trash and use the heat that’s created to produce a small amount of electricity that is sold back to the grid.
However, in some parts of the world where incineration is common, the risks are more well known.
The French newspaper Le Monde reported that a Paris incinerator, in the 13th arrondissement close to housing and schools, was found in 2024 to have regular exceedances of sulphur dioxide, which can exacerbate breathing conditions, as well as two instances of “non-compliant” dioxin emissions.
In Britain, a BBC study using five years of data from incinerators across the U.K. found that burning waste produces the same amount of greenhouse gases per kilowatt hour of energy produced as coal, which produces more carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy than oil or gas.
Yet, more than 70 per cent of Toronto residents said they preferred incineration to landfill according to an online survey by the city, as well as an Environics poll conducted for the city, that together reached more than 12,000 people last year in May and June.
Incineration can produce electricity and even steam to heat homes, said Morton Barlaz, a distinguished professor emeritus in the department of civil, construction, and environmental engineering at North Carolina State University. Metals such as aluminum and iron are recovered from the ash and recycled.
But once an incinerator is built to burn a certain amount of trash, said Barlaz, it’s difficult to scale it down.
“Incinerators have to be built within a pretty narrow range of what quantity of waste you expect,” he said. “If in 10 years, the mass of waste goes down by half, then the incinerator operator or whoever signs the contract is going to be looking for more waste because you can’t turn them down.”
Landfills on the other hand, are more flexible when it comes to size, and are cheaper to build and operate, said Barlaz, who has worked closely with the landfill industry for decades. But pollutants can leach out into groundwater, which means landfills have to be monitored for decades, even centuries, he said.
Landfills also produce about 17 per cent of Canada’s methane emissions.
It’s for many of those same reasons that environmentalists think reducing garbage is a much better option.
Incinerators have strict emission controls, but Neil Tangri, a senior fellow with the Center for Environmental Public Policy at UC Berkeley in California, said he doesn’t believe the monitoring, or the science, can keep up with the changing nature of household waste.
Today, garbage may include raincoats with water repellent coatings.
Or clothing treated with flame retardants, that when burned can create dangerous chemical compounds, noted Tangri, a founding member of Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a coalition of groups that support zero waste policies.
Tangri also says garbage is an inefficient fuel.
About 30 per cent of household waste is organic matter that contains water, which has to be burned off during incineration, putting household waste on par with emissions from coal when it comes to creating a kilowatt hour of energy.
Barlaz, though, said that’s not a fair comparison.
“We’re not burning garbage just so we can make electricity,” he said. “We’re burning garbage because we have to do something with it. And so saying it’s as bad as coal or worse than coal, that may be factually correct, but that by itself is not justification for not incinerating.”
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The Brampton plant, owned by Emerald Energy from Waste — so called because electricity is produced as a by-product of burning waste — said its new plant will be state of the art.
Ramboll Engineering, a Danish company, is conducting a review of the new plant’s combustion technology as well its emission control system, according to Joe Lyng, Emerald’s president. (The Star interviewed Lyng for a previous story, but he didn’t respond to interview requests for this story.)
The review is one of the conditions set by the provincial environment ministry before Emerald can obtain an environmental compliance approval, a mandatory permit required for construction to move forward.
The ministry said in an email that Emerald “is required to conduct a detailed evaluation of best available technologies that could minimize air emissions (including minimizing nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, dioxins and furans emissions to levels that meet or exceed Ontario standards) and to provide a rationale for the technology that is ultimately selected, based on that evaluation.”
Another condition is that Emerald explain how it will provide the public with real-time data on stack emissions and incident reports, as well as other continuous monitoring data.
That data will be key to addressing human exposure, said Barlaz, noting that the incinerator operators are the first to point out that they monitor 24-7 for pollutants such as carbon monoxide, particulate matter and sulphur dioxide.
“So then the question is, what are the concentrations,” said Barlaz. “How do they compare to ambient air standards? And if they’re elevated, I would argue that that’s a problem.”
Testing for dioxins, furans, and heavy metals such as mercury and lead from incinerators in Ontario are done less frequently.
Meanwhile, the City of Toronto said in an email it hasn’t yet made any decision on how it will manage its waste in the future and that it is still analyzing the available disposal methods.
“This includes whether energy-from-waste facilities would be used, where they would be located, or how waste would ultimately be handled,” said Charlotte Ueta, Toronto’s director of policy, planning and outreach for Solid Waste Management Services.
“In the meantime, the city continues to rely on Green Lane Landfill,” said Ueta.
Whatever the city decides, it will still need a landfill.
At least 20 per cent of the burned garbage remains as ash that has to be disposed of. And incinerators go down for maintenance around 10 per cent of the time, said Tangri, during which time a landfill is necessary as a backup for waste.
“If there’s really no scope for a any landfill whatsoever,” said Tangi, “then the whole current system doesn’t work. It’s not like an incinerator gets you out.”
