A rchive Date
[ 23-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[The new alchemy turns garbage into gold
We're all tired of this wasteful debate, and something tells me it's not over yet
By JOHN DOWNING
Toronto Sun
August 9, 2000
I'm tired of trash talking. What's that computer expression about garbage in, garbage out, meaning what you get out of your computer depends on what's been put in? Could describe the verbal output of some politicians!
I wish the vote a week ago by Toronto council really was the end of the garbage debates that have been dragging on at City Hall and the Legislature for a quarter of a century. I wish the headlines saying it's final, our city trash is going north, will really be the final such headlines.
But I gave up all illusions about garbage a long time ago. Actually the same 25 years ago when, as a columnist, I decided I would be better able to separate truth from garbage and fight the guff from environmental activists by taking the first U of T environmental science courses, where one great devil was the works department and how it buried our garbage just north of Toronto.
My study group did our paper on how Toronto's garbage was handled at landfills like Keele Valley. We found from actually mucking about and talking to everyone involved that Keele Valley was well-run from environmental and economic standards. And we got a good mark, even though we were a renegade group compared to the Pollution Probe mythology permeating the class.
Yet you'd think from the local yammering over the Keele Valley landfill, which prevented longer use which would have saved Toronto tens of millions, that it was some pestilence. Nope, Toronto taxpayers have just been sacrificed by the local MPP, Al Palladini, who is no pal of ours.
JOBS AND REVENUE
Spare me the grumbling of any local council which complains about "hosting" the garbage from the big city even as they get to dump their own garbage free and collect revenue and jobs.
Save me, too, from those who would now fight Toronto and its Olympic bid in retaliation to this shipment of garbage to their backyard, even though they're quite content to have Toronto contribute more than its share to the national and provincial economy, meaning that in shattered mining towns with record welfare and unemployment demands, it's Toronto taxpayers who help put bread on their tables.
I once took a crash course on how Europe, particularly Germany, handles its garbage as part of a small touring group of academics, bureaucrats and journalists. Since then I have been a great booster of incineration, which works well throughout the world without fouling the air thanks to new technology. Yet here we are in Toronto with councillors shying from modern incinerators because of old fears about air pollution.
How dumb and ridiculous it is to bury stuff that we could burn and harvest the energy; to lay waste with our waste instead of making watts from waste.
But then you could also say that how we got to this point - which isn't the end but "is, perhaps, the end of the beginning," in Churchill's phrase - has also been ridiculous.
Council's vote to ship 1.3 million tonnes of garage 600 km to a big hole in the ground that used to be a gold mine near Kirkland Lake was said to be the end of a 12-year search. Well, I reckon we've been searching twice that long, and that probably up to $100 million has been spent in the search and the cosmetics and propaganda around it.
And politicians of all stripes have helped to foul the process, particularly the Liberals and New Democrats. I found it ironic that this billion-dollar proposal, if it survives final negotiations and another council vote in October, is taking our garbage three times as far as a rejected idea to dump it in a huge hole outside Marmora.
I take cottage guests to see the wasteland left behind when iron ore was scooped out and what was left after processing was dumped to crush nature. The only difference I can see between the two holes is Marmora is only 200 km away, presumably, then, a lot less expensive for a daily 68-car garbage train to reach. But then Ruth Grier, the NDP's environment minister, had a cottage just north of it.
BLOTTING NATURE
You wouldn't have known it was a desert of used rock, though, it you had listened to the locals, just as now when you listen to the Kirkland Lakers it sounds as if Toronto is about to blot some wonderful nature spot. Trust me, the only beauty around most mines or mining towns is found in a few flower beds, which may be just geraniums in old juice cans.
Yet council's NDP wing, which was the guts of the 20 who voted against the 36 in favor, made it sound like city officials would be creating a cesspool worse than anything the provincial government allows with its lack of management of manure.
Coun. Jack Layton kept referring to what would flow from the old Adams mine into the "pristine" countryside. Well, as the expert hydrologist hired by the city kept showing, only water that had been treated in a sewage plant would be flowing out. And the countryside's hardly "pristine." Layton supposedly knows how to research since he has a PhD. Yet "pristine" would mean a surroundings in their original or primitive state that are pure and undefiled. Only in your socialist dreams, Jack, would anyone be describing the ground around Kirkland Lake gouged open by gold miners as pure and undefiled.
They took gold out and now we're spending a fortune in gold to put garbage in. And it makes sense to most of the politicians who haven't made much sense on this issue for 25 years.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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