Province buries Site 41 dump site in Simcoe

Gail Swainson Toronto Star May 26 2010
The province has revoked the certificate of approval for Elmvale’s notorious Dump Site 41, just hours after Simcoe County Council voted Tuesday to rezone the landfill for agricultural uses.
The decision means the site will be permanently shuttered after a 20-year battle by local activists to scrap the 20.7-hectare landfill, originally scheduled to be ready to take trash this fall.
“We did revoke the certificate of approval for Site 41 on request from Simcoe County,” said Environment Ministry spokesperson Kate Jordan.
On Tuesday, Simcoe County council voted overwhelmingly to ask the province to revoke the landfill’s operating certificate and redesignate the zoning on the property to agricultural.
County council also approved a motion to place restrictive covenants on the $13.7 million parcel prohibiting it from ever being used as a landfill site.
Hundreds of dump opponents cheered after county politicians voted to dump the landfill, once and for all.
“We’ve come a long way,” said Steve Ogden, who has led the fight against Site 41 since the beginning. “Everything is in place and now I hope it will be sold back to a farmer.”
A tight-knit coalition of local and native activists, angry cottagers and environmentalists vigorously fought the landfill, which they said would pollute the Alliston Aquifer — which sits right under the site — with leachate.
The Alliston Aquifer connects through a complex of underground rivers and other aquifers to the Oak Ridges Moraine, which provides drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Greater Toronto residents. Scientists have said the Alliston Aquifer contains some of the cleanest, most pristine water anywhere in the world.
While the original proposal for Site 41 was rejected on environmental grounds, the project was later revived after cabinet intervened. A 2007 county council decision approved the dump by a single vote.
Last August, county council voted to decommission the site, but opponents feared that until the operating certificate was revoked by the province, it could be sold to a private operator and opened for business.
The question now is where the county will put trash slated for Site 41. Local enviromentalists, who are pushing for zero waste, say a dump is no longer needed.
However, county officials are eyeing some form of arrangement with York and Durham or Dufferin County and their energy-from-waste incinerators.
York and Durham’s proposed $272 million incinerator is to be built by Covanta Energy Corp., which will design, build and operate the facility in Clarington, near Highway 401 in Courtice.
But Ogden warned that county officials have also been quietly working behind the scenes to reopen three other dump sites scattered across the county: Site 42 near Collingwood, Site 12 near Wasaga Beach and Site 9 near Coldwater.