Vision holds little appeal for county waste committee

By Kate Harries WaterWatch
Binoculars or blinkers?
That seemed to be the choice on the agenda of the waste management strategy steering committee as vice chair Gord McKay pushed for a new perspective to guide the deliberations of this advisory group for the next five months.
McKay, a Midland councillor and Zero Waste Simcoe representative, noted that the resolution establishing the committee had as its first item “that the County of Simcoe’s waste management strategy process consider and incorporate the principles of zero waste.”
But the committee’s terms of reference make no reference to zero waste whatsoever.
“It’s a fairly significant omission ,” said McKay, who argued that the document framing the work of defining a waste strategy for the next 20 years has the committee headed the wrong way – based on the assumption that there will be ever-increasing mountains of waste that will require the county to build more infrastructure and “landfills are definitely part of this future.”
In contrast, the province is moving in the opposite direction – one of recognizing that there’s no hope of controlling waste unless the onus is put on manufacturers to take charge of their no-longer wanted products, from mattresses to packaging.
“The whole waste landscape is going to change,” McKay said, describing an MOE consultation session he recently attended on changes to the Waste Diversion Act, to be introduced next spring by Environment Minister John Gerretsen.
“They (the MOE) said, we are going to change all this, we’re going to bring in something called EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) and we’re going to push all this waste back to the producers, so they’re responsible for it…We no longer will have the responsibility under the EPR to deal with all this. So there’s a major turning point. Do we want to continue to manage waste in perpetuity? Is that something this county really wants to do?”
He proposed an amendment to the vision statement in which the county exits waste management, while retaining short-term capacity to maintain diversion and disposal commitments, and focuses on management of the organics stream.
“We have to know where we end up in 20 years time,” McKay said.
County Councillors Gord Wauchope (Innisfil), Phil Sled (Severn), and Doug Little (Adjala-Tosorontio) had little taste for the discussion and urged the committee to move on.
“Our responsibility is to the waste that we’ve created,” Little said. “If we start to say we’re getting out of waste we could completely lose control here – we could end up with landfills all over our county.”
Environmental Services Director Rob McCullough expressed some discomfort at the proposal. “We as the waste managers have to look at both the theoretical and the reality.” David Payne of Stantec also expressed concern that the kind of change envisioned by McKay is a long way off and there’s no knowing how fast the province will move.
Janine Ralph of Stantec proposed changes to the Stantec vision, amending the second item to allow for the notion that provincial EPR measures could reduce the need for disposal of residual waste, and adding a sixth bullet to the effect that the county’s system has the flexibility to align with potential changes to the Waste Diversion Act and the provincial waste management system
A motion incorporating the changes was put forward by Sled and Councillor Bill Duffy (Ramara). 
Committee member Nickolas Rowe complained that the motion said nothing about what the committee wants, but merely that “we’re going to be aligned with government. As far as I’m concerned, governments are driven by what people make very clear they want.”
But Mary Munnoch of the Adjala-Tosorontio Ratepayers Association argued against McKay’s position, recounting how her group fought a landfill site and for the past nine years has been involved in volunteer waste diversion programs. “Who creates this?” she asked. “Don’t take it away from me,” she said, urging committee members to “take real responsibility.”
The committee voted 5-3 in favour of the Sled amendment and against McKay’s amendment.