When Toronto officials have nightmares about the city's garbage problem, they imagine something like what happened in Naples, Italy.
Like Toronto, Naples was producing more and more garbage. Like Toronto, it had dithered for years about where to put it.
The reckoning finally came in May of last year. Local dumps announced they were full. Neighbouring towns refused to help. With nowhere to take the trash, the city left it in the street, where it piled up, day after pungent day.
Schools closed their doors to keep students away from the garbage. Food markets shut down for fear of contamination. Neapolitans started wearing surgical masks and setting fire to garbage piles out of anger.
Is Toronto facing the same fate? The city has been looking for a garbage solution since at least 1987, when the government of now-defunct Metropolitan Toronto began fretting over what to do when two local dumps filled up. Tens of millions of dollars later, it still has no answer to this most fundamental of urban problems.
The best method it has been able to find is shipping the garbage to a private landfill in Michigan. Every day, about 140 enormous, six-axle trucks make the 12 to 15-hour round trip, taking their crushing toll on highway surfaces and spewing exhaust all the way.
Almost everyone agrees that exporting Toronto's garbage is a poor solution -- including the people of Michigan, who have made unwanted waste from Canada one of the biggest political issues in the state. At the same time, no one can agree on a better way.
What to do?
Despite two decades of hand wringing, Toronto's garbage problem is nowhere near as knotty as it seems. The garbage "crisis" is really no crisis at all. As this series will attempt to explain, there are plenty of clean, affordable ways for modern cities to dispose of their waste.
Incineration, used successfully all over the world and even in one Toronto suburb, is far cleaner and safer than it once was. Modern landfills have solved most of the pollution problems that environmentalists complain of. More aggressive recycling can cut down the volume of waste, though it's not the silver bullet it's often claimed to be.
But nothing will happen unless governments and their leaders take an honest look at the problem and make some hard choices. So far, they have been much better at saying what cities should not do with their waste.
In the 1990s, Ontario's NDP government banned the building of incinerators. Just this spring, the current Liberal government cancelled for good a long-standing proposal to ship Toronto's trash to an empty mine near Kirkland Lake in Northern Ontario.
"We're busy ruling things out before we really look at them," says John Tory, a contender for the leadership of Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party. In Toronto's mayoral race last year, he stood out from the pack by supporting incineration (and lost to David Miller).
Cities have been struggling with what to do with their garbage since ancient times. For millennia, people simply hurled their trash into the street to rot or be eaten by wandering animals. Over time, the garbage became so deep that cities effectively rose in elevation, building over the trash on giant mounds known as tells.
The original city dump opened in Athens in 500 BC. Rome had the first sanitation workers, two-man teams that roamed the streets with a wagon. Much later, some cities disposed of their garbage by feeding it to pigs in raw or cooked form. Others put it in huge vats with animal carcasses to produce grease and a substance known as tankage. The smells were staggering.
Toronto began formal garbage collection in the 1860s, after a cholera outbreak. By 1900, it was burning much of its garbage in crude incinerators. The ash went into the harbour or into city ravines as fill. Christie Pitts in the city's west end was partly filled with ash.
The city had its first garbage crisis when its three big incinerators started to run out of capacity. Meanwhile, many of its dumps started to catch fire because people would throw out cardboard and wood along with coal ash from their furnaces. Because of that ash, the average household produced 40 per cent more garbage by weight than it does now.
The latest garbage crisis began with the closing of the Keele Valley dump north of Toronto in 2002 after years of complaints from local residents about noise and smells. They held a party to celebrate, but the closing was bad news for the city, which lost a cheap, nearby disposal site and had no ready alternative.
More than a decade of effort and tens of millions of dollars had been wasted looking for a replacement for Keele. Two provincial governments, first Liberal, then NDP, scoured the province in vain for a community willing to take Toronto's trash.
The Conservative government of premier Mike Harris, elected in 1995, abandoned the search and told cities to look on their own. Still no "willing host" could be found.
"You can easily find holes in the ground of sufficient size within convenient distance to take all of Toronto's waste, but nobody wants it," said Richard Anderson, who teaches geography at York University. "People freak out over garbage issues."
Some environmentalists even say we are wrong to produce garbage in the first place. Our trash is proof of our wasteful ways, they argue. "There should be no such thing as garbage," Frank de Jong, leader of Ontario's Green Party, wrote in April. "Garbage should be recognized for what it is, partially used resources."
Toronto got a taste of the passion that garbage can provoke in 2000 when city council debated a proposal to ship the city's waste to an abandoned open-pit iron mine near Kirkland Lake. The bitter four-day debate over Adams Mine was the longest in years, featuring fistfights and tearful scenes in the public gallery. Although council ultimately approved the proposal, the deal fell through shortly after over the financial terms of the contract.
That left Toronto with just one option: Michigan. It signed a five-year contract with the U.S. firm Republic Services to send garbage to the Carleton Farms landfill in Wayne County, Mich.
That might have been a reasonable solution. At $53 a tonne for disposal and shipping, it is a lot pricier than Keele Valley's $18 a tonne. But then, cities such as New York and Boston spend $100 a tonne and more to ship their garbage out of state.
There is just one problem: The people of Michigan don't seem to want our trash.
"No one wants to get dumped on. That's what it comes down to," said Mike Garfield of the lobby group Don't Trash Michigan. "Michigan people have a very strong environmental ethic and to find we have become the dumping ground for the whole region is simply intolerable for us."
Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm responded to the pressure in March by signing a package of waste-management bills that would ban pop bottles, pop cans and used tires from imported trash. Yard waste, biomedical waste and radioactive waste had already been banned.
Under the legislation, Ms. Granholm will have short-term emergency powers to close the border to incoming garbage if the state believes there is a threat to health, safety or the environment.
If that ever happened, Toronto could quickly become another Naples, with garbage piling up and nowhere to put it.
The city would have just 48 hours before reaching the overflow point at its seven garbage transfer stations, where city trucks dump their loads to be transferred to Michigan-bound transports.
The city had a foretaste of what could happen when the U.S. border was closed for 16 to 18 hours last year because of the scare over mad-cow disease and Canadian beef. Garbage trucks lined up by the dozen at the transfer stations.
City officials had to appeal to the province, which gave them special permission to send garbage to Ontario dumps normally closed to Toronto's trash.
There is another problem with Michigan, too. New, tougher U.S. laws limiting how long truckers can spend on the road have pushed up costs for the company that transports Toronto's garbage. Wilson Logistics says its trucks face delays of up to three hours at the border as U.S. officials check them over.
Because of all this, Toronto is questioning its decision to send its garbage to Michigan.
"One hundred per cent of our stock is in Michigan, and Michigan might be Nortel before the crash," said environmental consultant Maria Kelleher, author of a recent report on the garbage problem.
The city says it would like to have a homegrown solution in place by 2010. It has all but ruled out sending its trash to an Ontario landfill or building a new incinerator.
Instead, it is pushing recycling, composting and other "green solutions." Along with the blue box for bottles and cans and the grey box for newspapers and cardboard, selected city residents will get a green bin for kitchen scraps and other "wet" garbage.
The goal is to divert 60 per cent of Toronto's garbage away from landfills by 2006, up from 32 per cent now.
That's a tall order.
An average Toronto household generates nearly a tonne of garbage every year. The city as a whole produced 908,966 tonnes in 2003, a figure that has been rising by about 1 per cent a year. Amid that vast pile are about five million toothbrushes, 10 million light bulbs, 100,000 mattresses and 25 million square feet of carpet, mats and other floor coverings.
No other big North American municipality has reached 60-per-cent diversion. Chicago, a similar-sized city, is hoping to divert 25 per cent.
"If we look at keeping 60 or more per cent out of landfills, we'll find it very costly and the environmental benefits very minimal," said Guy Crittenden, editor of Solid Waste and Recycling, an industry magazine. Though blue-box recycling is popular, he said, "You have to look outside the box, pun intended."
Even if Toronto reaches it ambitious 60 per cent goal, what does it do with the other 40 per cent? The city is placing it hopes on "new and emerging technologies" -- whiz-bang, high-tech processes such as gasification, in which garbage is reduced by heating it to high temperatures without igniting it.
But they are expensive and often untried. A report to a city committee studying the new technologies concluded "no magic bullets have been found." It also said that even the best technologies produce some ash or other residue that would have to go to a landfill.
"A lot of these are not proven on a long time scale," Mr. Crittenden said. "The danger is that Toronto will build some kind of white elephant."
To complicate matters, the provincial government decided in June not to let Toronto open a research facility to study high-tech options. So council voted to conduct an environmental assessment, a process that could take several years and cost millions of dollars.
Naples tried for a high-tech solution, too. City officials wanted to build two new low-pollution incinerators to deal with the overflowing garbage. Residents and environmental campaigners resisted. No one wanted an incinerator in their backyard.
Instead, they got piles of refuse in their streets, a medieval scene of squalor straight out of Roman times. When tourists visited the ancient site of Herculaneum, they were faced with rotting garbage at the gates, much as they might have 2,000 years ago. The history of garbage had come full circle.
Unwanted waste
Today: The garbage "crisis" is really no crisis at all
Tomorrow: Landfill phobia lies behind the garbage crunch
Part 3: Why incineration is a burning issue
Part 4: There's no turning back on recycling
Marcus Gee