by Cameron Smith

The Regional Municipality of Niagara is doing what governments and corporations should have been doing across Canada for the past 30 years.

If they had, I’ll bet Canada would have significantly lower rates of autism, asthma, and hyperactivity in children, as well as breast cancer, and environmental sensitivity in adults, (to name just a few health issues), and the nation’s contribution to global warming would be much lower. Instead, all these rates have been steadily increasing.

Niagara’s landfill sites were filling up, and it needed to decide what to do. It was faced with the usual clamour from companies with competing technologies,  so it took the radical step of commissioning a report to compare what it called the “true cost” of different ways of dealing with food waste and leaf-and-yard wastes (including brush).

By “true cost” the municipality meant that, in addition to capital and operating costs, it wanted to put a price on health and environmental impacts; it did not want to offload the cost of these impacts needlessly on residents.

To attempt such assessments from scratch would have been a complicated process, but as the report points out there are studies and computer models available from Environment Canada and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that make the calculations much simpler.

The report looked at what the results would be from using four different technologies:  composting, landfills that flare the resulting methane gas, landfills that use the methane for generating electricity, and incineration or gasification techniques. It did not compare the results produced by biodigesters, which also create methane for generating electricity.

It found that composting far and away had the least impact. The true cost of landfills with flaring was 3.8 times more costly, landfills with methane used for producing electricity was 2.5 times more costly, and the “best case estimate” for incineration or gasification was 3.2 times more costly.

As with any report, the Niagara study is open to disagreements and criticisms, but the exercise cannot be faulted. This is the sort of analysis that should be undertaken with any development project.

Environmental impacts were examined according to their potential for global warming, eutrophication of lakes and rivers, and acid rain. Health impacts were examined according to their potential to produce particulate emissions (“microscopic solids or liquid droplets so small they can get deep into lungs and cause serious health problems”), toxins that act like toluene (which causes cancer and genetic damage), and toxins that act like benzene (which slows down nerve transmission, depresses the central nervous system, and reduces the ability of hormones to carry messages within the body).

The final category of impacts was “ecosystem toxicity” which affects both the environment and human health. It was assessed by looking at compounds that act like the herbicide 2,4-D which, the report says, is believed to cause “major health effects, ranging from cancer to immunosupression, reproductive damage due to neurotoxicity, and environmental contamination, particularly of wetlands.

“A significant factor which contributes to the economic benefit of composting,” says the report, “is... that finished compost will be used as a substitute for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.”

On the basis of the report, Niagara has decided to go with composting, and is negotiating with a supplier to build a plant.

The municipality has now set a standard that residents of other municipalities should insist be observed.