With an apparently insatiable consumer demand for convenient, disposable and over-packaged goods, handling ever-growing piles of garbage will only continue to become increasingly problematic.
For generations, the typical approach has basically been to simply dig a big hole, bury the waste, cover it up, and forget about it. Unfortunately, our descendants will not have the luxury of ignoring a major problem we placed directly on their shoulders.
As council heard last week, landfills — which use a protective but certainly not infallible membrane to prevent waste from leaking into the ground — represent a major long-term liability, especially for small municipalities.
“Even once a cell is closed off, and packed off, and left off to the side, that liability continues on forever. And those liners don’t last forever,” said John Rimmer, Caroline’s mayor, who was seeking Sundre council’s support in principle on a regional private-public-partnership waste-to-energy project that would not directly need taxpayer funding.
“Those liners will break down, they’ll start leaking into our aquifers and our groundwater,” he said, adding the time to move away from the practice of landfilling has come.
That assessment is echoed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which has stated the barriers are ultimately destined to fail, with the site lingering around posing a toxic threat for millennia. Pollution seeping from landfills into groundwater is not a matter of if, but when.
So while the initial deployment cost for a landfill seems cheap when compared with an expensive, technologically sophisticated waste-to-energy facility, in the long-run, the latter is not only far more economical — even generating a revenue stream by selling electricity — but arguably more environmentally friendly.
We can’t pretend to be concerned about future generations while continuously creating a catastrophic environmental mess they’ll inherit.
Of course waste-to-energy isn’t perfect. Although scrubbers reduce smells, the process does emit some amount of carbon dioxide. And just burning trash presents a very real potential unintended consequence of actively discouraging consumers from being more conscious in their purchasing habits.
But like Rimmer told council, while every effort should still be made to reduce, reuse, and as a last resort, recycle, “we’re not going to run into a shortage of plastic. And it’s becoming more and more apparent that if we don’t do something about how we handle plastic, it’s going to continue to get worse.”
So while we think waste reduction should remain the top priority, the waste-to-energy proposal is at the very least worth investigating.
— Ducatel is the Round Up’s editor
