Ottawa's new waste plan looks to extend life of Trail Road Landfill until 2049

The City of Ottawa is looking to extend the life of the Trail Road Landfill to 2049 through several initiatives to reduce the amount of waste residents are throwing out, deferring the multi-million-dollar cost of a new landfill or building a waste-to-energy facility.

City staff presented the long-range Ottawa Solid Waste Master Plan, the 30-year plan guiding waste management and diversion until 2054. The plan outlines steps the city should take in a bid to extend the life of the city's landfill for another 14 years, while also hiking fees for waste collection.

"Ottawa's generating far more garbage than it can manage sustainably," Coun. Shawn Menard told councillors and the media on Friday.

"The waste plan doesn't offer one single bullet solution to these challenges. Instead, it offers a list of actions that tackle the problem from many different angles."

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The plan comes as the city's municipal dump, the Trail Road Landfill, is rapidly filling up, with the landfill expected to be full between 2034 and 2036.  A new landfill, if required in 2034, would cost $591 million, according to the city.

"To defer costly alternatives to managing waste, whether that be a new technology or a new landfill, we need to make changes now," Alain Gonthier, Public Works Department general manager, told councillors.

"To do this, we must work together. The more residents reduce their waste, use their green bins and ensure recycling maximized… we will be able to make an impact on diversion levels and cost deferrals."

The updated Solid Waste Master Plan outlines five objectives and 50 actions to decrease the amount of waste going to the landfills by 15 per cent by 2029 and 23 per cent by 2034.  The city wants to increase organic waste by 14 per cent by 2029.

While Ottawa is introducing a three-item limit on garbage in the fall and plans to expand the green bin program to all apartments by 2027, more needs to be done to extend the life of Ottawa's only landfill and defer a costly new landfill or an incinerator for the city's future garbage.

The new plan includes maximizing the reduction and reuse of waste, expand the Take It Back! program, support more repair cafes, enforcing source separation requirements for recycling and organics, implementing a food waste reduction strategy, minimizing waste at special events, increasing waste diversion initiatives at city facilities and parks and public spaces, a bulky waste diversion strategy, pilot projects for alternative collection containers, a yellow bag program for small businesses review, single-use item reduction initiatives, and a new education and promotion plan to support implementation.

Gonthier says this plan is not about delaying a key decision on whether to build a new landfill or a waste-to-energy incinerator for this term of council.

"I think what we're delaying is the cost of that solution," he says. "There's no doubt within the 30-year plan that next big expense will be required. What we're trying to do is push that big expense out as far away as we can. And by doing that, especially, we're leveraging and we're maximizing the capacity that we currently have in the landfill," he said.

"There is a cost of every year that we extend the life of the landfill, there's a cost of to that, there's a value to the city, there's a financial value to the city of doing that. So the more we can do that, we're able to push those big expenses, that are inevitable, but we push those out as far as possible into the future. That's the big value."

Menard is the chair of the environment committee and says the city needs to do something to entice residents to throw out less. "What the strategy does is three concrete things: number one, it extends the landfill life by 14 years; number two is it offers service enhancements for things like green bins in multi-residential and more type of ways for it to be picked up curbside; and number three is that it allows us to save for a future system, whether that be landfill or waste-to-energy, that has yet to be determined. But it allows us to build those reserves to save for what will be the waste needs of Ottawa in the future."

Menard says the decision about building a new landfill or a new incinerator will come next year, after staff have fully analyzed the positions, those costs and benefits of each, and what makes sense for Ottawa.

"If you are just putting things into waste incineration, how much more will people throw out in the trash and how much costs will increase? I know one thing is true, that we all have to do more to reduce where we can because that will save us a lot of funds in the future whether that is landfilling or incineration. That is what this plan is all about, is those types of reductions." 

The goal is to reduce the amount of waste by 31,000 tonnes over 30 years and divert 970,520 tonnes of waste from landfills over 30 years.  The key goal of the new Solid Waste Master Plan is to extend the life of the landfill an additional 14 years until 2049.

Solid waste fees to increase

As part of the new Solid Waste Master Plan, the fees for garbage collection will increase to help fund operating and capital requirements until 2053.

In 2024, the average property tax bill included a $201 charge for solid waste services. 

The proposed Solid Waste Master Plan could see fees increase to $265 in 2025 and $381 a year by 2034, which would help fund some of the initiatives in the plan. Staff say shifting the garbage services charges on a tax bill to a flat fee rate will also help replenish reserve funds for solid waste services.

--With files from CTV News Ottawa's Leah Larocque