Flow Control

I.  Voltaire

Optimistic Candide says: Il faut cultiver notre jardin – we must cultivate our own garden.  He  means that our responsibility is local, and we must focus on our own actions. Think global, act local.

II Flow Control

Back in 1995, HRM’s landfill in Lower Sackville was nearly full.  An innovative community consultation process upended convention by proposing to treat waste as a ‘resource’.  In order to make the composting/recycling vision a reality, the citizens adopted several principles:

 

 

From: An Integrated Waste/Resource Management Strategy by the Community Stakeholders Committee 

Adopted in principle March 25, 1995

 

Community Rights and Responsibilities

 

To achieve the essential goals  of our Vision for resource management, it is necessary to design a system which supports full public participation and stewardship, including:

• The right to have meaningful and effective community/public participation in policy formulation, component design, component procurement, system operation and overall implementation and review of our resource management system.

• The right to have access to information on all matters affecting resource management.

• The responsibility to protect natural systems from any human abuse.

• The responsibility to find solutions to resource-use problems as close to source and home as possible.

• The responsibility to exercise personal and social restraint in the consumption of resources.

 

That vision was written into HRM’s by-laws including:

 

HALIFAX REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY SOLID WASTE RESOURCE COLLECTION AND DISPOSAL BY-LAW BY-LAW No. S – 600

16. PROHIBITIONS 

16.3 No person shall export or remove solid waste material generated within the Municipality outside the boundaries of the Municipality and all such solid waste shall be disposed of within the boundaries of the Municipality and in accordance with this By-law. 

 

This is called flow control and is anathema to the waste haulage industry, especially those transporting Industrial, Commercial and Institutional (ICI) waste.

 

The landfill at Otter Lake, operating under the new strategy of zero waste opened in 1999.  HRM said from the beginning that they didn’t want to operate the dump, so Mirror, part of the Municipal group of companies was hired to manage the facility.

 

Money from trash

In 2005, a legal campaign was mounted against by-law S-600.    The Solid Waste Association of Nova Scotia (SWANS) applied to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia (SWANS v. HRM, 2005 NSSC 89) to quash certain sections of HRM’s Solid Waste Collection and Disposal By-law, citing exclusively financial considerations.  Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) and Halifax Waste Management Society (HWMS) raised as a preliminary issue that SWANS does not have standing to bring the application.   The Honourable Justice Suzanne M. Hood  concluded that, since there was another reasonable and effective means to bring the matter before the courts, SWANS did not have standing to challenge the by-law.

 

SWANS, a limited company, existed from 2003 to 2019, when it was struck off the rolls, having last filed an annual statement in 2011.  Its address was 20 SIMMONDS DR., DARTMOUTH now home to GFL Environmental, a waste company.  Directors in 2003 were Joe Warwick, George South and Kevin Clowater.  With such a limited lifetime, SWANS can fairly be described as a shell corporation.

 

Halifax (Regional Municipality) v. Ed DeWolfe Trucking Ltd. , 2006 NSSC 287, involved a single truck load of waste being hauled by the respondent,  Ed DeWolfe Trucking Limited,  from within HRM to a landfill site in West Hants. The virtues of the vision aside, The Honourable Justice J. E. Scanlan found “Provisions within By-law 602 which limit export of solid waste from HRM are beyond the powers conferred upon HRM under the Municipal Government Act.”

 

Scanlan notes “HRM currently charges $115.00 per tonne for ICI waste delivered to the Otter Lake facility.  At that facility they do an assessment as to the quality of source separation for ICI waste .  There is no direct evidence as regards what the “tipping fee”  is at all waste management facilities outside of HRM.   Counsel repeatedly made reference to  tipping fees ranging from $50.00 to $80.00 outside HRM.”

 

The Honourable Justice Nancy Bateman allowed a stay while HRM appealed.

 

Saying “ the purpose of the by-law was, as I said earlier, to assure that the municipality has management of all of the waste for which it is responsible, to provide a predictable flow of revenue to help fund the overall waste-resource management system and, particularly in the case of ICI waste, to support municipal efforts to maximize source separation and diversion of waste.”, Justice Roscoe allowed the appeal.

 

Clearly, Ed DeWolfe’s lawsuit was simply about tipping fees.  It cost more to unload ICI waste at Otter Lake than outside the county.

 

The End of Flow Control

 

In 2011, HRM undertook a review which disappointed the community group (then called the Community Monitoring Committee). On January 14, 2014, HRM Council’s Committee of the Whole considered a 95 page report from staff with nine recommendations for changes to the waste management system. Recommendations seven through nine dealt with changes to the landfill and included:

Amend By-law S-600 to allow for the export of ICI residual waste (garbage) outside HRM, and amend Administrative Order number 16 to provide for an increase in fees for disposal of ICI residual waste from $125 per tonne to the assessed system cost of $170.00 per tonne

The report did not explore the primary reason for flow control:  The responsibility to find solutions to resource-use problems as close to source and home as possible, nor did staff consider the pollution costs of distant transport.  Although the staff report asks council to “confirm the objectives of the Community Stakeholders Committee Integrated Resource Management Strategy 1995”, in fact it laments “Wasting capacity at the existing site through flow control is not sound environmental stewardship.”  Oddly enough, staff wanted to gut one of the main pillars of the CSC.  One wonders at the origin of this plan and why Council so brazenly ignored the will of the people.

 

The upshot was a windfall to the waste haulers, who could now offer a much cheaper alternative (or not) to their clients.  HRM got to extend operations at Otter Lake beyond 2024 (possibly to 2036) and to increase the vertical height of existing and future cells by 15 meters.  

 

St. Croix Cove

Is a speck of a village on the North Mountain in Annapolis County.  It’s home to one of the destination ICI dumps.  None of the widely acclaimed principles (remember them?) of the 1995  Community Stakeholders Committee are in effect.  

• The right to have meaningful and effective community/public participation in policy formulation, component design, component procurement, system operation and overall implementation and review of our resource management system. We’ve NEVER been asked.

• The right to have access to information on all matters affecting resource management.  When we ask what’s in the dump, we’re given the run around.  When we identify pollutants from the scanty records, we’re met with stony silence..

• The responsibility to protect natural systems from any human abuse.  This should be what the Department of Environment and Climate Change is meant to do.  They do the reverse

• The responsibility to find solutions to resource-use problems as close to source and home as possible. Cruel irony, eh?

• The responsibility to exercise personal and social restraint in the consumption of resources.  Ask our Local Peregrine Falcons who’s more restrained.

 

Math

Annapolis Waterkeepers has photographs of 154 John Ross trucks showing deliveries of autofluff (ICI waste) to Arlington Heights C&D from April 2019 to December, 2020.  That alone represents tipping fees of $354,200.  Those trucks emitted 49,000 kilograms of CO2 in their frenzy to avoid flow control.  We estimate 4 trucks a day are currently making deliveries - windfall profits of $9,200 and new CO2 emissions of just over 1,000kg per day.  

Irony Interlude

In 2022, Canada was caught with its pants down, shipping containers full of undesirable waste to the antipodes:

Some of the 69 containers of Canadian trash that were returned to Canada from the Philippines in 2019 are stacked at Global Container Terminals after being offloaded from the Anna Maersk container ship, in Delta, B.C., on June 29, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Indonesia sends back hundreds of shipping containers full of waste

Published Wednesday, September 4, 2019 4:42AM EDT

Hundreds of shipping containers, such as this one sent from Australia, have been found to be filled with household trash and hazardous waste. (AFP)

 

Why bother sending waste to the Philippines when there’s a third world country in St. Croix Cove just 175 kilometers away?

 

Without  doubt

• the SWANS lawsuits were about loss of revenue due to flow control.  

• Mirror has never been a disinterested party

• the dump in St. Croix cove is owned by the Municipal group of companies

• Otter Lake is operated by a sister company

• Since the demise of flow control, the profit for any Municipal company from using a Municipal-owned dump for ICI waste is increased to $170/tonne or $3910/truckload

• HRM Staff and Council have ignored the solid waste strategy charted in 1995 and favor industry over people:

• “Elimination of flow control on ICI garbage affects waste service costs across the entire ICI and business community. Reduced service costs for HRM businesses are a positive economic outcome. This also supports free market competition for haulers delivering waste to landfills outside HRM at lower tip fee rates.” -page 68 of HRM Staff Report

 

This is such a poorly managed project. By manipulating a gullible Council, a sacrifice zone has been created to serve business interests.  Good intentions have come to naught and taxpayers will be cleaning up the mess made by the greed of Dexter and incompetence of NSECC for decades.