Concern over incinerator fills Campbell’s Bay Rec Centre
Pierre Cyr, LJI Reporter
One hundred and twenty-four people attended a public information meeting at the Campbell’s Bay Recreation Centre on Saturday afternoon to hear concerns about MRC Pontiac’s proposal to build a garbage incinerator in the Municipality of Litchfield.
The meeting, convened by Judy Spence and her group Citizens of the Pontiac presented four speakers with extensive experience on the matter of energy-from-waste incinerators, all of whom joined the meeting via Zoom to share their views.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Paul Connett, is a graduate of Cambridge University and holds a PhD in chemistry from Dartmouth University. He is the author of the 2013 book The Zero Waste Solution and is an international expert in waste management and environmental toxicology. Connett, who doesn’t charge anything to share his expertise and channels all the profits from his sales of his books to support non-profit organizations, participated in Saturday’s meeting via Zoom from England.
“This is really an absurd solution for Pontiac,” said Connett who has shared his expertise on over 300 incinerator projects. “You will be producing 20 times more toxic ash than the trash you currently have,” he said, explaining that an incinerator that burns 400,000 tons of garbage produces about 100,000 tons of ash, which is 20 times the 5,000 tons of garbage currently produced across Pontiac County.
Connett said that the fly ash coming from the incinerator is particularly toxic with some extreme levels of lead and cadmium, and showed studies revealing that these chemicals, dioxins, and nanoparticles accumulate in the environment and contaminate surface waters and the food chain.
‘’Why would you play Russian roulette with your children’s brains?” Connett asked.
“Making dirty energy is stupid,’’ he said, adding that a big incinerator will ruin the image of Pontiac, reduce property values, threaten farming, and undermine hope for genuine economic development.
‘’You can’t be polite about it. You can’t keep quiet about it. You have got to shout and make some noise if you don’t want this to happen in Pontiac,’’ he said.
Connett believes the alternative for Pontiac is a good zero-waste program that will reduce residual waste to 1,000 tons per year.
He also said that, in contrast with the 50 jobs promised for the envisioned $450,000 facility, far more jobs would be created by having a good zero-waste strategy here in the Pontiac
“Our job today is not to find better ways to destroy material, but to stop making products and packaging using materials that must be destroyed,” he said.
The second speaker was Linda Gasser, who fought against the Durham York Energy Center (DYEC) incinerator project in Ontario and is with the group Zero Waste 4 Zero Burning. She shared that the cost of the project went up from the original estimate of $197 million to $295 million for the 140,000-ton capacity incinerator. She said the Durham York incinerator suffered two fires in its early days, as well as breakdowns requiring shutdowns of the facility for up to three months.
‘’No one should point to DYEC as an example to follow. It’s a failure in every respect,” said Gasser.
The next speaker was Wendy Bracken with the group Durham Environment Watch who was also involved in the environmental watch of the DYEC. She offered data that shows emissions of dioxin/furan more than 12 times above the legal limits. Bracken also brought forward weaknesses in the testing of the emissions coming from the incinerator, saying they were conducted too infrequently and for too short a period to provide an accurate indication of the level of toxins actually being emitted. According to Bracken, Canadian regulations and standards regarding incinerators are outdated when compared to those in Europe or the United States.
Next was Liz Benneian, a former newspaper editor with a degree in science, now working with the Ontario Zero Waste Coalition, who helped to run a successful campaign to stop an $800 million incinerator project in Ontario in 2005.
“We were able to prove that these plants never work as promised. We could prove their emissions were toxic,” said Benneian.
Benneian said that one of the characteristics of the incinerator experience is untransparent local government.
“In the Pontiac, why is public money being spent on business cases, and why is pre-agreement being sought to bring waste from Ontario while the public is kept in the dark?” asked Benneian. “What else is going on behind the scenes?”
According to Benneian, it should be obvious that the problem of waste generation cannot be solved by an incinerator that requires an ongoing production of waste.
“With only 5,000 tons of waste to manage, the incinerator is a solution we don’t need for a problem we don’t have,” concluded Benneian.
Benneian, Bracken and Gasser have helped more than 10 Ontario community groups in their battle to prove that an incinerator project was not a good solution for waste management. They succeeded in 100 per cent of the cases to have local and regional politicians change their mind and vote against an incinerator project.
After listening to the speakers at the meeting, Josey Bouchard, a Campbell’s Bay municipal councillor and spokesperson for the health advocacy group Pontiac Voice, declared that she will now support efforts to stop the construction of the incinerator.
“It is a dump, a glorified dump, and I don’t think our region should be anybody’s dump,” said Bouchard.
Video of the presentations will be available at www.citizensofthePontiac.ca over the coming days.
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