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You've got to watch this video. It's about an oil spill long ago that is exactly the same as the one in the Gulf of Mexico today, and the same people and the same cleanup techniques failed then and, well, just click here to watch the video.
Note that it's seven minutes long but really worth watching in its entirety because it sort of builds and builds...
Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government in Ontario has capitulated to lobby pressure from regulated industry and postponed (possibly permanently) one of the most important pieces of constructive environmental legislation in a generation.
The legislation would revise Ontario’s Waste Diversion Act, and was supposed to be introduced in June in the legislature. The legislation was crafted by Environment Minister John Gerretsen and his staff, and was important for reasons I’ll list in a moment.
This is a very sad day for the environment and also a sad day for taxpayers, who will continue to subsidize businesses and wasteful packaging. Municipalities will continue to receive only 50-cent dollars in industry’s preferred “shared cost” model for curbside recycling, and a tremendous opportunity has been lost to move Ontario in the direction of sustainability, clean production and green jobs.
It seems that industry can afford to pay the best lobbyists to use scare tactics against politicians; municipalities (i.e., the public) cannot afford these lobbyists, and therefore the public interest has been thwarted (again). It’s simply incredible that such a winning piece of legislation, that would enjoy broad public support, could be thwarted by a small group of industry flacks, but there you go. Money and fear rule the day. Even though an election is a year away, the Liberals appear to have caved to fear-mongering and misleading characterizations of stewardship fees as “tax” (when in fact the whole exercise is about tax reduction).
The reason is also rumored to be that Gerretsen and his staff failed to “sell” the legislation enough to their counterparts in other ministries and in the Premier’s office.
Here are four reasons the revisions to the Waste Diversion Act should be reintroduced in the fall (and if not, this party is not fit to govern):
1. Currently, municipal ratepayers fund 50 per cent of the net costs of the blue box recycling program. This is a subsidy to industry that makes no sense anymore and gives industry very little incentive to redesign or eliminate its waste packaging, and to design products for ease of recycling at the end of their useful lives. Minister Gerretsen and his staff – after extensive public consultations – has read the public’s mind and knows the public “gets it” (when it’s explained properly) that it’s time to get waste diversion off the tax base and make producers responsible for the materials they send into the marketplace.
2. For once (finally!) all the right stars were in alignment to move forward with much-needed change. The Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) was in agreement with the various waste and recycling associations on matters that were negotiated over a period of years! Imagine, the Ontario Waste Management Association (OWMA) – that represents the private waste industry, including landfill owners – agreed that a surcharge should be applied to waste sent to landfill (to encourage waste diversion). That’s no mean feat! What politician is so stupid as to think the public would not favor such a surcharge? Are the Liberals so behind the public on environmental issues that they wish to encourage landfill disposal, even when the landfill industry itself sees the writing on the wall? The Municipal Waste Association (MWA), the Recycling Council of Ontario (RCO) and other organizations are all on the same page and ready to “get the word out” to the public that the new legislation is in the public interest; talk about squandering goodwill! Do the Liberals use the same public relations firm as BP?
3. Product stewardship and extended producer responsibility (EPR) are sweeping across the continent and Europe. Ontario has started to position itself as a leader in this area, and was about to introduce legislation that would have made it the talked-about role model across Canada and the United States. The province was poise to steal the crown from places like British Columbia… and then, nothing. Ironically, companies have started to figure out that clean production and eco-efficiency are the way to go. Industry just needs a nudge from policymakers to embrace the cradle-to-cradle way of producing and distributing goods, which is also good for new technology and green industry jobs (the kind that the politicians always say they want). With the postponement or cancellation of this legislation, the winners are the smokestack industries that want to continue business as usual and the companies that want to produce goods in China and import them here in packaging made from hundreds of different kinds of materials (many non-recyclable).
4. Bringing further producer responsibility to the economy and revising and strengthening the Waste Diversion Act fits with the “polluter pays” principle and is the very opposite of raising taxes; it’s a tax cut. The Liberals could literally campaign on having cut everyone’s taxes by moving hundreds of millions of dollars off of municipal balance sheets and into the more efficient private sector. Ironically, the original Waste Diversion Act was introduced by the provincial Conservative party, so would be hard-pressed to oppose the Act or improvements to it.
We must hope that this summer the people who understand the importance of the WDA review to the economy and the environment get in the face of the politicians and demand that this legislation be re-introduced in the fall and passed. Oddly, just today I received an email from Bill Sheehan of the Product Policy Institute (PPI) related to a white paper produced by David Stitzhal (PPI Vice President and principal of Full Circle Consulting) for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s Product Stewardship Stakeholder Group.
Here’s a summary from that paper that everyone should show the dithering Liberal cabinet members so they can play catch up with the public on this important issue:
“Product-oriented policies reflect an awareness of – and an attempt to address – the impacts products have at end of life, as well as throughout the product’s life-cycle. Ideally, such product stewardship policies establish built-in mechanisms and incentives that minimize environmental impact at time of disposal, as well as during design, production, transport and other life-cycle stages. This is often achieved by building the costs of such impacts into the consumer-manufacturer transaction, rather than covering such costs through solid waste rates and taxes.
(What a great paragraph! The letter continues…)
“Many mechanisms exist and are emerging that establish level regulatory playing fields, thus allowing industry to compete on improving their environmental footprint, rather than simply cost and performance. These mechanisms rely on different engines, ranging from leveraging purchasing power (EPEAT, Top Runner) to restricting materials (RoHS, food service packaging), to requiring manufacturer take-back (Paint, E-Waste). These approaches provide lessons and experience from which Oregon can draw when exploring continued product-oriented policies as a tool for decreasing waste and toxicity in the State. Several lessons and policy recommendations are suggested.”
Links to the Oregon DEQ site -- and to several other important papers on the subject -- are posted at http://www.productpolicy.org/content/green-design
I hope Ontario gets back in the game, and fast, and doesn’t leave it to places like Oregon to lead and prosper from the new EPR paradigm.
In May an argument resurfaced between the Composting Council of Canada (CCC) and Stewardship Ontario (SO) over the definition of compost as a fertilizer and negative implications from its inclusion in Ontario’s stewardship program for municipal hazardous and special waste.
The argument dates back to last year when compost got sideswiped in a debate over definitions, and compost somehow got included in the management of fertilizer wastes in the new stewardship program. The CCC’s Executive Director Susan Antler had casually mentioned to me in a dinner conversation how ridiculous it was that compost was being labeled as a “toxic waste” in Ontario and I sat there dumbfounded.
My subsequent investigations unveiled a complicated policymaking discussion in which various stakeholders (mostly the CCC and SO, along with the environment ministry) wrestled with whether or not agricultural fertilizer should be included in the new household haz-waste program, and if so, how to do it so that a potentially toxic waste stream of fertilizer would be properly disposed, without somehow tarnishing the reputation of compost, and (especially) without adding to the price of a bag of compost, of the variety typically sold to consumers at home and garden centres.
The CCC has worked for years to build consumer awareness of the benefits of using compost as a soil amendments, and partially because of its efforts large-scale Green Bin programs are in place across Canada. The last thing the CCC wants to see is any policy that creates negative perceptions of compost just as new standards are leading to greater and greater acceptance and utilization of compost.
I followed up by calling Waste Diversion Ontario’s Executive Director Glenda Gies, and asked her what was up. She assured me that neither WDO nor SO had any intention of harming compost’s reputation, and that the CCC’s concerns had been addressed in the final version of the regulations and the program. I put the idea of writing about this on hold.
So it was surprising for me to read an “e-Lert” from Stewardship Ontario dated May 10 that discussed the issue in terms that were negative for fertilizer and a bit sensational (with the heading “How do you solve a problem like fertilizer?”). I subsequently read a letter that the CCC sent to SO’s CEO Gemma Zecchini that pretty much sums up the CCC’s concerns.
The issue is complicated, but if you read the e-Lert and the CCC’s subsequent letter, you’ll have a pretty good introduction to the issue. I’m putting this on my blog to create greater awareness and in hopes that the MHSW program is tweaked so that its conducted in a way that satisfies the CCC’s concerns. I hope the environment ministry and WDO people sit down with SO and the CCC to work this all out.
First, here’s the e-Lert text:
How do you solve a problem like fertilizer?
Association reps, stewards seek administrative solution
The Ontario Agri Business Association (OABA) and the Canadian Fertilizer Institute are leading efforts to find an administrative solution that would allow stewards to exempt sales to carded farmers from being reported to SO and having to pay fees. The decision follows an SO meeting last week, during which stewards and association representatives discussed the expanded definition of fertilizer under phase two of the MHSW plan – and what it might mean for Ontario’s agricultural community.
Under the consolidated MHSW program, which takes effect July 1, a fertilizer is any product defined under the Fertilizer Act and regulated under the Fertilizer Regulations. Introduced to cover the 85% of returned fertilizers not currently included under the MHSW plan, the revised definition dramatically increases the materials defined as fertilizers under the program.
While the definition continues to be restricted to products in packages of 30 kg or less, critics say that a good portion of these are sold to farmers who could be forced to subsidize the cost of managing leftovers they had no part in creating.
“I have no problem with stewardship. We accept the responsibility, and understand that there’s a cost to be borne for the stewardship of that product,” one steward said. “We’re quite prepared to pay for our share. What our company is not prepared to pay for is the care of and the appropriate handling of residual product that is created by other people and other markets.”
Stewardship Ontario CEO Gemma Zecchini, who stressed that SO doesn’t levy fees on farmers or interfere with any commercial relationship, said that steward rules may provide the flexibility to exclude material sold directly into the farm community, provided the carve out for carded farmers is administratively doable.
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Second, here’s the letter to SO from the CCC:
May 17, 2010
Ms. Gemma Zecchini
CEO, Stewardship Ontario
1 St. Clair Ave West, 7th Floor
Toronto, ON M4V 1K6
Dear Ms. Zecchini,
e-Lert of May 10, 2010 and Fertilizer Exemption Discussions
It was with great surprise and then ensuing concern that discussions are underway with only a select group of fertilizer category interests to seek an “administrative solution” to “solve a problem like fertilizer”.
Why should one type of product or target group sales be given preference versus the original “judgment” set out and approved by the Board of Directors of both Stewardship Ontario and Waste Diversion Ontario as well as sanctioned by the Honourable Minister Gerretsen, Minister of the Environment?
As you know, we continue to object to having compost products be declared “municipal hazardous or special waste” in Ontario through the MHSW plan. Our concerns have not been addressed despite considerable input from both our Council as well as members.
We now read that there are discussions to exempt sales for a specific target market. Despite what is said in the article (How do you solve a problem like fertilizer?), Stewardship Ontario, the MHSW program and its impact on compost products will indeed interfere with commercial relationships as well as market development (particularly when the issue is sensationalized with headlines such as “How do you solve a problem like fertilizer?).
If certain products can be considered for exemption, we respectfully ask once again that compost products also be exempted from the looming MHSW program.
We also respectfully ask that Stewardship Ontario open any discussions pertaining to the fertilizer category to all companies and organizations that are impacted by the currently approved MHSW program plan direction. Only then should decisions be made that can change the unfortunate current direction of the MHSW plan.
We look forward to hearing from you regarding next steps.
With respect,
Tom Hennessey, Ontario Chair
Scott Gamble, National Chair
Susan Antler, Executive Director
cc : Glenda Gies, Waste Diversion Ontario
The Honourable John Gerretsen, Minister of the Environment
John Vidan/John Armiento, Ontario Ministry of the Environment
