By Duncan Bury, Ottawa Citizen Op-Ed, October 28, 2023
Ottawa’s draft Solid Waste Master Plan (SWMP), which will be tabled for discussion at the Nov. 21 meeting of the city’s Environment and Climate Change Committee, needs to focus on replacing the filter rather than buying a new engine. In order to postpone the need for either a new landfill or an incinerator to manage residual waste, the city needs to up its game and implement a wide variety of initiatives to reduce and divert waste from disposal rather than launching prematurely into a very expensive, controversial, environmentally problematic and lengthy process to site a new landfill or to burn our garbage.