Staff at the City of Ottawa are working on a fast-tracked feasibility study for an incinerator, set to return to council by mid-2025.
“No matter what, we’re going to be generating waste, and as Ottawa continues to grow we need to make sure we have a means to deal with that,” said Hoover-Bienasz.
There is also no getting around emissions, she said. Landfills create their own greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane.
Building an incinerator similar to the facility in Clarington would cost $450 to $500 million, according to the city’s estimates, with annual operating costs of an additional $25 million.
If this is anything like the technology used in Sweden, it’s a net positive – it burns at such a high temperature that the emissions are essentially just carbon.
And let’s face it – plastic recycling has been a dismal failure, and we were all duped by the plastic producers into thinking that recycling was an environmental choice. Turn those petrochemicals back into combustible material, and generate some power while diverting huge amounts of waste from landfill.
FYI, Sweden’s program was so successful that they started accepting trash from neighbouring countries to keep the incinerator running.