On London’s doorstep, the giant Green Lane Landfill — snapped up by Toronto in 2007 for $220 million, with enough elbow room to take all the garbage collected by Canada’s largest city for years to come.

Now, to the east, in a limestone quarry near Ingersoll, a pitch is being made for a massive private landfill for commercial and industrial waste from across Ontario, mainly the Greater Toronto Area. The province is expected to decide within months if it likes the first draft of that application.

If approved, the pit would swallow up to 850,000 tonnes of waste a year — about 10 times what Londoners send to their landfill.

Nearly 30 years after Toronto first came sniffing around Southwestern Ontario, looking for new dumping grounds as its own filled up, the Big Smoke appears finally closing in on what critics feared — a garbage chute down the Hwy. 401 to Southwestern Ontario, its flatlands absorbing the mega-city’s trash mountains.

How that happened, in one of the nation’s richest farm belts, is like a landfill itself — some things were buried away so long ago, they’re all but forgotten now. Others are much closer to the surface.

There’s the shifting sands of the garbage business itself, a huge commodity industry whose rules change.

Add to that a province many say never got tough on trash with Toronto.

Then there’s the curse of geography — 200 km away, we’re close enough to Toronto on the nation’s busiest highway, with plenty of turf for a throw-away society even if recycling has reduced what we toss out.

Some argue our own leaders haven’t helped, either, failing to stand up over the years to the province.

“It’s this whole issue that Southwestern Ontario doesn’t have a strong voice in Toronto — whether it’s the imposition of turbines or landfills, they’re eunuchs.” says Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley, whose career in politics dovetails the decades that Toronto garbage has haunted the region.

***

Steve McSwiggan was at work when he got the e-mail that abruptly sent him back into environmental activism. A private company, the message read, had applied to build a giant landfill in Oxford County.

At a limestone quarry.

A stone’s throw from his home in Ingersoll.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, here we go again,’ ” says McSwiggan, the founding president three years ago of the citizens’ group Oxford People Against the Landfill Alliance.

It seemed a reprise, writ larger, of the letter-writing and lobbying McSwiggan had done when he learned, five years earlier, that Toronto — which for years had trucked its trash to Michigan — was solving its garbage crisis by buying the Green Lane Landfill in Elgin County, near his former Lambeth home.

Now, Ontario’s Environment Ministry is examining Walker Environmental’s plan to lease 80 hectares of the quarry site in Zorra Township, owned by Belgian-based miner Carmeuse.

It’s still early days. But a green light for the Walker-Carmeuse plan would make Southwestern Ontario home to three of Ontario’s five highest-capacity landfills. Already, it has the two largest operating ones — the Ridge Landfill in Chatham-Kent, and Twin Creeks in Warwick, in Lambton.

Proponents say the quarry site would recycle a pit that would be made inpenetrable, keeping the bad from leaching out. It would also spare Ontario from exporting some of the three million tonnes of industrial and commercial trash it still sends to the U.S each year and create a waste-and-recycling economic hub.

Opponents say it’s too close to town, its base too vulnerable to possibly leaking into the water table.

The time and cost to approve the landfill would be better spent finding ways to reduce waste, they say.

“The province needs to have a conversation about what we do with trash. We can’t keep finding holes to dig . . . and just fill them up with trash,” says McSwiggan.

***

Whether it’s Toronto industrial garbage showing up near Ingersoll, toxic waste from across North America in Brigden, where Clean Harbors incinerates and landfills the stuff, or Ontario Power Generation’s proposal to bury its nuclear waste in a shaft near Kincardine, deeper than the CN Tower is tall, it’s all a provincial issue with huge regional implications, Bradley argues. “I struggle with why we accept responsibility for other people’s waste,” he said. “When we do cradle-to-grave (disposal), others should do it too.”

Municipalities, Bradley says, need to take control over their own waste.

***

Just 30 years ago, that was supposed to be the plan.

But the politics of garbage propelled the debate in a different direction – more precisely, in several.

In 1990, its Keele Valley landfill nearly full, Toronto had no Plan B.

A regional mega-dump had been proposed but was rejected, along with more than one incineration plan.

Those hoping for an out-of-area solution were outraged when then-premier David Peterson seemed more inclined to go with an agency to manage the metro area’s garbage regionally.

Some say a turning point came when activist Gord Perks stormed Peterson’s 1990 election-call news conference, playing a recording of what Perks called the Liberals’ broken environmental promises.

Then Peterson was out, and the NDP’s Bob Rae in.

Rae, they hoped, would help rid Toronto of its problem. Instead, the NDP opposed Toronto’s newest and best hope — to ship its trash to an abandoned open-pit mine near Kirkland Lake.

Rae then did the unthinkable, at least to many in Toronto — creating a provincial waste authority that would propose three mega-landfills, all in the Toronto region. Trash exports would be banned. That would have put garbage close enough that people would notice and have to cut back.

But with a long list of 60 potential sites, the outcry from suburban areas was furious.

“Solid waste politics is a really complex issue,” sighs lawyer Peter Pickfield, a specialist in waste-management law. His firm represents three civic and related groups fighting the quarry landfill.

***

Garbage was suddenly mobile after 1995 — and Southwestern Ontario smack dab in its path.

After Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservatives swept to power that year, Rae’s Interim Waste Authority was among the first things to go. Gone also was a process that had often led to public environmental hearings, which often halted proposed landfills.

As long as it was wanted on the other end, garbage to go was good.

But by 2003, when the Tories were canned and the Liberals took charge, Toronto — its landfill closed for good, its stash-trash-in-a-mine idea revived but then dispatched — still had no place for its garbage.

It turned westward — to a region with plenty of land and the nation’s best super-highway.

It began trucking trash to Michigan, more than 150 rigs a day. While many in Southwestern Ontario opposed the trash convoys, it was the growing cost and Michigan’s insistence the shipments stop that finally made the mega-city take ownership, sort of, for its waste. It bought Green Lane, south of London, for $220 million and started shipping there almost exactly five years ago.

“There hasn’t really been an over-riding provincial strategy or provincial rules” over the past 25 years of a growing trash crisis in Ontario, Pickfield says.

No clear and cohesive process for potential host municipalities, or for proponents either.

The tide has turned so that all the benefits, Pickfield argues, are enjoyed by shareholders of a private company — and all the risks borne by local residents.

“I just think this is a process which is highly disruptive for so many people. There might be better ways to deal with this,” Pickfield says.

***

“This” is a deepening demand for landfill space, at a time when re-use and recycling are the buzzwords.

Despite modest residential waste diversion, about 38%, the vastly larger bulk of Ontario trash is from industrial, commercial and institutional sources — so-called ICI waste.

ICI diversion rates are a torpid 11% — and dropping.

Since Perks crashed Peterson’s 1990 election call, “nothing important has changed,” he says.

Now a Toronto city councillor, Perks says that policy failure is fuelling demand for more landfills, such as the one near Ingersoll. Without enough accountability or incentives to reduce waste, he says it’s not only possible but profitable for companies to get rid of ICI garbage through private landfills.

What’s needed in Ontario is “extended producer responsibility,” Perks says. “If your product is destined for disposal, that’s on you.”

But while Perks says waste is an economic drain, the Ontario Waste Management Association argues it’s worth $3 billion a year to the economy. It wants fair and open markets for recyclables and waste.

***

Two years ago, the Ontario Liberals introduced a controversial bill that would have required industry to pay more for blue-box recycling, with less packaging and life-cycle costs included in product prices.

Environmental critics said it didn’t do enough; economic critics said the cost would be crippling.

That bill died after second reading in the legislature.

The government plans to introduce a waste-management bill, “within months,” including higher diversion rates and “stronger producer responsibility,” says Environment Ministry spokesperson Kate Jordan.

***

It’s unlikely any large waste companies will stop finding fertile ground in Southwestern Ontario.

Bradley blames that largely on the impotence of local leaders in the face of a Toronto-centric legislature. Southwestern Ontario also has both the highways and land to make landfills viable.

Each year, for example, Peel Region trucks most of its 100,000 tonnes of waste to the Twin Creeks landfill owned by Waste Management Canada in Warwick. After a decade of local opposition, that site expanded in 2009 to be able take up to 750,000 tonnes of waste a year.

Mayor Todd Case says Warwick fought the expansion on two fronts: First, that it was in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons; and, to get the best deal it could if the expansion went through.

In talks with the province, Case says, “I said it every day: ‘Why should the smaller municipalities take responsibility for a larger municipality’s lack of planning in dealing with its waste?

“We tried everything in the book and everything outside the book we could find,” he says.

While he doesn’t relish more trash, Case says less garbage is coming in than the landfill can take.

“If I were an Oxford County politician, I’d be asking, ‘Why would you build another landfill when there’s capacity at other landfills?’ ”

***

Around Ingersoll, residents are bracing for a long fight.

The Oxford People Against the Landfill Alliance, a coalition of neighbours, environmentalists, First Nations people and politicians, has distributed 5,000 lawn signs and plans a seminar next weekend on how to fight a landfill.

“We continue to fight this plan until it is won,” says Bryan Smith, the group’s president and head of the Oxford Coalition for Social Justice.

After 36,000 letters and numerous petitions against the project, Smith said his “presumption” is that the Environment Ministry “will find no option but to turn it down.”

But Perks’ advice for Southwestern Ontario is that as long as people keep consuming and throwing out stuff, corporations will want to build landfills.

“While you’re busy fighting the awful imposition of a landfill in your community, spend a bit of your energy figuring out how to fight the next one and the next one,” he says.

debora.vanbrenk@sunmedia.ca

megan.stacey@sunmedia.ca​

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WE ASKED: Walker Environmental Group’s Darren Fry about its proposed landfill near Ingersoll

Q: Why Ingersoll?

Reasons include the location and proximity to where waste is generated in Ontario, which would be predominantly the GTA and the Golden Horseshoe . . . It’s an existing quarry and already has a lot of existing infrastructure in terms of energy, transportation and existing haul route . . . it’s already in industrial use. We wanted to avoid having to look at green field or prime agricultural land.

Q: Why use a limestone quarry?

There are unique characteristics to a quarry that can provide benefit to the function and operation of a safe landfill . . . Landfills are heavily regulated in Ontario and would require a liner system. For example, our liner (at a landfill) in Niagara is approximately four metres thick, so waste is not placed directly on bedrock.

Q: Why not use existing landfills?

Ontario currently exports approximately 40% of its waste to the U.S., to Michigan and New York. Last year in 2014, Michigan received approximately 3.5 million tonnes of waste from Ontario . . . The reason we’re exporting waste to the U.S. is because Ontario does not have sufficient waste disposal capacity . . .

WHAT TORONTO SAYS

“We like to say that everything is on the table,” with a new waste strategy in the works — from energy-from-waste options, to landfill bans and whether buying another landfill is the way to go."

— Annette Synowiec, Toronto solid waste management services

"If Toronto went looking for another landfill, “we’d be looking for willing hosts. We’re not about to just go and purchase this land and stick a landfill site somewhere were we wouldn’t be welcomed.”

— Derek Angove, director, processing and resource management

TORONTO TRASH TIMELINE

1980: City starts blue-box recycling

1980s:

Landfill filling up: Southwestern Ontario activists fight to keep Toronto trash out

Alernatives include incinceration; sending trash to old northern Ontario pit mine.

1991: NDP rejects mine option.

1993: Creates an authority to find Torotno area mega-dumps.

1995: PCs scrap that; open door to other options.

1996: Starts trucking waste to Michigan.

2002: Landfill closes; up to 120 garbage trucks daily head to Michigan

2007: Toronto buys Green Lane Landfill near London for $220 million

2010: Michigan contract ends; trash goes to Green Lane

2012: Private quarry landfill proposed near Ingersoll, largely for GTA-area commercial/industrial trash.

2015: Province to decide on early Ingersoll landfill plan.