Last week’s virtual panel hosted by Environment Haliburton! – dissecting the negatives of incineration – brought forward as a possible solution to the County’s waste management woes – was the first concerted effort by the community to learn more about the controversial process.
It came just months after County council committed to investigating incineration, largely at the behest of Dysart et al deputy mayor Walt McKechnie, who has spent much of this term advocating for it.
It took Dr. Paul Connett, a retired environmental chemistry professor and one of North America’s leading speakers on waste management solutions, about two minutes to convince me an incinerator is likely never coming to Haliburton County.
For one, the cost is wildly prohibitive. We heard how the Durham-York plant located in Clarington cost $295 million to build in 2016 and carries an annual operating bill north of $16 million. Connett estimated a similar facility could cost between $400 and $500 million if built today.
Granted, that’s a much bigger facility than we would need in the Highlands. The Durham-York plant processes about 140,000 tonnes of waste per year. Our four townships combined generate about a quarter of that amount. Maybe.
McKechnie said he wants to see a made-in-Haliburton County solution. He doesn’t believe there’s any need to pursue a facility as large as the one serving Durham-York, calling for something smaller. He said there are many examples of small-scale commercial incinerators operating around the world. He has said others could shop their waste here, too.
According to John Watson, Dysart’s environmental manager, there are limits to what can be done with municipal systems. He noted the plant in Durham-York is one of the smallest incinerators Cavanta, the company that runs it, operates in North America. Speaking at a council meeting in May, Watson didn’t think an incinerator was viable.
Even if it was decided the County could get a cost-effective burner, where would it go? For a community renowned for its natural beauty, dropping an oversized furnace here, even in some far-flung corner, would likely do more damage than it’s worth, certainly from a tourism perspective. And NIMBYism will raise its ugly head, too.
McKechnie is right, though, when he says something needs to be done. The biggest landfill in Dysart, the Haliburton site, is already at end-of-life having been capped in 2020. The Maple Lake landfill in Algonquin Highlands has about 45 years of life left, while the Scotch Line facility in Minden Hills has a remaining lifespan of about 11 years.
Soon, most of our major landfill sites will have transitioned to a transfer station. While it’s not a great use of money spending hundreds of thousands of dollars shipping garbage elsewhere, as McKechnie claims, we don’t have any other choice right now.
With a resource as invaluable as U-Links Centre for Community-Based Research on our doorstep, perhaps there’s an opportunity to engage with the bright minds from Trent University and Fleming College to help us forge a new path.
Connett’s suggestion of establishing a zero-waste strategy in the Highlands, while noble, is more of the same pie-in-the-sky thinking that I just can’t see happening. At least not yet. Maybe people will be more amenable in another 30, 40 or 50 years, when our landfill space really dwindles. Or our townships are more open-minded to wide scale organic recycling and composting.
I’m glad these conversations are happening – incineration is likely to be one of the hot-button issues leading into the 2026 municipal elections. It’s important to know where people stand.
It’s equally important that groups like EH! continue to bring experts like Connett in to discuss the issue. But it’s important to be balanced.
Next, I’d like to hear from someone who can talk to the benefits of incineration. There must be a reason places like Durham Region and York, as well as Edmonton – which recently committed to building a new $300 million, 150,000-tonne-per-year incinerator – are doing this.
With inflation driving up costs for people all over the country, nobody is lining up to burn money. Maybe incineration is the key, maybe not – a lot more discussion and local research needs to take place before we can say for sure.
