Compost or combust?

Environmentalists push Montreal to the avant-garde of recycling despite the machinations of some suburban mayors

by PHILIP PREVILLE

The question is: how to transform our garbage? The City of Montreal, working in concert with local environmental groups, wants us to separate and categorize it, dump all the biodegradable trash in the same place, turn it into a gooey mash, then have us come back and get it for use as garden fertilizer. A group of half a dozen suburban mayors, however, want us to turn our garbage into smoke and ash and then forget about it entirely. For now, it seems, the first option may have the upper hand.

This summer, 20,000 Montreal homes will suddenly find themselves at the cutting edge of waste disposal, as participants in a large-scale compost collection initiative. Residents in Côte-des-Neiges, NDG, Ahuntsic and Pointe-aux-Trembles will receive "brown boxes" in which to throw all compostable materials--meat, fruit and vegetable scraps, lawn cuttings and soiled paper and cardboard such as pizza boxes. The city will collect the material and bring it to the Miron quarry where it will be turned into compost and made available to residents for use as garden fertilizer.

"This is truly an avant-garde project," says environmental activist Mario Lacaire, who manages the Éco-quartier project in St-Michel. "Seattle tried something similar, but their project only involved 5,000 homes," says Lacaire, noting that Montreal intends to extend the compost collection to all homes in the city by next summer. "Despite everything that is wrong with the Bourque administration, including the management of many of the Éco-quartier projects, I have to say that this is a real breakthrough."

But despite the progress this project represents, many environmental activists remain concerned about the possible resurrection of a presumably dead mega-incinerator project for the island of Montreal. The incinerator, which would be built by New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler in Montreal-East, is being proposed by a group of suburban municipalities--Pierrefonds, LaSalle, St-Laurent, Lachine, Anjou and Montreal East.

In 1992, the Régie intermunicipale de gestion des déchets de l'Île de Montréal (RIGDIM) formally signed a contract with Foster Wheeler behind closed doors to build the incinerator. The incinerator project wasn't disclosed until almost a full year later; it was presented to the public as a fait accompli during public hearings on garbage disposal organized by the province's Environment department in 1993. Under public pressure, the RIGDIM finally cancelled the contract in the spring of 1996.

That cancellation, however, came with a price: the RIGDIM and its member municipalities were left with a $63 million penalty payable to Foster Wheeler. Now the six municipalities have hired a law firm to contest the cancellation.

LaSalle mayor Michel Leduc says that it's the incinerator, not the composting project, that's truly avant-garde and insists that incineration is the most environmentally sound method available for waste disposal.

But Michel Séguin of Action Rebuts, an organization that promotes recycling, says he has reason to be skeptical. "The RIGDIM has never had any intention of working with the public or with environmental groups on the incinerator project," he says. "They've been trying to railroad it through since day one."

Most importantly for environmentalists, however, is the fear that the incinerator, if adopted, would put an end to the composting project. "Once we build an incinerator, it has to be cost-effective, which means it has to be fed as much garbage as possible," says Karel Ménard of the Front commun québécois pour une gestion écologique des déchets. "That means we will simply have to forget about recycling. Incinerators are garbage gulpers."