Burn it, don’t bury it
Fix the basics / garbage
Burn it, don’t bury it.
Spring cleaning. The week after Christmas. The morning after a birthday party. The week you missed garbage day and you’re sitting on a month of it. Three items, then a yellow bag from the City at $4.40 each, unless you live in a condo or apartment tower, where there is no limit on what goes down the chute. It isn’t fair. In 2023, council capped every household with curbside pickup at three items of garbage every two weeks, because Trail Road was running out of room and the City had nowhere else to put it. In January 2026, the same council spent $95 million buying a landfill with thirty years of room. The limit is still here. The yellow bags are still here.
So here is the next plank in Alex Lawson’s platform: bring back the six-item limit, and build the waste-to-energy plant the City’s own study ranked first, on the land the City already owns. The study is done. The land is bought. Decide.
Ottawa is not out of room. It paid $95 million to not be out of room.
The three-item limit was sold as a way to stretch Trail Road. Then the City bought the Capital Region Resource Recovery Centre on Boundary Road near the 417, the first landfill Ontario has approved in more than twenty years, with the permits included. The reason for the rationing is gone. What is left is a yellow bag economy, a bylaw enforcement load, and about 7,000 instances of illegally dumped garbage in parks, street bins and back roads in the limit’s first ten months. Garbage doesn’t disappear when council passes a motion. It goes somewhere else.
And in June 2025, the City’s own consultants finished the study of what to do when Trail Road fills up. Their highest-ranked option was a waste-to-energy plant: it burns what is left after diversion, generates electricity for the grid, and sends 77 percent less to landfill. Council’s response was to order another report, due in 2027, after the election. Ration the residents, buy the hole, defer the decision. That is not a plan.
And understand what a landfill is. It is a pile. Ottawa has been filling one since 1980, and this year’s answer was to buy a second pile for thirty years and leave what comes after to our kids. Making another pile is not a solution. Europe runs about 500 waste-to-energy plants, handling a quarter of its municipal waste. Italy, with about 28 percent of Ontario’s land area and more than three and a half times its people, cut the share of its garbage going to landfill from 46 percent to 18 percent between 2010 and 2022. It did not do it by buying more land.
Two decisions
A motion in the first 100 days restores the six-item limit Ottawa lived with from 2007 until September 2024, in effect from the first collection day of 2027. Six covers the week after Christmas, the birthday party, the spring clean-out and the missed collection day without a trip to the store. The yellow bags stay on the shelf for the rare week a household goes past six, but the City stops selling rationing to families as a policy. Green bin, blue bin, black bin and leaf and yard waste continue exactly as they are, with no limit. Diversion is a good program and this plan keeps it. What ends is the rationing.
Within 30 days of taking office, a motion directs staff to treat waste-to-energy as the working assumption, sited on the City’s own 192 hectares, and to move from comparing options to delivering the one their own study ranked first. What comes out is ash, about a fifth of the weight that went in. Denmark puts 99 percent of its bottom ash into road base and the Netherlands has committed to reusing all of it; Ottawa tests the same thing in its own road base and concrete, and whatever cannot be reused goes into the landfill next door. A landfill that receives a quarter of the tonnage lasts roughly four times as long on the same airspace, before any ash is reused. The thirty-year landfill Ottawa just bought stops being a thirty-year landfill.
Six promises
Carlsbad Springs fought this landfill for fifteen years. Five rural councillors voted against buying it. Residents learned the terms from a staff report after the deal closed under a non-disclosure agreement. A Lawson council negotiates a host community agreement with the community, standard practice for these facilities in Ontario, before construction starts. If the City’s waste is going to Boundary Road either way, the plant is the better neighbour, and the community gets paid for hosting it.
A landfill smells because garbage rots in it, and Ottawa knows what that means: in 2018, Half Moon Bay in Barrhaven, five kilometres from Trail Road, spent months complaining after a wet year sped up decomposition, and the City had to install a new perimeter gas collection system. The City’s own 2006 odour study found properties within a kilometre of Trail Road could expect odours ten to fifteen times a year, and developers must put a notice on title for affected properties. A plant is different: the garbage is tipped inside an enclosed building under negative air pressure, the air from the tipping hall is drawn into the furnace and burned, the garbage sits for days rather than decades, and what leaves the stack is scrubbed, monitored and posted online.
Durham York Energy Centre runs continuous emissions monitoring and two stack tests a year and posts the data online. Ottawa’s plant does the same, with the reporting requirement written into the procurement contract so it can never be quietly dropped. The feed lives on the City’s open data portal, where anyone in Carlsbad Springs can check it on their phone.
On the Durham York model, which has posted one every month since 2013: every odour, noise, litter or truck complaint from a neighbour, with the date, what was found and what was done, published monthly and written into the operating contract, so a neighbour never has to wonder whether anyone wrote it down.
Today the City has no milestone for this decision beyond a report due in 2027, discloses contracts of $25,000 and up twice a year in a PDF, and publishes no progress report. Under this plan: motion in 30 days. Refreshed cost estimate in 60 days. Provincial approval application within 12 months. Procurement decision within 24 months. Shovels in the ground inside the term. Every contract online with no dollar threshold, and a quarterly progress report in plain language. A slipped milestone gets reported the quarter it slips, with the reason.
Nothing in this plan closes Trail Road early or trucks Ottawa’s garbage to a private operator somewhere else in Ontario. The current site, the six-item limit, and the new plant are sequenced so residents never see a gap in service.
Straight talk on the money
The City is spending this money either way. Its own June 2025 study put a waste-to-energy plant at $497 million to $862 million to build and a new landfill at $439 million to $761 million. The plant costs more to run, about $47 million a year against $15.6 million, before revenue of about $17.9 million a year from electricity and recovered metals. Durham York, an hour down the 401, earns about $8.5 million a year selling power on 140,000 tonnes and recovers the equivalent of 3,000 cars worth of steel. On emissions, garbage in a landfill rots and releases methane, about 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide over a century, for decades after the site closes; a plant burns the same material once and the US EPA’s estimate is roughly one tonne of greenhouse gas avoided per tonne combusted instead of buried, an accounting some environmental groups dispute. Ottawa’s own curbside stream, about 103,000 tonnes last year before counting a single apartment building, is close to the 140,000 tonnes Durham York runs on; neighbouring municipalities that have nowhere to put their residual waste (the Pontiac tried to build a 400,000-tonne plant to take Ottawa’s and Renfrew County’s garbage, and dropped it in 2024) are upside at a tipping fee, not a dependency. And on January 1, 2026 the province moved the full cost of the blue box onto producers; residents have not seen that saving on their bill, and the whole-bill statement in the Lawson fiscal plan will show where it went. What the study did not price, because it was done before the purchase, is that Ottawa now owns the land, the road access, and the landfill approval next door for the ash. The plant is financed the way a water plant is: a long-lived utility asset on the solid waste fee that already carries the $95 million, backed by tipping fees, a 20-year electricity contract with the IESO, and metals revenue, procured on the Durham York model or with federal infrastructure money where it is available. And the honest caveats: the site’s landfill approval does not cover a plant, so the plant needs its own provincial approval, which is why the application goes in inside twelve months; the cost range is wide because nobody has designed it yet; ash reuse under a street has to pass Ontario’s environmental rules first, so the plan says test, not assume; and the three-item limit did cut curbside tonnage by about 22,800 tonnes in its first year, which its supporters will say, and they are right. It also produced the dumping, the yellow bags and the bylaw fights, for a landfill problem the City then solved with a chequebook. The full plank shows the math and every source.
Ottawa deserves better.