Waste Privatisation in Toronto: Good or Bad?

Hot news in Garbage in Toronto these days is the privitisation of waste management in Toronto.

I'm not completely swayed that this is a bad thing, but with Rob Ford's records on issues concerning the environment, I'm getting a little wry.

Maybe another strike's on the way...

This is a fabulous article put together by the The Environmental Alliance (TEA) for a digestible summary of what's been going on in the last few weeks.

Waste Management - Frederick Kaufman

This is a brilliant article I stumbled upon while looking into waste management in New York.

Steve Askew, the man being interviewed, is clearly one who is absolutely very knowledgeable and well-versed in the ethics and purpose of waste management. I adore the final bit where he states his job and the functions of human waste treatment plants as returning the environment to the way God intended. Bold.

2008 / New York City

Waste Management

TAGS:

 

disease,

 

garbage,

 

journalism,

 

New York,

 

parasites,

 

science

For thousands of years, Homo sapiens flocked across continents in pursuit of bird, beast, and fresh water, leaving behind him a trail of gnawed bones and steaming waste. The moment we stopped removing ourselves from that waste, it had to be removed from us. Thus the origins of civilization, thus the glories of Rome, Paris, and Philadelphia. A civilization that cannot escape its own fecal matter is a civilization in trouble—unless, of course, the uneasy relationship between man and his effluents can evolve.

“The first regulations with respect to waste go back to the code of Hammurabi,” said Steve Askew, superintendent of New York’s North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the world’s largest. “You have to bury your waste far from where you sleep.” And he gave me the look. Steve Askew never finished college, but that look had seen to the bottom of things. It was both spooky and intimidating, that particular look of pity and loathing the wise bestow upon the ignorant. He knew something I wanted to know: the ultimate fate of our waste.

“People wake up in the morning, they brush their teeth, flush the toilet,” said Askew. “They think it goes to the center of the earth.”

If you happen to live within one particular 5,100-acre patch of the West Side of Manhattan, instead of going to the center of the earth, your waste flows to Askew’s extraordinary concrete cesspit: twenty-eight concrete acres suspended above more than two thousand concrete caissons sunk into the shallows between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. Constructed in the 1970s, topped by three swimming pools, a skating rink, and a carousel, North River cost the city a billion dollars, 100 million of which went straight into odor control.

North River is just one of New York City’s fourteen wastewater treatment plants, the first of which opened in 1886, along with the Statue of Liberty. These plants handle every conceivable kind of sewerable waste from the city’s eight million permanent residents, not to mention anything a commuter or a tourist might care to add. They separate the material that comes their way into solid, liquid, and gaseous parts, which they further subdivide into that which must be discarded, that which may be consumed, and that which someone, somewhere, might eventually be able to sell.

The substance that enters North River is mostly water, and the vast majority of that water leaves the plant after not much more than six hours, disinfected to the extent that it can merge inoffensively with the Hudson River. One flush on the Upper West Side at seven in the morning, and by three in the afternoon the water is back on the street, so to speak. What’s left over is a half-million gallons of concentrated daily waste, now known as sludge.

I followed Askew into an enormous room of computers, controls, workstations, and switches. Behind us flashed a wall-size diagrammatic panel, the great computerized brain of waste. Next to us stood the oiler, who had been at North River twenty years.

“Right now we’re at 135 million gallons per day,” said the oiler.

The greatest increase occurs between eight and nine in the morning, when the city’s output swells from 70 million to 150 million gallons per day. This is known as the big flush. Now it was eleven A.M., and in a few hours the circadian flow of biology en masse would begin to diminish, eventually bottoming out around four in the morning, at 68 million gallons per day. The rhythm is as steady as the tides. “The Super Bowl halftime surge is a myth,” said Askew.

He led me across the concrete floor, through a concrete warehouse, and to the concrete screening room, where he began to extol the virtue and beauty of his eleven-mile-long sewage interceptor. By the time the morning flush finally rolls into North River, it has joined the downstream flow of all the other morning flushes from all the other sewage lines from Bank Street to the Upper West Side, and sunk fifty-four feet below sea level. It is here, at the extreme low point of this immense underground current, that North River gets to work. In the Stygian depths, its mighty diameter swollen to sixteen feet, the dark torrent branches into six channels, each of which must be pumped to the top floor of the plant, where gravity can once again take hold and set the outcast on a new journey.

Askew gazed into the inky pool of untreated wastewater and began to describe some of the marvels the interceptor had disclosed. Aside from the daily take of leaves, sticks, cans, and paper, the great rake had brought up quite a few vials of cocaine. When cops bang on the door, the toilet is a drug dealer’s best friend. Ditto for the professional forger: a good deal of counterfeit money has floated into Steve Askew’s hands. Twenty years ago a dog showed up, a living dog that became the mascot of a Brooklyn plant.

As we walked away from the pool, I asked about the wind. No matter what the weather is outside, no matter where we traveled inside, the thick concrete walls of North River generated bracing gusts. Askew explained that every minute, titanic blowing machines inhaled 600,000 cubic feet of fresh air and exhaled 750,000 cubic feet of carbon-filtered, bleach-scrubbed exhaust—six to twelve complete air changes per hour.
But the scouring of North River’s halitosis, while essential to community relations, has nothing to do with the plant’s core mission. The alchemy of purgative transformation starts in the warmth and humidity of the next chamber we visited, where submerged chemical mixers combine the waste with custom-made bacteria. “It’s volatizing off!” Askew yelled above the din of engines and bubbling brown water. Undeterred by the general uproar, Askew detailed the technical intricacies of fecal breakdown and development, but I’m afraid the cacophony blunted the nuances. So Askew dumbed down the lecture. “This looks really good!” he hollered. “Tan water! Light brown froth! Small bubbles! Musty smell! If the foam looks like chocolate mousse, that’s an indication of a bacteriological process!”

We headed to a low-ceilinged room so huge it did not appear to have walls. Here were the settling tanks, the final stop before the water returned to the world. Peace held sway among these last lagoons, and indistinct reservoirs misted into a concrete vanishing point hundreds of yards away. “On a cold morning, you will see the water vaporing off,” Askew said. “And it will rain inside the plant.”

He gave me the look. “When it is really cold, it snows inside the plant.”

At that moment, two square football fields of submerged jets spumed into the shadows and the bronze liquid arced, more sublime and terrifying than the fountains of Trevi or Versailles. Soon these waters would sluice down concrete courses to mix with the mighty Hudson. As for the remaining sludge, it also would depart, but by an altogether different route.

When the froth finally settled back into silence, Steve Askew backtracked through the concrete dungeons until we arrived at a perfectly normal conference room and a nice surprise—someone had ordered pizza!

Despite the skating rink and swimming pool, despite the bleach, the carbon filters, the white hard hats and the spotless lab coats of the technicians, despite the banks of UNIX computers and the sober talk of asymptotes and oxygen demand, despite the boardroom-size wood-veneer table and the well-upholstered ergonomic chairs and the rush of twenty thousand cubic feet of air per second, and despite, to put it bluntly, one of the most extraordinary concealments in all of human history, North River still managed to evoke unappetizing associations. But as I gazed at the cheese and red sauce and blackened crust, I recalled the words of one of the many wastewater professionals I had met that morning. “One of the things about the job—you still have to eat.”

So I sat down to lunch and learned about the glorious future of waste. Now that biochemists could scour the particles on the atomic level, the plant could recover ibuprofen, acetaminophen, endocrine disrupters, DEET, Prozac, and Chanel No. 5. Even caffeine could be extracted from the mix, and I had a hunch the citizens of New York excreted boatloads of stimulant. Perhaps Starbucks would be interested. The technology was there.

“Twenty years from now we will be removing things we have no idea about,” said Askew. “Penicillin, mercury, heroin. Will this be a pharm business? An energy business? An agribusiness?”

He took another bite and delivered the look.

“A bear goes in the woods and it takes two years to decompose. We do it in six hours. In six hours, we imitate all of nature—from the big bang to the big chill. We’re trying to put it back the way that God intended.”

© 2008 by Frederick Kaufman. Used with permission of Frederick Kaufman.

"It's far easier to save a dollar than it is to make one."

- Christine Terhune Herrick, Good Housekeeping Late 1800s.

Taken from Susan Strasser's Waste and Want

Waste Resolution #3: Only Buy Food That You Know You'll Use

Only Buy Food That You Know You'll Use

Easier said than done. Someone told me ages ago that grocery stores are strategically laid out so you get enticed. That always stuck with me. I think the best move would be to live near a grocery store, so you buy things as you need them.

I sort of addressed the idea that my roommate never waste because her food was all frozen. But there are all sorts of awful things that go along with preservation, packaging and keeping food cold. So, maybe that isn't the best option!

Compost, Buying too much and Dumpster Diving

A little late on this one, but I found a terrific article in Toronto Star on waste in Ontario. A huge problem I am dealing with is over buying. I like her intro line to her article -

"Food is so plentiful in Canada that even our garbage cans are full of it." ("Waste Land," Jennifer Bain, Toronto Star, January 15, 2011)

Waste, and over wasting is a huge issue that the government is struggling to grapple with. Toronto I was most astonished to find keeps absolutely no garbage in the walls of the city. I really wanted to craft an article to argued that Toronto Should Keep Their Own Garbage In The Walls Of Their City. You explore my ideas further in a little brief I wrote when the new year rolled around, big changes in the city.

My TA at the time kept trying to tease ideas out of me, I simply couldn't argue the space issue (there simply is not any!) It's really easy to defend the social issues, but then you struggle with the monetary benefits for the recipients of the waste. So, I am a little stuck and hope to have the good opportunity to explore this further.

But something I have been really struggling to address is overbuying food. Last year, I lived with a girl who bought largely frozen food - something I am hesitant to do. I however, week after week found myself throwing out tons and tons of fresh food that didn't make my belly! Still, even more so living with my Grandpa now I find myself wasting far too much.

Bain explores some really valid points that need serious evaluation -

1. Food waste is the "Elephant in the Room," The Green bin is a guilt eraser!

She calls it the "elephant in the room" because it's something we know is there but don't know how to address. She states:

"In Ontario, there are multiple fees for everyone from manufacturers to consumers to handle the disposal of e-waste. But how do you handle that with a head of lettuce?"

2. What should we do with the waste? How do we save it before it becomes garbage?

Who has kitchen staff to transport bruised apples into apple sauce? Who can hand out yogurt before it expires? Who would best appreciate milk, coffee creamers or green energy smoothies?

These are questions that I drew from Bain's article. She claims these are problems that Second Harvest drivers face daily. Second Harvest is a brilliant service that collects unused, leftover food from restaurants, bakeries and shops. They can actually take food that is one year past their expiration date, providing it is frozen. Blayne Walker, a Second Harvest Driver states that "If you won't eat is, don't pick it up."

3. North American portions

I wish I was raised in a culture that is comfortable with small portions. I come from a family and environment that finds satisfaction in larger portions of lousy (but ever so delicious) food. She touches on a great group called Love Food Hate Waste, a campaign encouraging portioning and conscious food shopping.

I'm a little crossed on the doggie bag debate. My coworkers and I often get a sick chuckle out of what people will take home. It was less obvious at the last place because we would just toss the customers the boxes. The restaurant I work at is slightly upper class, I have to see and package everything people wish to eat later on. Bain's article harps on the good merits of doggie bagging everything. She states -

"Blame it on the "all-you-can-eat" culture that Bloom has renamed "all-you-can waste." Or the fact that asking a restaurant for a doggie bag is sometimes seen as gauche."

We do judge you that way. Sometimes packing up every little fry is tedious, but I agree with Bain's stance. However, every styrofoam container I have to use to package up every chip left is painfully hard for me. I am the first to love a leftover meal, (especially one I didn't make!) but it just gets to the point where you know people will absolutely not eat their soggy chips later on!

I wish all restaurants, including my own would use more ecofriendly containers. Another serious issue that we're all struggling with. I will touch on this in the future! Paper dishes, or green, compostable plates and cutlery are not always welcomed to the compost stream. At least I can speak for the research I've done in Toronto. Mixed up. Will feature this in the upcoming weeks!

4. Gleaning

"Gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they've been harvested or deemed unprofitable to harvest. Gleaners eat the free food or pass it on to those who are hungry."

Meet the Ontario Association of Food Bank's Community Harvest program - They collected 12,635 pounds of corn, potatoes, eggplants and bell peppers for the association to hand out at food banks for Thanksgiving.

Meet Not Far From the Tree - Seven hundred volunteers harvested nearly 20,000 pounds of fruit from 228 Toronto trees on private property this year. The fruit is then transported on foot (or bike) and evenly divded amongst property owners, volunteers, food banks and shelters.

I read this terrific book called Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by a British chap named Tristam Stuart. He talked about his experience dumpster diving. A concept you absolutely must dive (pun!) into.

Further reading and consideration:

American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of It's Food (and What We Can Do About It) by Martin Gooch

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristam Stuart

Reuse, Toilet Paper Rolls

Who says toilet paper rolls are rubbish?

Meet Anastassia Elias, talented and completely original artist.

Waste Resolution #2: Buy Less, Keep Less

Buy Less, Keep Less

I grew up lost in stuff. This is a result of a vicious combination of my Mother's love of shopping and my Dad's immense sentimental value for stuff.

Something that has really made me aware of the potential to change is living with others as well as moving frequently. I have moved four times in three years.

Three things that I buy very effortlessly is music, movies and books. Great things, but I have to find a healthy medium.

I'm hoping in a big move across the country I can really sever my ties with my stuff.

I will make a few more comments on stuff in the days to come. It's a real rich untouched field that I don't think is properly addressed in the Reality TV Drama Hoarders.

This is the den I grew up in. I am puckering up to my Grandfather and my bro is looking quite pensive.