Canadian Trash

[JimD]

Wednesday, Mar 24, 2004 Email this to a friend
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Michigan congressman demands enforcement of Canadian trash treaty

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Michigan congressman wants the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to prove it's complying with a bill that requires the agency to spend $1 million on enforcement of a Canadian trash treaty.
U.S. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Dearborn, Mich., released a letter Wednesday he had sent last week to EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt. Dingell reminded Leavitt about the provision in the funding bill, which President George W. Bush signed in January, and asked him for a detailed account of how the $1 million is being spent.

EPA spokesman Dave Ryan said Wednesday the EPA has received the letter and still is deciding how to respond.

"I can't go beyond that," Ryan said.

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Dingell said a 1992 treaty requires Canada to notify the EPA about each shipment of waste entering the United States. The EPA has 30 days to consider what impact the shipment may have on the state and then accept or reject the shipment.


Dingell and three other Michigan legislators - Democratic Representative Bart Stupak and Republican representatives Mike Rogers and Fred Upton - amended the EPA's 2004 budget last fall after the agency's director of solid waste, Robert Springer, told a House of Representatives subcommittee the EPA had taken no action to enforce the treaty.

"It is simply outrageous that the United States signed this agreement more than 11 years ago and nothing has been done to implement the notice and consent provisions laid out in a very clear manner in the agreement," Dingell said.

Although the provision wouldn't halt shipments of trash into Michigan, it could slow them by forcing shippers to deal with regulatory hurdles. Michigan now is taking about 200 truckloads of solid waste each day from Canada. Dingell said one-half of it is dumped in his district.

The House has not yet considered two other measures that would halt Canadian trash shipments. One bill, sponsored by Rogers, would ban Canadian trash shipments but not shipments from other states, in an effort to appease trash-exporting states such as New York. Another bill, sponsored by Representative Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania, would give states more authority to control trash.

Earlier this month, state legislators passed a package of bills that would put a two-year moratorium on new landfills in Michigan.

© The Canadian Press, 2004

****

That's one way to keep Canada clean

[Leon m]

Oh redface.gif ...I thought this was going to be a thread
about Shania Twian :D

[ 03-25-2004, 12:09 AM: Message edited by: Leon m ]

[Peter Malcolm Jardine]

I find it embarassing we are sending our garbage to the US. We
should be responsible for it here.

[Venchka]

You suppose there are any softwoods in the trash entering without paying the punative tariff?

[ 03-25-2004, 12:40 AM: Message edited by: Venchka ]

[Ron Williamson]

Yet another reason to hate Toronto.They refuse to deal with their own and feel the need to send it somewhere less important.Most of the municialities in Ontario were canvassed by THE CITY to accept their trash.
There ought to be a law prohibiting movement of garbage over more than two municipal boundaries.
R

[Popeye]

There was a grand scheme cooked up a few years back. It involved America sending barges filled with garbage to Canada to be incinerated in an electric arc furnace in a decommissioned phosphorous plant.

The furnace was built to melt rock, the slag was radioactive, the mined material was shipped from Florida. The phos was sent back to the States.
The slag we kept.

Garbage? we said. fuggetaboutit.

[Bruce Taylor]

The ooze flows both ways, I think:

http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/2000/LOCAL/westcentral/07/12/tgm.toxic.waste/

I like Ron's suggestion: let the cities keep their own rubbish. This structure could easily be converted into a municipal garbage silo...a giant trash can, as it were:

http://www.isap.org/2000/Workshop-ICAAC-Toronto/Toronto-City-Hall.jpg

[Mrleft8]

If people were personally responsible for their own trash/waste products, instead of relying on others to pick it up and make it disappear, maybe there wouldn't be so much trash at all. Imagine if you could buy all the things that you currently buy every day, but without all the flashy packaging. If we all had to deal with our own waste I bet there would be much less trash blowing along the highway median strip.

[Bruce Taylor]

In my grandfather's day, many people in rural areas were responsible for disposing of their own trash. Every farmer had his own garbage pile. Anything that could be burned was put to the torch, and the rest was just chucked in a slough. When a car wore out, you dragged it into the bush. A small river was a good place to dump old mattresses, rusty washtubs, batteries, gas cans and broadloom carpet. If you didn't want all that crap in your own yard, you drove around until you found a roadside ravine and you tossed your stuff into the woods.

Give the garbage back to the people, and your idiot neighbour will be out there at midnight, burying stuff ten feet from your well head.

[Popeye]

i said it before, and i think i'm right, humans are the only species on the planet willing to crap in their own drinking water.

Now, back to more Toronto bashing .. smile.gif

[Alan D. Hyde]

Bruce, you make a good point.

BUT, years ago, there was NOWHERE NEAR AS MUCH waste as there is now.

Many average houses presently dispose of two or three forty-gallon bags of waste per week; their grandparents had perhaps a tenth (or less) as much: there just wasn't that much disposable stuff back then. In a world of more scarcity and circumspection, people wore things out, used them up, or made them do.

There was little plastic.

Burnable stuff was burned, and what couldn't be burned was either hauled away periodically, or smashed (to compact) and buried. Organic garbage was boiled and fed to hogs, or went to a compost pile, or was buried.

Alan

[ 03-25-2004, 10:54 AM: Message edited by: Alan D. Hyde ]

[Alan D. Hyde]

Here's a visual of a plume resulting from pollution.

Every time a quart of oil is dumped on the ground, or a pile of manure is deposited, or a biocide is sprayed, such a (big or small) plume is created: most (though smaller) by individuals, and not by large industrial polluters.

Something to think about, both in terms of your own disposal, boatbuilding/agricultural/gardening practices, and with respect to your own drinking water.

http://earthsci.org/teacher/basicgeol/groundwa/plume1.jpg

***

Alan

[ 03-25-2004, 11:46 AM: Message edited by: Alan D. Hyde ]

[mmd]

Households have not increased the volume of the landfill stream, marketing and advertising has.

Fer instance, a while back I bought a new computer game for my daughter. It consisted of a single CD-Rom disk and an instruction booklet the same size as the CD-ROM. These items were individually packaged in plastic sleeves. These, in turn, were fitted in indents in a plastic tray measuring 10" x 8" x 1.5". This was then covered by another plastic tray. This assembly was encased in a cardboard covering. This was then slipped into a printed cardboard box. The end result is that a product that has a volume of 6.875 cubic inches was packaged so that it occupied 156 cubic inches and used 550 sq. in. of packaging to cover its 60 sq. in. of surface area.

Does a 2" x 1/2" tube of Krazy Glue need to be "blister-pakked" in a 5" x 8" card?

Do we really need to throw away the cloth every time we dust?

Scandalous!

[Alan D. Hyde]

Agreed, Michael.

But as long as we BUY them that way, they'll SELL them that way.

We get what we (are willing to) pay for.

Alan

[Popeye]

i recall, somebody once dug a carrot out of a landfill, pretty much intact, after being buried there for some 20 odd years.

[Bruce Taylor]

BUT, years ago, there was NOWHERE NEAR AS MUCH waste as there is now.Precisely. DIY garbage disposal was barely workable even in that more innocent time (I remember the rusting junk at the bottom of the ol' swimming hole). Going back to it now--distributing responsibility among individual households--would just multiply the opportunities for errors, abuses, and plain criminality.

Keeping garbage within municipalities makes a lot of sense, though. If our trash stays in the neighbourhood, where we can all see exactly what happens to it, we might think a bit more about the stuff we discard, and are more likely to insist on good waste management practises.

Good picture, Alan.

[Mrleft8]

Originally posted by Alan D. Hyde:
Agreed, Michael.

But as long as we BUY them that way, they'll SELL them that way.

We get what we (are willing to) pay for.

AlanWe are more or less FORCED to buy them that way, because that's the only way they sell them. It's a viscious circle.... I try to buy as little "packaging" as possible. I'll buy the already opened returned to the store w/o it's blister pack tube of super glue before I buy the unopened one every time.

[Peter Malcolm Jardine]

LARGEST SINGLE COMPONENT IN LANDFILLS: Paper.

[Bruce G]

I was a bit shocked to see what this thread was about when I opened it. I thought it would be about the American hating Members of Parliment.

But back on subject. I watched a special last night about the water supply in Florida and how it is being affected by trash and farm water run-off. Our trash problem is one thing- BUT when it comes to water we MUST do something and do it quick.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I thought Canadian trash ended up working as strippers in Macao.

[TimH]

They dump their raw sewage in the ocean too.

It's been estimated Greater Victoria dumps 45 billion litres of raw sewage into the ocean each year.

The environmental group Sierra Legal Defence Fund took samples of raw sewage near Victoria and found traces of PCB toxins. They say one gram of PCBs is enough to make one billion litres of water uninhabitable to marine wildlife.

"We think it's completely ridiculous for a developed country such as Canada to be dumping raw sewage into the marine environment," said Margot Venton of the Sierra Legal Defence Fund.

[buhmkin]

45 billion liters of raw sewage per year from roughly a quarter million people. 180000 liters per head per year. No, my math must be off, let's divide by ten. 18000 liters per head per year. That's approximately 493 liters per head per day. Still a hundred times what you and I produce in a day. Throw me a bone here, I don't get it.

What I REALLY don't get is how Canada, with about a 10th of the population of the USA and way more available remote land, has managed to convince someone that the flow of garbage should be southbound.

And here I thought for sure all of North America was sending waste to Sudbury, Ontario.

[mmd]

Buhmkin, that's only 65 flushes per toilet per day (or once every 20 minutes, 24 hours per day, or once every fifteen minutes if you sleep eight hours per day) - sounds reasonable, doesn't it? ;) :D

Must be all the roughage all you Lotus-landers eat. :D

[ 03-28-2004, 04:28 PM: Message edited by: mmd ]

[Harry Miller]

I guess I need to do a garbage run. Now which way? Southhampton or Wakefield smile.gif

[Beowolf]

I visited a landfill in Lansing last summer as part of a grad course. The lady explained to us that the flow of trash here from Canada is a function of economics and ecology.

Regulations state that a landfill must be capped within 10 years of it entering operation. With the system that must be used in order to create and cap a landfil, there becomes a minimum size at which one becomes economically feasible, thus the landfill is under the clock to fill the landfill within the 10 years in order to pay for it. This is why we bring in trash from elsewhere.

The real stink is that we've been paying the EPA 1 million dollars a year to monitor the trash coming in to make sure that it is all legal. They've been accepting the 1 million, but have performed no monitoring. That's what's most lawmakers upset at the moment.

[JimD]

Originally posted by Beowolf:
I visited a landfill in Lansing last summer as part of a grad course. The lady explained to us that the flow of trash here from Canada is a function of economics and ecology.

Regulations state that a landfill must be capped within 10 years of it entering operation. With the system that must be used in order to create and cap a landfil, there becomes a minimum size at which one becomes economically feasible, thus the landfill is under the clock to fill the landfill within the 10 years in order to pay for it. This is why we bring in trash from elsewhere.

The real stink is that we've been paying the EPA 1 million dollars a year to monitor the trash coming in to make sure that it is all legal. They've been accepting the 1 million, but have performed no monitoring. That's what's most lawmakers upset at the moment.:( Geez, what a back asswards way of dealing with garbage, on both sides of the border.

[ion barnes]

Tim, I grew up in Victoria and I can sympathize with you. We would go beachcombing along Ross Bay to see what was thrown back. I, as a former Victorian, wish they would do their part. They dont want to part with their money on something that does not give them a visable benefit. Bury it or drown it and poof! its gone. I am truely sorry and embareassed.