Detour required as local warehouse prepares to close

With just a few weeks left in the remaining life cycle of the Collingwood Landfill, more waste from the area will be transferred elsewhere.

The landfill at the Collingwood Waste Transfer Station was full and was scheduled to close in 2023.

“Actually, the landfill portion of the site hasn’t closed yet, we’ve still snuck a few more months out of it,” says Rob McCullough, Simcoe County’s director of solid waste management.

County officials say service for residents and businesses will remain the same, however. Users are not expected to see any difference as it will be the closure of the landfill, not the transfer station that residents access to dispose of waste.

But the question remains: Is there room to reduce the amount of waste that needs to be transported elsewhere, lowering costs and giving the environment a bit of a break?

McCullough said there is room to reduce the amount of waste that needs to be transported elsewhere. Doing so would not only reduce costs for taxpayers, but also be better for the environment.

“When we weigh the different materials in the trash (collected at the curb) – 47% is organic,” he explains. “What we want to do is remove as much organics as we can from the waste stream.”

The portion of actual trash that is thrown to the curb as garbage is 29%, the remaining 71% is material that can be diverted – the vast majority being organic.

Removing more of the organic material, he reasons, will not only reduce costs, but also the methane released into the atmosphere when organics are added to the landfill. Organic produce is also useful on its own as a source of fertilization.

McCullough’s department regularly undertakes the unenviable task of a waste audit of 100 representative units collected over an eight-week period. This involves examining garbage samples with tweezers to determine what kind of material is being thrown away. That’s how he knows that nearly half of the curbside trash is organic waste that could go in the green organics collection cart.

This leads him to conclude that there is room for diversion efforts to reduce the amount of organic material going to landfill.

When it comes to recycling, however, the county scores high – typically among the best recycling municipalities in the province. But even there, he sees opportunities for improvement. If 90% of the population recycles the blue box material and 90% of them do it correctly, the end result is an 80% recycling rate, he reckons, concluding that there is still room for improvement.

Some help is expected on this. In January 2026, Ontario producers of related material will be responsible for that waste stream. He sees opportunities at that time for province-wide advertising to encourage more recycling and related instruction. With this consistency across the province, there will be no mixed messages about what can and cannot be recycled. Currently, municipalities do not all recycle the same material.

As for the pits in Simcoe County, well, it all ends. With Collingwood’s landfills ready to accept the last of their rubbish in June, the county will have just two landfills left.

The county’s 2023 solid waste data summary, presented to the full committee in late February, showed that, at that time, the remaining capacity at the Collingwood Landfill was 9,215 cubic metres.

The Nottawa Landfill, which is expected to reach capacity soon, has a remaining capacity of 19,575 cubic meters. The third landfill, in the city of Oro-Medonte, will remain in operation until mid-2027, with a capacity of 203,290 at the time of the report.

In 2023, the county’s waste collection crews picked up approximately 109,135 tons of waste (garbage, organics, recyclables and seasonal collections). Another 55,421 tonnes of total waste was disposed of at the facilities, bringing the total waste tonnage to 164,556, of which 65%, or 106,985 tonnes, was diverted.

Simcoe County has no plans to put up new locations, at least not yet. Previous efforts to create a new site were abandoned following strong objections and controversy, so the decision was made to use transfer stations to move trash elsewhere, similar to approaches taken by other municipalities.

The county has entered into a new agreement with a Barrie company. Waste from the county is transported to Barrie where the company then transfers it to partners with whom it has agreements. It could be anywhere, McCullough says, but most of Ontario’s commercial trash is taken to the United States.

Fun, meanwhile, remains the focus.

“We really need to put all our efforts into landfill diversion,” says McCullough.