Recycle this

As if they didn’t have enough financial problems on their agenda, the city of Iqaluit now has another: how to pay for a garbage recycling program.

This problem is partially self-inflicted. Earlier this year, confronted with wildly escalating costs for its recycling scheme, the city was poised on the edge of making the right decision: shelve the program.

It was the right thing to do for two reasons. The first is that the current Iqaluit city council has no political mandate to run an expanded recycling program. That is not what they were elected to do. Check the platforms that most candidates ran on last fall. The issues in the last election were public safety, infrastructure improvement, taxes, and development planning.

The second reason is that they do not have enough information to make an informed decision about its recycling scheme. There is no evidence that they even had answers to most of these essential questions:

1. What is the cost per tonne of pouring garbage into a dump?
2. What is the cost per tonne of pouring garbage into a recycling system?
3. What is the difference in cost between those two methods?
4. Who is willing — and able — to pay the difference?

Instead, council members caved to emotional pressure from an unelected lobby group that claims a handful of members. Instead of postponing recycling until they have figured out how to do it, they decided to cross their fingers and hope for the best. They will continue the program, and at the same time try to find ways of reducing its costs.

We wish them the best of luck. Municipal governments all over North America have already discovered that it costs 10 to 20 times as much to pour garbage into a recycling scheme than it costs to pour garbage into a hole in the ground.

Take Toronto, for example, Canada’s largest municipality. Three years ago, it cost them about $15 a tonne to pour garbage into a landfill site. At the same time it cost them about $120 a tonne to recycle garbage. And their recycling costs were low in comparison to others. In that same year, 2002, recycling cost the city of Guelph a whopping $308 a tonne.

These costs are real. Mouthing shallow platitudes about saving the planet will not make them go away. In a small town like Iqaluit, the high price of recycling is compounded by the high cost of transporting recyclable material to markets in the South.

And when it reaches those markets, Iqaluit’s thrown-away glass, plastic, and rubber doesn’t fetch a very high price, and certainly not enough to pay for the cost of collecting it, separating it, and then sending it there via air cargo.

What was city council thinking when they set aside only $5,000 for recycling in this year’s budget? Why are they surprised that the real cost is turning out to be between $250,000 to $300,000 for this year alone?

The city’s biggest environment liability right now is its festering sewage lagoon, and the botched sewage treatment plant built to replace it. Over the past 10 years, the Department of Fisheries of Oceans has twice laid charges over the leaking of disease-laden effluent from the sewage lagoon into the bay. The first time, the territorial government paid the fine. The second time, the municipality paid. If the city is charged and convicted again, a fine would cost the city many hundreds of thousands of dollars. That makes the sewage treatment plant a higher environmental priority than a recycling program.

The city’s biggest political liability right now is the sorry state of the road system, the absence of sidewalks, and unexplained problems with the contractor hired to carry out its road-paving scheme. That is a higher political priority than a recycling program.

At the same time, the city has run into unexpected financial shortfalls. As usual, they are less than forthcoming about exactly how bad it is, but the problem seems to be related to lower than projected cash reserves, which would have provided some of the money needed to pay its share of Iqaluit’s $50 million infrastructure program.

On top of all that, there are the inevitable contingency expenses that the city must also pay, such as the $100,000 they have agreed to spend on a consultant to find out why the new arena is sinking into the tundra.

So is the city now dipping into its reserves to pay the unbudgeted operating costs of recycling? Will the city now produce a deficit at the end of the year?

If the city of Iqaluit is not ready to answer the question of how it will pay the extra costs of recycling, and who will pay them, then the city of Iqaluit is not yet ready to run a recycling program. JB