7/11/2010 5:50:23 PM

July 9, 2010

Toronto temporarily stops shipments of organics to one of its contractors

The City of Toronto uses five different processing facilities (four contracted and one city-owned) to compost its Green Bin material. Today, one of the contract facilities, Orgaworld, announced a temporary shutdown of its facility near London for approximately two months to improve its odour control systems. When the necessary repairs are complete, the City expects to resume shipments to Orgaworld.

Orgaworld currently processes approximately 25 per cent of the City’s 110,000 tonnes a year of Green Bin material and also composts organics for other municipalities. The temporary loss of this processing capacity will be a challenge for the City of Toronto. The City is working with its other contractors and staff at its own anaerobic digestion compost facility in Downsview to attempt to redirect this displaced material. Toronto is also actively searching for replacement capacity elsewhere, exploring all alternatives.

If alternatives are not available, and only as a last resort, approximately 4,000 tonnes (anticipated volume of organics generated over two months) may need to be landfilled. If that is required, the resulting impact on the City’s annual residential waste diversion rate would be up to 0.4 per cent, which equates to a lowering of the estimated 2010 overall waste diversion rate to 45.6 per cent from 46 per cent.

“It is unfortunate when any business experiences operational issues that impact its ability to conduct business and fulfill contractual obligations. We understand Orgaworld’s closure is temporary,” said Geoff Rathbone, General Manager of Toronto’s Solid Waste Management Services. “It points out the importance of Council’s recent decision to build a second new state-of-the-art compost facility in Etobicoke. Ultimately, this strategy will allow the City of Toronto to be self sufficient with processing capacity inside our boundaries.”

This move has no impact on organics collection in the City of Toronto. Residents should continue to use their Green Bins and those businesses participating in the Yellow Bag Program will continue to put organics out for collection.