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Landfills are a thing of the past. Trouble is, they’re a thing of the present too. And future, whether we like it or not.

One of the seminars I attended at Saturday’s Toronto Stewardship Forum was about the new book HTO (Coach House Books, 2008, $24.95), a history of Toronto’s relationship with water. One of the book’s editors, Wayne Reeves, talked about how Toronto has used its waterways over the years, explaining that, today, the city is trying to resuscitate and reintegrate ecological features around waterways to better deal with rain water (and, of course, to create a healthier city).  But a key challenge for the city is its historical landfills.

Just like the landfills we’re creating today, dump sites of 50 and 100 years ago are in areas we consider acceptable (OK, maybe  tolerable is a better word) for that sort of use. It turns out that, even up to the 1950s, Toronto’s ravines were used for dumping garbage. And guess what? It’s still there, taking up space, interrupting local ecology, and it’s today’s problem and the city tries to mitigate chemical runoff from whatever people here threw out all those years ago.

So where should we dump our garbage? I’d say nowhere. I think, like Japan and many other places, we should see our garbage as fuel. Everything that’s left after recycling and claiming materials should be used to power modern, non-polluting incineration plants (even gasification), or processed in biodigesters, set up for small populations. That way we’ll reclaim power for use locally.

What do you think, can we eliminate garbage?

I took this photo of an incineration tower from a building in Ebisu Garden Place, Tokyo. It was one of many towers visible by scanning the city from above. There were no visible emissions coming from the stacks.

Upon arriving at my friends’ place here in Tokyo, my tour of the apartment included the trash facilities – the choices are combustible and non-combustible, and I believe PET bottles and aluminum cans are separated as well. So that’s it, all the combustibles are burned right here in the city, rather than trucking them out to the countryside. To make that work, the facilities would have to be clean, the emissions would have to be contained, or certainly people in this well-organized, clean city would complain.

According to this Washington Post article, one of the plants burns 300 tons of garbage a day, and actually creates electricity for use in the surrounding area from the process, as well as an ash that can be used in building materials.

I’ve often wondered if incineration would be a good choice for Canada’s cities – my view of the Tokyo skyline left no doubt.

How do you think we could manage waste better?