Canada’s Waste Flow

From both local and global perspectives, waste is a relative term. Several phenomena, including dumpster diving, yard/car boot sales, vintage clothing stores, and the thriving garbage-picking industries in developing countries, point to the fact that one person’s waste is another person’s sustenance, livelihood, and/or treasure.

Moreover, in important ways, we never actually get rid of anything: things we discard are transformed into other things. In this way, nothing is ever finally waste. Landfill waste may be out of sight, but it is material that variously resists and transforms into other substances, such as leachate. So in asking the question “what is waste?” we critically consider what it means from cultural, economic, political, and material perspectives to identify certain entities as “discardable” and discarded.

The waste Canadians produce is typically characterized as solid, liquid and gaseous substances, including municipal, industrial, construction, industrial agricultural livestock manure, nuclear, mining, and electronic (e-waste). According to the latest statistics, Canada produced 645 million tons of oil sands waste (sand and fine tailings), 473 million tons of mining waste (mine tailings and mine waste rock), 181 million tons of agricultural waste (livestock manure), and 34 million tons of municipal solid waste.11Statistics Canada, “Human Activity and the Environment: Waste Management in Canada,” 2012, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/16-201-x/2012000/part-partie2-eng.htm. This makes us the world’s highest per-capita municipal solid waste producer.22Statistics Canada 2012, 11 and 14; Conference Board of Canada, “Environment Report,” January 2013, http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/environment.aspx.

Despite recent efforts to divert waste through recycling, up to 95 percent of all global waste is buried in landfills,33Kwon-Rae Kim and Gary Owens, “Potential for Enhanced Phytoremediation of Landfills using Biosolids: A Review,” Journal of Environmental Management 91, no. 4 (2010): 791–797. and landfilling is the central means of disposing of waste in Canada.44Statistics Canada 2012, 16. Every province and territory in Canada has landfills, and in 2010, 30 percent of them had reached or surpassed capacity.55Statistics Canada, “Households and the Environment,” 2011, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/11-526-x/11-526-x2013001-eng.pdf?st=d5Bx3lCa. In response, increasing volumes of waste are moved between provinces, or exported to the United States, Mexico, China, and elsewhere.66Josh Lepawsky and Chris McNabb, “Mapping international flows of electronic waste,” The Canadian Geographer 54 (2010): 177–95; Statistics Canada, “Human Activity and the Environment: Waste Management in Canada, Annual Statistics 2005,” 2010, http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/Statcan/16-201-XIE/0000516-201-XIE.pdf. By 2050, Canada will have produced well over 2.5 million cubic metres of nuclear waste, nearly 200,000 kilograms of plutonium contained in over 24.8 million spent fuel bundles.77Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Office, “Inventory of Radioactive Waste in Canada,” March 2012, https://radiationsafety.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Inventory-Report-2012_EN.pdf. The problems posed by nuclear waste toxicity—affecting not only nations producing nuclear materials, but nations considered suitable sites for permanent repositories—remain largely unaddressed and are far from solved.88Association for Regional and International Underground Storage. "International Waste Management Initiatives: Some History," http://www.arius-world.org/; Ian Holland, “Waste Not Want Not? Australia and the Politics of High-level Nuclear Waste,” Australian Journal of Political Science 37, no. 2 (2002): 283–301. Other forms of waste such as mining, agricultural, and e-waste are managed through landfilling, reprocessing, incineration, freezing, and other methods.

Canadian waste management focuses on the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. Of these, reducing waste is most effective but receives the least attention because it requires a significant change in consumption patterns. Reusing waste materials is next in effectiveness, and receives some attention in the form of drop-off depots, designated curb-side exchanges, and the like. Recycling waste material is least effective and—depending on the material being recycled—bad for the environment, yet receives the most interest.

In asking “what do we do with our waste?” we are interested in finding out what material, political, economic, historical, and cultural decisions contribute to our current waste-management practices, and how these practices might change in the future.

In Canada, as elsewhere, waste is largely understood as a technoscientific problem amenable to technoscientific solutions. This points to a circular logic: engineering and science articulate the terms and parameters of waste problems such that each new problem tethers us to further solutions in the form of further technoscientific innovations. As such, most attention is directed towards more and better diversion strategies, better landfilling and repository technologies, better semiological technologies for warning the future, and the development of new waste-management technologies. These solutions, as such, are not undesirable. But waste also involves the politics and economics of consumption; intergovernmental and industry-government relations; urban-rural divides; health; labour relations; gender and waste economies (in the Global North, household waste-sorting is most often performed by women, and in the Global South increasing numbers of women and children engage in waste recycling activities in subsistence economies); science-public relations; risk; governance; and so on—a bewildering array of factors, considerably beyond the remit of engineering and science. Indeed, this raises profound socio-ethical issues about our “waste-maker” society, and in particular, the effects of capitalism’s refusal to identify waste as integral to production itself.

As such, our aim is to better comprehend society’s fundamental and inextricable entanglement with technoscientific phenomena, and their risks. This entanglement between technoscience and risk is also the site of Canada’s present and future ethical responsibility to current and future generations. Indeed, the twenty-first century marks a threshold where waste—as concept, as excess, as object—begins to issue an imperative that we refigure our relationships to waste within our communities. We must also begin to see waste as constituting our environments, and poised, we might say, to become an organizing, biospherical feature of global society. Canadians require opportunities to consider society’s complex socio-ethical relations with waste in order to situate waste-management technologies in their wider context. Through a comprehensive examination of current and emerging waste-management technologies, our study aims to make an original and innovative contribution toward both practical and theoretical knowledge about the futurity of waste.

Our research program has already involved numerous projects, all of which link concrete waste issues (such as food recalls, mine tailing waste, recycling, and so on) to larger issues such as overconsumption, settler colonialism, intra- and extra-governmental relations, and public dialogue. For more detail on completed and ongoing projects, as well as publications and reports, see www.wasteflow.ca.