CAFES at City Hall: Some Progress on Waste — But Let’s Keep an Eye on the Incinerator File
On June 16 2026, the City’s Environment & Climate Change Committee received the Solid Waste Master Plan’s Year Two Update. Some things seem to be going well — but one sentence buried in the staff report set off alarm bells.
The good news first
There’s real progress worth celebrating:
- The three-item garbage limit is working. 98.5% compliance, and a fall 2025 set out study showed that 89% of households are now setting out two or fewer garbage items per collection cycle, compared to 74 % in 2022. The changes in what can go in the blue bin due to the shift to the Extended Producer Responsibility system should further improve these results for 2026.
- The multi-residential Green Bin rollout is advancing — 75% of buildings receiving City waste collection now have access to Green Bin organics diversion. Organic material collected from multi-residential properties increased by approximately 30% in 2025 compared to 2024. Wow!
- Community reuse events have received more support, resulting in more activity. Drop & Swap events, Repair Cafés and the Giveaway Weekend is back (although hardly anybody knows about that yet….).
- Also very cool: the Community Environment Project Grant Program (CEPGP) now has a $102K waste reduction funding stream and the community responded well to this opportunity, proposing all kinds of action (grant window in early April 2026).
The Solid Waste team has been visible, collaborative, and open with community partners. A June 9th 2026 Reuse/Reduce Roundtable attended by CAFES was a useful event.
Now the line that worries us: “reviewing site locations for a waste-to-energy facility”
Tucked into the City staff report is a sentence saying staff are “initiating work on reviewing site locations for a waste-to-energy facility.” In plain language: the City has started scouting where to put an incinerator — before any public consultation on whether Ottawa even needs one. And Council has not made that decision.
CAFES position is that we want to see community engagement before choices for residual waste management are made and sites are selected, not after. CAFES works closely on these issues with Waste Watch Ottawa, Ecology Ottawa and EnviroCentre.
CAFES and our colleague organizations, have pointed out that there is no urgency forcing this decision. The staff report leads with Trail Road landfill having ~9.3 years left, but that is strongly misleading once we count measures already in effect (the new ban on Trail accepting commercial and institutional waste, the 60,000-tonne/year private landfill redirect, and the sustained three-item reduction). Furthermore, the Trail Road waste facility expansion Environmental Assessment is already well underway. Once we add this up, Trail Road will have capacity until 2050-55. Plus there is a further 30 years of room at the newly purchased Miller-Taggart site.
The urgency argument for costly incineration does not hold up. There has been no political decision in favour of incineration. There has been no public consultation. Yet the City is paying consultants to check out future incinerator sites?*
* An incinerator would drive Ottawa’s carbon emissions sky high, release cancer causing dioxins and fuerans into the air, produce 30% volume of residual ash that would need to be landfilled plus produce toxic ash that requires hazardous waste disposal. To boot, an incinerator would cost around 1/2 a billion and the energy it could produce will only pay for a fraction of its cost.
Our other asks
We also noted some other points for the Councillors: GHG quantification is overdue (two years running, the solid waste report just says emissions “will be quantified later”); the Circular Economy Strategy needs a real timeline with public engagement; and producer responsibility is eroding — producer funding for household hazardous waste events has slipped from 40% to under 30%, with taxpayers quietly covering the gap.
Our public delegation:
You can watch the recording of the meeting here, and Angela’s delegation is at 26:00 minutes. The delegation presentation is below.