Waste management experts warn that failing to address Ontario’s landfill capacity crisis will have costly consequences for taxpayers and the environment as the province is projected to run out of room for its trash within the next decade.
Calvin Lakhan, director of York University’s circular innovation hub warns, if this limit is reached: “The cost of landfilling goes up enormously.”
More garbage will need to be shipped out of province, or overseas, and when the costs of waste disposal go up, Lakhan said, illegal dumping also tends to increase.
“When people don’t the ability to safely and adequately dispose of their waste,” said Lakhan. “They will often dump the waste in like ravines and parks.”
In the 1980’s, Ontario faced a similar landfill capacity crisis, and it led to birth of the blue box recycling program.
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Three decades later, the province is hoping innovation can help avoid a garbage catastrophe.
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Toronto is facing a ‘freeze’ as it looks to increase its landfill capacity
In 2026, new province-wide recycling regulations will come into effect across the province aimed at incentivizing businesses to find more sustainable packaging solutions.
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The program is called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), and it will be administered by a national non-profit organization called Circular Materials.
Businesses that package products will have to meet recycling and diversion targets or face fines.
“There’s an embedded incentive for (producers) to reduce their packaging,” said Allen Langdon, Circular Materials CEO. “Because if they reduce their packaging, they will reduce the amount of fees they pay.”
Lakhan warns recycling alone can’t solve this crisis.
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“We need to be asking ourselves, what is the most sustainable packaging option and not what is most recyclable packaging option,” said Lakhan.
Waste management experts want to see incentives for producers to make reusable or biodegradable packaging, and an expansion of organic waste programs.
Toronto officials estimate that 40 per cent of what’s ending up in the landfill should go in the green bin.
Charlotte Ueta, acting director of policy, planning and outreach with the City of Toronto’s solid waste management services, boasts the city’s organics processing facilities have “the capability to accept items that are not commonly accepted in other diversion programs.”
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For example, diapers, women’s sanitary pads and clay or wood chip cat litter is accepted.
Though Toronto hasn’t made it illegal to put organic waste in the garbage to follow cities with higher diversion rates like Vancouver and San Francisco.
Garbage incineration is also being considered too easy pressure on overburdened landfills.
In Sweden, fewer than one per cent of municipal household waste goes to landfill.
The rest is recycled or burned for energy.
Environmentalists warn that garbage incineration still creates greenhouse gases and can have negative health consequences, despite technology designed to screen out harmful emissions.
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“Studies from European jurisdictions where they have a lot of incinerations have also found accumulation of certain toxic emissions in the soil, in the moss, in the trees and plants, and even in breast milk and animals,” said Emily Alfred with the Toronto Environmental Alliance.
Alfred is also concerned that expanding garbage incineration will simply create a demand for more garbage rather than promoting sustainable solutions.
“We are consumer culture and we’re just generating significant amounts of waste,” said Lakhan. “The secondary issue is that our infrastructure really hasn’t kept up.”
York University’s circular innovation hub director said government regulations often lag as the convenience of single use packaging has become pervasive and unavoidable.
“These lightweight composite materials that can’t effectively be managed in our existing systems which is contributing to an impending landfill crisis,” said Lakhan.
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