Environment Committee on June 3rd, 2014

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to start my questions with Mr. Walters. Mr. Walters, you talked about environmental protection in your diversion and also the economic viability of that. I'd like you to expand on that a little bit. How is that actually working out in a very, for lack of a better term, concrete way, because I know that's part of what you're dealing with as you do your recycling? How are you working through that process? How are you finding that working on the waste that you are diverting?

[Michael Walters]

Sorry, what was the first part of your question?

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Well, it's from the environmental aspect but also the economic aspect. You talked about the two of them working hand in hand.

[Michael Walters]

On the environmental side, of course the operation has to be environmentally sound. We take all of the steps we can to safeguard the environment, even as to where our plants are located, as to what vehicles are coming to the site, as to the actual equipment itself and how it is looked after from a practical point of view, and as to protection of the groundwater and surface water from any of our operations, from our stockpiles of material that would go out.

That is paramount. It is part of complying with the Ministry of the Environment certificate of approval that we have to operate under, as well as with the local city by-laws.

From an economic point of view, we pursue those markets that are viable. We have gone through the tough times, but the products that we pull out of the C and D stream are products that can be readily used and for which there is a need all the time, such as granular material for road building, wood in the agricultural industry—they need a good portion of it—or biomass material on the energy side of it. Then there is cardboard—OCC, or old corrugated cardboard—Sheetrock, or gypsum.

Then we do other things. We have a new process that we're putting in right now that will take 70% diversion. I want to clarify that we divert 70% of the product that comes in. We're going to take that up to 85%. We have a technology that is going to do that for us.

So it's a good marriage of protecting the environment but also of markets that we pursue. It hasn't always been easy, but we've been able to succeed so far.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

When you say that you have markets that you pursue and that you are going up to 85% diversion, are you implying that you are looking at specific areas from which you are collecting waste or at specific types of waste so that you can make that number as high as you have it? Or are you taking, in a particular area, any waste that goes with it?

[Michael Walters]

I'm saying in our presentation that there are more than 240,000 tonnes of C and D within this market. I'm only handling 51,000 tonnes of it right now. My certificate is limited to that. I'm going to build a new plant and I'm going to go after another 100,000 tonnes. So in total I'll be taking 150,000 tonnes out of this market here in Ottawa.

The nice thing about this is that if 24% of the waste stream in Ottawa is C and D material, quite frankly, other markets will be very similar.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

My question is this, though. Are you picking and choosing what C and D material you take, or are you taking everything from a site?

[Michael Walters]

No, I take everything. The issue here is that when you're building a house, you don't have the ability to keep separate cans around the property. You can't have a 40-yard container for wood and a 40-yard for all of the different materials. In putting it into my process, you put it all into one can and let us do the separation at the plant.

That's what our plant is all about, mechanical and actually human separation. I have sorters down there and I have the mechanical separation—the combination. Approximately 30 tonnes per hour will go through our plant and be processed.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Is your space really the residential and construction area, or is it broader than that?

[Michael Walters]

It's broader than that. I'll take residential for sure—new home building, all of the new developments that we have around here with the different developers, such as Mattamy and others. They come to us.

We become involved in the LEED program. We give reports to people such as the big developers who want to know how much of their material is diverted. We give them that information as well.

This market right now in Ottawa will be a good taste. In the next year, we'll be able to take another 100,000 tonnes of it. With the technology we're developing, we can take it to another market as well, but right now we're going to put our hands around the Ottawa market.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you.

Mr. Nickel, are the technologies you're working with through BECii also, for the most part, self-sufficient in their economics, or is there a lot of subsidy required for all of them, some of them, or any of them?

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Can we have a quick response?

[Trevor Nickel]

I can't speak to all of them, not being directly involved with all of them. But certainly the ones I'm fairly versed in are profitable on their own, and I wouldn't be involved in a company that isn't. But it's far easier to make profit if you throw stuff over the fence than if you take care of your own problems.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much.

We'll move now to Mr. McKay for five minutes.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, all, for your patience.

Mr. Cardinal, I hope somehow or another that the researchers are able to work into the report the phrase “community planning around your anus”. It seems to me it might even be a title for the report.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Cardinal, I've just been looking at you on Google, and I'd encourage colleagues to look at Mr. Cardinal on Google. Some of the buildings you have designed, including the Museum of Civilization, now the Museum of History, are stunningly beautiful.

I only suggest in half jest that somehow or another you've done some thinking that's way deeper than the rest of us about how to design so that you are not creating construction waste unnecessarily, that you are not creating unnecessary pollution of some kind or another. I'd be interested if you could just share in a minute or two your thinking about how you design a building, and how that could help people like ourselves, who have no architectural background, think about how to create space.

[Douglas Cardinal]

What I have felt through experience is that you never solve problems from the top down. You always solve problems from the bottom up, working with the people who you're serving. Nobody asked the doctor or head surgical nurse how to design an operating room, or a teacher or the kids in the classroom how to design a classroom. So we're always imposing overall systems on the problem without really concerning ourselves with the people we're serving. In every building I've designed, I've started from the user, from the people themselves, and asked them what their needs are, what their priorities are.

It's all about respect. People want spaces to inspire them. People want beauty in their lives. People want harmony and balance. People want to be surrounded by environments that are inspiring, environments they want to bring their children up in. I don't think we're listening to people enough in the whole planning process and how we serve them in terms of all the technology that we create.

All my work is involving the people themselves in the planning process. I feel that in what we're doing in the planning of our cities and the planning of our environment, we're not thinking about, definitely, women bringing up children in the environments that we create. I think that we have forgotten about loving and caring for each other, and loving and caring for our environment. I think that if we think of laws—federal laws, many laws, provincial laws—if we harm each other, then we have to accept the penalty for doing so.

But what are we doing with the technologies we're creating? We're harming each other with them, so there should be certain concerns that society has about harming each other with the technologies we've created. I would like to feel that we should contribute to people's happiness and beauty and develop a future for our children that is loving and caring, rather than just being concerned about today and only thinking of how we can create the bottom line today to make a profit, but leave such a disaster behind us that the future generations have to pay a heavy price to clean it up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you, Mr. Cardinal and Mr. McKay.

Monsieur Morin, you have five minutes.

[Marc-André Morin, NDP, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

My question is for Mr. Nickel.

Part of the problem around measuring the value of recycled waste materials, is that it's important to consider more than just the value. My colleague gave glass as an example. If you measure the value of a cracked glass that ends up in a garbage bin, it certainly isn't much. But if you measure its actual value, you realize that the materials used to make that glass, through silica and phosphate extraction, could represent hundreds of kilograms of raw materials that were processed and crushed up.

Shouldn't we start to think about that? Consider a 200-kilogram bulldozer battery that gets thrown out. How much does the lead ore that was processed to manufacture the battery weigh? That's something we should think about.

What is your take on that?

[Trevor Nickel]

We get into the discussion on embodied energy when we start talking about that aspect of recycling fairly quickly. I'm sure we're all aware that the material in front of us is just the end use of the value chain. If there's nothing wrong with it, then it becomes a very deep philosophical and social discussion about whether or not we should throw it out.

I'm not sure we're here to discuss that, but I would completely agree with Monsieur Morin on that.

[Marc-André Morin, NDP, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I'd like to ask Mr. Cardinal a question.

Do you think it would take a cultural shift to start viewing the environment as something that demands greater respect? For instance, when the conquistadors landed in Mexico City, it was the cleanest city in the world, apart from a few stains at the top of the pyramids. People could walk around barefoot the city was so clean. Cleanliness and order was so important it could have been considered a local religion. Today, the city's dumping ground is so vast that it takes 23 hours to walk from one end to the other.

What are your thoughts on that?

[Douglas Cardinal]

I do believe that we have to have a cultural shift. When we believe, biblically, that we're dominion over nature, that is our problem, because we're not dominion over nature. We are nature. We're human animals that evolved from nature.

If we look at it in that way, if we look at all life as being sacred and that there is life all around us in every living thing, if we feel connected to all life on this planet, as a cultural shift, then we would not destroy our brothers and sisters, which are all the animals, the birds, and the fish.

We need to understand that, egotistically, we're not above our environment. We are our environment. You can't separate us from the air. You can't separate us from the water. We're 98% water. You can't separate us from the earth.

The shift that we have is that we believe that we are separate. We are dominion and we're not. We should walk more humbly on the earth and realize we affect all life with our every act.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Okay, thank you very much.

We'll move now to Mr. Storseth, for five minutes.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Cardinal, you made a couple of comments I just wanted to follow up on with regard to the announcement by the Obama administration. I was just wondering if you were familiar with changes that our government has already made when it comes to the coal-fired electricity sector?