On weekends throughout the summer, locals gather at the Dresden Raceway in Southwestern Ontario to watch horse-and-carriage rallies, tractor pulls and sometimes a demolition derby where cars slam into each other until only one is left standing.
Dresden, population 2,800, is a special place, said Martha Fehr, the 22-year-old owner of a chip shop across the road.
The town is growing with housing developments, a Christmas light competition and night markets that bring in thousands of visitors from the surrounding area. Most of Ms. Fehr’s childhood friends have come home, she said, preferring the sense of community found here to big-city life.
But that small-town charm may be about to change, Ms. Fehr and many others in Dresden worry. A landfill and waste processing facility is slated to be developed less than 800 metres from the downtown core, and the project is moving forward despite fierce pushback from the municipality.
“My entire livelihood is in this thing,” said Ms. Fehr, gesturing to her fry shop. “Who wants to buy food that is three kilometres from a massive waste facility?”
Chip-shop owner Martha Fehr is among the local business owners anxious about a landfill in Dresden, a town about three hours’ drive west of Toronto.
Since 2020, new landfill sites in Ontario have been subject to comprehensive environmental impact assessments that require the support of all municipalities within 3.5 kilometres.
The Dresden site, however, is categorized as a closed landfill, a leftover from some small waste-management activity that started 60 years ago. This makes the site a grey zone, as far as environmental regulations go, with few limits on what could happen there.
Still, in 2024 the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks ordered a comprehensive study for the project. In June, however, it backtracked on this decision, and now the Dresden project is becoming emblematic of Ontario’s growing trash troubles.
According to provincial data, Ontario has roughly 1,800 closed landfills; few Ontarians live far from one. If the Doug Ford government allows the Dresden approach to be replicated, many more communities could find themselves hosting reopened, greatly expanded landfills – and with few options at hand to oppose them.
“This is a red flag for rural Ontario,” said Chatham-Kent councillor Jamie McGrail.
About half the patrons at Crystal Cadotte’s popcorn and candy shop on North Street, the main drag, come to the town for the quaint atmosphere that a landfill would imperil, she says. Now she wonders whether to move away. ‘Do you get out before?’ she asks. ‘Get my money out now?’
The 35-hectare plot of land on Irish School Road is approximately three hours from Toronto, a straight shot down Highway 401 followed by roughly 30 minutes on country roads. It has been a small-scale landfill of sorts since the 1960s. At first the municipality used it to dispose of fly ash from a nearby incinerator. Later it was also used for scrap wood and non-hazardous waste, leading it to be designated as a landfill in the 1980s. The maximum waste allowed to be stored on the property was 75 tonnes a day.
Ontario’s current landfill site regulations and standards were not in place at the time, and there is no evidence of any environmental impact studies or engineering assessments being completed, according to a letter sent to the Environment Ministry from the municipality of Chatham-Kent, obtained by The Globe and Mail.
Today, the site contains approximately 40,000 cubic metres of fill material across three areas which, when combined, equal two hectares. To the municipality’s knowledge, the site was inactive, said Bruce McAllister, general manager of development services at Chatham-Kent. But it’s about come back online in a major way.
York1 Environmental Waste Solutions Ltd – a GTA-based waste management company – purchased the plot in Dec., 2022. The original plans for the site, published on the environmental registry of Ontario, divided the site into two parts.
The first part was a proposed eight-hectare landfill, which the company said had a theoretical capacity of 1,620,000 cubic metres, about the volume of the Rogers Centre in downtown Toronto. It would receive 40 times more waste – in the form of non-hazardous solid construction and demolition material from across the province – than exists there currently and be in operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (York1 has since adjusted these proposed operating times to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday).
The second part was a waste-processing facility that would – across the remaining 25 hectares – recycle and divert a maximum of 1,000 tonnes a day of residual waste.
This new subdivision is a few hundred metres away from the landfill site.
The fact that a comprehensive assessment was not required was a major selling feature, York1 spokesperson Laryssa Waler said.
Since 2020, when Premier Doug Ford introduced Bill 197 – a provision added to the Environmental Assessment Act that gives municipalities the right to veto landfills – comprehensive studies have been a major hurdle for projects. The law was one of the biggest changes to waste management practices in Ontario’s history, and it made opening new landfills virtually impossible, experts told The Globe and Mail. A comprehensive study can take a decade to complete and cost in excess of $10-million.
But because the Dresden site was already a designated landfill, the community had little opportunity to object. No comprehensive study meant less community consultation, an essential part of the assessments that must factor in socio-economic effects alongside potential environmental impact.
The government would never consider doing such a thing in Toronto, said Darrin Canniff, Mayor of Chatham-Kent, the region encompassing Dresden. “Not for a second. But they decided on Dresden because, oh, it’s a small town, it doesn’t matter.”
Many in the community felt betrayed and abandoned. They questioned how their businesses, property values and infrastructure would be affected by pollution, truck traffic and other potential problems. And to many it simply felt unfair: The region is already home to a landfill that receives 1.3 million tonnes of waste a year from southern and central Ontario.
“Our town is not a dumping zone,” said Stefan Premdas, an organizer for a local group fighting the project.
Activists opposing the Dresden landfill managed to make some headway last year, but the passage of Bill 5 this summer changed that.
In spring 2024, uproar from the community during a by-election persuaded the Ministry of Environment to require a comprehensive study for the project.
To York1, this was an unjustifiable and politically motivated change of course, Ms. Waler said. For Dresden, it was a victory, Mr. Canniff said; the community had fought hard to get the comprehensive environmental assessment.
York1 filed a judicial review in July, 2024, arguing that the company bought the land on assurances from the ministry that it would not need to conduct a comprehensive study. These promises were broken, Ms. Waler said.
Almost a year later, the province once again changed course with Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act.
Justifying this about-face, Environment Minister Todd McCarthy referenced the large quantity of Ontario’s waste that is exported to the U.S. for disposal. Amid trade disputes, he warned, those shipments could be curtailed.
“We pivoted in the face of a crisis to build our landfill capacity,” he told the Legislative Assembly.
The waste management industry’s warnings about dwindling landfill capacity predate Bill 197 – and even Mr. Ford’s 2018 election victory. Waste to Resource Ontario (a trade organization formerly known as the Ontario Waste Management Association) had long pointed out the possibility that trade disputes and restrictions on waste exports into the U.S. could strain the province’s landfills.
According to a report published in 2023 by the Association of Municipalities Ontario, Ontario generated between 12.7 million and 15.5 million tonnes of waste in 2022, but only 8.8 million tonnes of that was landfilled within the province.
The waste organization’s latest landfill report, published in 2021, predicted that, provided population growth held steady and exports continued, existing capacity would be exhausted between 2032 and 2036. Bill 197 is “the biggest obstacle to increasing capacity,” the organization states on its website.
The municipalities association has blasted the government for failing to address the crisis, for example by increasing waste diversion, or banning disposal of food waste and other materials. The government’s efforts to build 1.5 million new homes in the next few years will make matters worse, it alleges.
In Dresden, York1 is pioneering another option, Ms. Waler said.
“One promising solution to the province’s landfill capacity crisis is the adaptive reuse of existing landfill sites,” she said. “By leveraging existing licences and environmental permits, these sites can be transformed into modern recycling facilities.”
But the Dresden landfill would provide only minimal relief. According to York1’s published plans, it would accept a maximum of 365,000 tonnes of waste a year – an increase in annual capacity of about 4.1 per cent. Moreover, it would operate only until 2032.
By making it prohibitively difficult to open new landfills, Bill 197 “created an environment that encourages proponents to take this Dresden approach,” said Jessica Boily, an environmental lawyer at Gowling WLG.
Todd McCarthy, Ontario’s Environment Minister, has defended the Ford government’s about-face on landfills, citing trade disputes with the United States.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Alexandru Cioban, a spokesperson for Mr. McCarthy, refused to answer questions about how the government plans to address the crisis. Mr. McCarthy’s office also denied an open request for an interview prior to this article’s publication.
And Mr. Cioban didn’t answer whether the government will promote the reopening of other closed landfills. Mr. McCarthy’s public comments, though, suggest he regards this as a pragmatic, viable solution. He repeatedly emphasized in the Legislative Assembly that the Dresden site is attractive because it’s already an approved waste management location.
“We will do it in a balanced, responsible way in Dresden and anywhere else where landfill capacity needs to be expanded,” he said in the Legislative Assembly on May 14.
York1 still had to abide by some environmental assessments, such as requirements for air, noise emissions and sewage works. The company also planned to engineer the landfill according to modern standards, with clay liner, leachate collection, and an extraction pond and ditches. These changes would make the site “more environmentally sound than it had been in previous uses,” said the company in a legal document obtained by The Globe and Mail.
But these regulations and environmental assessments are far less robust than a comprehensive study, said Richard Lindgren, a lawyer at Canadian Environmental Law Association and legal counsel for the community group fighting the project.
“There are pretty significant potential adverse impacts associated with landfilling, and that’s why its appropriate for these kinds of projects to receive the highest level of scrutiny possible.”
It’s not clear how many of Ontario’s 1,800 closed landfills could be candidates for reopening. Many presumably closed because they were full, or were no longer economically viable. Ms. Boily added that many were located in areas that have been developed since their closure.
However, given the challenges of opening new landfills – and the demand for them – options are limited. Should the expanding of old landfills become more common practice, more and more communities such as Dresden will be left to deal with the consequences.
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