In Michigan, criticism grows over Toronto's export of trash

TORONTO -- Joe Racanelli slung a sagging plastic bag onto a heap of others on the back of his garbage truck and leaned on two levers to close a set of steel jaws.

"Watch out. They spit," he warned as the mechanical maw chomped the wet bags, which burst with staccato pops. Juice, as he called it, oozed from the seams of the truck. "This is the part I hate most -- the messy part," said Racanelli, 40.

The 12-year veteran garbage collector, part of a recycling effort, was helping to quiet the trash talk across the US-Canadian border. A long-simmering feud over what to do with Toronto's garbage was inflamed last week by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, who promised Michigan residents that he would stop garbage trucked south from Canada into the state.

"It's time to end the Canadian trash-dumping in Michigan," Kerry said. His remarks have incensed people in Toronto.

Kerry has become "the front-runner to be the most anti-Canadian candidate," said Don Martin, a columnist for the National Post newspaper.

Kerry was probably "just seeking votes," said an editorial in the Toronto Star, but his stance "is generating new hostilities from Americans."

Local officials contend that their trash is better than garbage from Michigan and most cities. Toronto's rate of recycling paper and plastic is on par with efforts in other big cities, and the wet garbage that Racanelli threw onto his truck was part of an ambitious program of collecting organic kitchen waste separately to be eaten by microbes and returned to the soil.

"By this time next year, we will be the best city in North America at diverting waste," said Gord Perks, a senior campaigner at the Toronto Environmental Alliance, an advocacy group.

"We're doing everything reasonably in our power to reduce our solid waste going to Michigan," Mayor David Miller of Toronto said in an interview.

"The material we are sending there is as safe or safer than the stuff local people there are putting in their landfills," said the chief of solid waste for the city, Angelos Bacopoulos.

But if the garbage is so clean, why don't they keep it in Ontario?

"You should listen to the noise and smell the stench and see the dangerous road conditions that we have to deal with every day," said Lynette Guzman, who lives with her husband and two children in Wayne County, Mich. Most of the 140 trucks coming from Toronto exit Interstate 275 a mile from her home and barrel past on their way to a landfill a mile down the road, she said.

The United States and Canada have a free-trade agreement that nearly erases the border for commerce. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that garbage is a commodity to be treated like any other commercial product.

So in 2002, when mounting political pressure forced Ontario to close Toronto's largest landfill, a garbage-handling firm, Republic Services of Florida, offered to ship the city's trash to its landfill in Sumpter Township, Mich., a rural area 25 miles southwest of Detroit. The price for removing the trash was $40 million a year, more than twice what the city was spending.

It was hardly a novel arrangement for Michigan, which receives trash from seven states. The business is a growing political issue within Michigan, led by those concerned that the state has become a dumping ground.

"We want space in Michigan restricted to Michigan trash," said Mike Garfield, director of the Ecology Center, an environmental activist group in Michigan. "We have brought this problem on ourselves. We have an oversupply of landfills and lower tipping fees. "

But it's a two-way street. A Massachusetts-based company, Clean Harbors Environmental Services, operates a hazardous-waste landfill and incinerator in Ontario that receives about 132,000 tons each year of contaminated sludge, foundry sands, old solvents, and heavy metals from the United States, according to an official of the company, Phillip Retallick.

The garbage that goes to Michigan seems pretty sweet to the Sumpter Township government. It took in $3.5 million this year in fees from Republic Services, about 40 percent of its budget, said Dwayne Seals, the township's financial officer. "That revenue stream has kept taxes from going up," said Tim Hicks, a member of the township's Board of Trustees.