Landfill owners can pull out their wallets. The government of François Legault will soon require them to pay royalties for the use of covering materials, which represent almost a third of the waste destined for disposal in Quebec.
A draft regulation will be tabled next Wednesday by the Minister of the Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change, Benoit Charette, learned The duty. The elected member of the Coalition avenir Québec wants to make recycling and upgrading “more competitive” options.
Once adopted, the CAQ regulation will force owners to pay $10 per ton of covering materials used. In 2019, 2.7 million tonnes of this waste — made up of clean and contaminated soil, sand, glass and shredding residue — ended up in engineered landfills (LETs), according to data from Équiterre validated by Recyc-Québec. This figure represents 32% of the total waste disposed of that year.
A levy on covering materials would be a first in Quebec. Until now, this category of waste did not require any payment from operators. According to the Quebec Common Front for Ecological Waste Management, “the equivalent of nearly $60,000,000” has been lost annually in the current model.
In its report on waste management released at the beginning of the year, the Bureau d’audiences publiques en environnement (BAPE) stated that this new kind of charge “should be applied quickly in order to reduce the […] materials used for covering. According to Équiterre statistics, the amount of collection waste sent to LETs increased by 26% between 2008 and 2019.
Higher payouts
In addition to expanding the scope of its royalty program, Quebec intends to increase the bill it already imposes on the industry. Currently, landfill managers pay the equivalent of $24.32 per metric ton of regular waste disposed. Once adopted, the Legault government regulation will require payments of $30 per tonne.
As he had already suggested in a strategy tabled in 2020, Minister Charette is committed to indexing these amounts by $2/tonne annually.
Quebec expects to make gains of $150 million per year thanks to its new amendments. The additional sums it imposes on the industry will also make it possible to reduce the call for landfills, assures Minister Charette.
Since 2020, the government has given the green light to the expansion of three LETs. Tuesday, The duty also reported that the company Complexe Enviro Connexions intended to join the batch and process a greater quantity of residual materials.
In January, the BAPE indicated in its report on the management of ultimate residues that at the current rate, it is “obvious that new disposal sites or expansions of existing sites will have to be authorized in Quebec over the next 20 years” . The production of waste by Quebecers and private companies has experienced a “marked increase” in recent years and does not plan to slow down, can we read in the thick document of nearly 700 pages.