This week I attended a meeting of the Brighton Landfill Liaison Committee, and there’s a lot to talk about, starting with acknowledging the passing of the former Chair of the committee, Peter McCann; I agreed to take on the Chair position in his absence, and the County will be advertising for a new member of the committee to represent Northumberland at large.
We’ve only met one other time this term of council, but that doesn’t mean that County staff haven’t been busy, or that there isn’t a lot of work to be done in the coming year. First I’ll give a brief rundown of how waste collection works in Northumberland County, and then give you a sense of where it’s going.
What a Waste System
Even though the landfill is in Brighton, our garbage pickup is operated by Northumberland County. In fact, the Brighton landfill is the only active landfill in all of Northumberland. When the county first took over responsibility for waste collection there were many smaller landfills; each of those are now closed, though the County remains responsible for them in perpetuity.
The ongoing existence of the Brighton landfill is a wonderful example of how waste diversion works. When it was first created in the 70’s, standards for waste and how to dispose of it were very different: it was a pit, and everything went into the same pit. Back in 2010 the county began the process of exploring how they might extend the life of the landfill, or wind it down, with the expectation that it would be full by 2024. They put down a plastic liner to keep the garbage-soaked water that collects in a dump (called “leachate”), and moved the existing garbage onto that liner, allowing them to put down liners in the other areas of the dump. At the same time they started a number of waste diversion practices, including the start of the recycling and composting programs, to keep recyclable and reusable materials out of the landfill. Now here we are in 2026, expecting it to have filled up by 2033 or 2034.
Fun (and gross) fact: the leachate that is now prevented from going into the groundwater is collected and shipped to water treatment facilities in Trent Hills and Cobourg, at a rate of ~30,348,000L per year!
Ongoing Monitoring
A significant portion of time at the meeting was spent looking at the County’s water quality monitoring. They have dozens of test wells around the landfill, which they test bi-annually in order to determine if leachate is making its way into the groundwater and which way it’s flowing. The good news is that no groundwater contamination is found at the test wells furthest from the landfill; and what small contamination there is can be traced to the dump prior to its upgrades this century (i.e., it’s been there a long time and doesn’t seem to be moving much), or to the use of road salt on County Road 26. The land directly south of the landfill is currently co-owned by Northumberland County and the Municipality of Brighton; the county will be seeking to buy out Brighton’s share in that land, in order to help them meet their groundwater monitoring requirements, since the standard for land owned by the county is lower than the standard for land owned by anyone else. I want to be clear that the contamination levels there are still low, but because the county does not own that land outright it is technically out of compliance; once it owns the land, it will be well within compliance with the ministry regulations.
Waste Diversion in 2025
2025 saw a big boost to our waste diversion efforts, particularly with the start of our mattress diversion program. Believe it or not, the 5,570 mattresses and boxsprings that were diverted from the landfill since January 20th 2025 saved us 6,270 cubic metres of space, about the size of a football field filled 4ft high–that’s about 25% of the volume of the waste we collected all year, adding another 3 months of life onto our landfill!
2025 also saw the beginning of proof of residency at the landfill. This is to keep people from outside Northumberland from bringing their waste here. People do this for a lot of reasons, but it’s usually because their landfill charges more for tipping fees. 8 weeks after we started requiring ID or other proof of residency in July, incoming waste tonnage had dropped by 12%.
Changes to Recycling in 2026
As of January 1st, the producers of plastic packaging are now responsible for the collection and recycling of recyclable materials. I really support this change in principle, as it supports the concept of a circular economy in which materials, like plastics, are used and reused appropriately and the producers of those materials are responsible for the entire life cycle of that material. Appropriately, the new company assigned responsibility for recycling programs is called Circular Materials Ontario. You can get a great explainer of this change, and what can now be included in your blue and grey bins, here.
The short of it is that you can keep doing what you’re doing, so don’t worry about the changes. The good of it is that they’re expanding what you can include in your blue and grey bins, which means fewer things ending up in our landfill. There’s very little that can’t be diverted from the landfill at this point, which is excellent news…but there’s still work to be done.
More Diversion in the Future
In 2027 the county is hoping to start diversion programs for asphalt shingles and dimensional lumber. Each year an estimated 2,000 tonnes of shingles and lumber enter our landfill, amounting to about 9% of our total waste. If we begin that diversion in 2027, by the end of our landfill’s life in 2033 it will have added another 7 months of use to the landfill.
The county’s goal is to divert 75% of total household waste. In 2014 the average household was generating 770kg of waste per year, with 58% of that (449kg) sent to the landfill and the rest being recycled, composted, or otherwise diverted. While we no longer know how much total waste each household produces (since the county is no longer responsible for all aspects of waste collection), we do still know the garbage side, and know that on average each household in Northumberland still sends 390kg to landfill. If we’re still producing the same amount of waste overall, then with all of the diversion programs available to us we must not be using them to their full potential: with a little effort to sort waste, we could be keeping more things out of the landfill. To address that, the county may at some point in the future start requiring clear plastic bags for waste pickup so that they can refuse bags that haven’t been properly sorted.
But of course, we might also just have more waste overall (which would be worrying, if true!). And the high volume might reflect other trends: starting in the pandemic, the number of home renovations and storage purges has gone up. I know that my family sends very little household waste to the landfill, but we did send some old cupboards from our basement to the landfill last year, and they were heavy.
Decommissioning Process and GHGs
No matter the cause of the sheer volume of waste that goes into our landfill, please do your part to reduce your own waste and improve diversion. Because come 2034, when our landfill is full, we already know that there’s nowhere in Northumberland to site a new landfill; our waste will eventually need to either be shipped elsewhere for disposal, or else we’ll be looking at a new energy-from-waste plant (i.e., we’ll burn our garbage to generate electricity). The latter has been done successfully and safely in Durham Region since 2010, so I’m not worried about the technology of that, though I know there’s a long and disgusting history of burning garbage improperly. Better that, I think, than to truck our garbage to the US, where tipping fees are much cheaper.
The process for determining next steps for our landfill is a long and expensive one. The Environmental Assessment process is expected to take 5-8 years and cost ~$2.5M, and it will probably need to start this year. Our committee will be meeting again in June to discuss next steps in that regard, as well as another important upgrade to our landfill: methane collection.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 23x more potent than carbon dioxide, and the methane released by our landfill accounts for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions from county operations. By 2029 we will be required by federal regulations to be collecting and flaring that methane: by burning it, we turn the methane into carbon dioxide, greatly reducing its greenhouse effect. Unfortunately the amount and quality of methane produced by our dump is not good enough to make bottling it for use elsewhere effective. To collect it we’ll have to insert perforated pipes into the landfill, and keep a steady suction on them to draw out all methane as it is produced by the decaying waste. The project is expected to be another $2-3M, and will also need to start this year if we’re to meet the Jan 1 2029 deadline set by the federal government.
I know it seems like a lot of money to spend on a landfill that will be closed almost as soon as we’re done! But that methane flaring, and the leachate disposal, will need to continue for many years after we’ve stopped adding to the landfill. Once it is closed we will add several feet of clay or other low-permeable soil to the top, which will allow a very small amount of water into the waste so that it will continue to decompose; that continued decomposition means continued methane emissions, and the water flowing through will mean continued leachate disposal. The alternative, which is apparently used in the US, is to put a plastic membrane over the top of the landfill just like the liner beneath it, not allowing water in; but this setup stops the waste from decomposing, turning it into a time bomb as the decomposition will start up again as soon as the plastic cover breaks down, maybe a few hundred years from now. Better to keep decomposing slowly, while the pipes and pumps for taking out the leachate and methane are still there and in good condition. Which is to say, just because we’ve thrown something “away” doesn’t mean we can just leave it there for future people to deal with.