It strikes me as somewhat suspicious that Waste Management (WM) starts talking about the possibility of a power-generating incinerator as an alternative to expanding the Carp Road landfill just in time to share the spotlight with Rod Bryden's Plasco Energy venture.

Both companies are offering technologies to consume garbage, rather than bury it, with electricity generation a beneficial byproduct. WM's Wheelabrator burns garbage at almost 1,400 degrees Celsius, which generates pressurized steam used to drive electric turbines. There is a residual ash that must still be buried in a landfill and greenhouse gas emissions that must be reduced through a series of scrubbers and filters.

Over at the Trail Road facility near Barrhaven, Plasco Energy Group is finally firing up its pilot plant that uses a gasification process to reduce garbage into a fuel gas that can be used to generate electricity. Emissions from the process are minimal, far better than the requirements of the province's emission standards, claims Mr. Bryden. The resulting hard waste is an inert glass-like material that can be used for construction. A small amount of sulphur is also a byproduct, as well as about 1.3 kilograms of heavy metals per tonne of garbage that must still be disposed of in a landfill.

The Wheelabrator, already a proven technology used throughout the U.S., would carry a price tag of about $400 million and use about 400,000 gallons of water a day to generate the steam. The Plasco technology, meanwhile, must still prove itself. Nor do we know how much it would cost to build a full-scale facility comparable in size to the Wheelabrator. Of the two, the Plasco technology is being lauded as superior with the least environmental impact.

When it comes to looking at ways of disposing of garbage in this big broad country of ours, the habit of simply burying it in the ground has been as much the fault of government policy as it has been citizens who still equate incineration with poisonous air pollution. Representatives of WM have made the legitimate case that they haven't made the sales pitch in Canada for the Wheelabrator technology before because there simply wasn't an appetite for it. That may be so, but it seemed to take a lot of public outcry from both local residents and municipal politicians against the expansion of the Carp dump before WM put forth the idea. Instead, the company waited until just before Plasco threw the switch. Coincidence, or strategic planning?

If Plasco delivers on its promise, Ottawa is in the position to become a world-class centre of excellence for environmental technologies. Not because of Plasco alone. Ottawa also boasts another company you may have heard something about – biofuel pioneer Iogen, not to mention other promising companies like Thermal Energy and Triacta Power Technologies. It's all about the power of intellectual property.

Of course, it all begins with the message from city hall. At this point the city is still in the fact-gathering phase of considering some kind of incineration technology. Mayor Larry O'Brien isn't rushing to commit to anything and appears to be conducting appropriate due diligence, as illustrated by his tour of a Wheelabrator facility in Florida at his own expense over Easter weekend.

If council does decide to go forward with some kind of large-scale incineration or waste-conversion facility, does it better serve the economic development of the region to support a home-grown success story, or some big corporate interest from the U.S.? On the other hand, considering the amount of garbage we generate as a society, it will probably need to do both.

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BITTERSWEET IN SMITHS FALLS

The last hope has been dashed for Hershey's Smiths Falls plant and with it goes almost 500 jobs.

It's a traumatic blow for a small town to lose its largest employer. We've already seen the consequences of such a loss to a small rural community in the Winchester area with the closure of the Nestle factory in Chesterville. It was both a responsibility and an obligation of local politicians to meet with Hershey executives in a last minute bid to save the plant. They should be applauded for their efforts.

Of course, the Hershey situation raises the question, did local politicians ever go to such lengths to save jobs during the tech wreck? In less than two years, upwards of 30,000 local jobs were cut by Alcatel, JDS Uniphase and Nortel Networks alone. Where were the politicians then? Why didn't they consider these jobs, the livelihoods of these people, as important? These were, for the most part, high income earners who generated a lot of tax revenue for government and spent a lot of money in the community, at least, while they were employed. Perhaps it was just a matter of timing. There just wasn't the same photo op then as there is now with elections 1ooming on the horizon.