Professor Emeritus and Senior Policy Fellow University of Delaware
Solid waste management (SWM) – landfills, use of landfill gas (LFG), waste-to-energy (WTE) and, clean material recovery – has critically been evolved in the U.S. and Canada. The City of New York was the first to start refuse collection and established a recycling center in the late 1890s. The first sanitary landfill was established in 1934 in California, but by the 1960s many open dumps remained. In 1965, the Solid Waste Disposal Act (SWDA) was passed that was the first major legislation governing SWM. In 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) was passed and amended in 1984; the amendments gave U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) to regulate landfills and establish new criteria for landfills, which resulted in 50 % of the existing landfills to close; currently, there are 493-MSW landfills providing landfill gas (LFG) use for 541 projects. Solid waste regulation in Canada is different, where the provincial governments establish regulations and policy for SWM. Currently, Canada has about 2600 open landfills and 10,000 closed landfills. Newfoundland Labrador and the northern territories still have some open dumps. In 1993, 70% of the municipalities had recycling programs. The City of Toronto has a long history of SWM; the city started garbage collection in 1834, opened their first incinerator in 1890, started curbside recycling in 1987 and the, current operations include two anaerobic digesters to process organic MSW and, a clean materials recovery facility. The SWM practices and regulatory advancement in the US and Canada are detailed in this work.
