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Got garbage?:
Andre Lafleche wants it Moose Creek landfill operator will gladly take Ottawa's excess refuse
Patrick Dare, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Monday, April 10, 2006

Andre Lafleche is ready for Ottawa's trash. Cruising through his big landfill site in Moose Creek, with mud flying from his SUV, Mr. Lafleche is very much the confident problem solver for one of Ontario's hottest municipal issues: What to do with all the garbage?

Toronto is shipping garbage to Michigan, but could soon find that door closed. Ottawa is in the midst of a big fight over the proposed expansion of Waste Management of Canada's mountain of garbage on Carp Road. Millions of dollars are being spent each month trying to find new waste-handling solutions in Ontario. Mr. Lafleche's answer is to bring at least some of Ontario's trash to his site at Moose Creek, east of Ottawa.

Lafleche Environmental, his landfill company, already has room under its licence from the Ontario government to handle the additional garbage load, which has a limit of 200,000 tonnes a year. But within three months, Mr. Lafleche is expecting the Ministry of the Environment to approve another 100,000 tonnes of garbage each year, bringing the licence to 300,000 tonnes.

That leaves plenty of room for garbage from Ottawa's east end, certainly 50,000 tonnes a year and perhaps up to 100,000 tonnes.

Mr. Lafleche sees great opportunity where others see nothing more than a green garbage bag at the end of the drive, or a hall full of voters fuming at the proposed enlargement of an already smelly landfill that is defining the western landscape of Ottawa.

For years Ottawa has followed a policy of dealing with its garbage within its own borders. But that may be changing. Recently Mr. Lafleche met with two of Ottawa's senior waste managers. He sent the city a proposal.

"Ottawa's been growing so fast. I sense openness," says the gregarious businessman in the leather jacket.

The City of Ottawa collects 319,000 tonnes of residential waste each year, diverts 34 per cent of it and dumps the rest in landfills. But there's growing opposition to expanding those landfills. An estimated 2,000 people packed a school gym for a meeting in Stittsville recently over the proposed doubling of the size of the Waste Management landfill on Carp Road.

The Lafleche operation is one of the few new landfills around. Municipalities and companies spend millions of dollars to start new landfill sites that often don't make it past the study stage. It took years for Mr. Lafleche to get his approvals in place and the landfill going. But Andre Lafleche is a very determined man with a wide-ranging life experience.

He was raised in nearby Casselman, survived a serious childhood illness, dropped out of high school, worked in cheese factories, mines and in construction, before getting into the garbage business, managing a landfill near Montreal.

Years ago, he figured the site at Moose Creek was a great spot for a centre to handle waste, so close to Highway 417. He was intrigued by the waste-handling technologies being used in Europe.

For some time he worked with the waste company BFI on the project, at one stage selling the project to the company, then buying it back when the company needed to shed projects. By January 2001, the garbage was rolling in.

Mr. Lafleche has a boundless enthusiasm for finding ways to turn different streams of garbage into things that are useful.

Walk around his landfill and you can find yourself treading on spongy cover, made of shredded tires. Using the old tires replaces stone cover for the landfill. He is licensed to handle as much as 3.5 million tires a year and takes in as much as 10,000 a day.

He will begin collecting methane gas in the landfill later this year, which he will eventually use to generate power with a turbine, and sell it into the provincial power grid. He's speeding up the process of garbage decomposition into methane gas by recirculating contaminated water through the garbage. The power production could reach 10 megawatts.

He wants to cover sections of landfill with compost and grass sod, and build special digesters to handle farm and septic waste, and turn it into fertilizer. He's planning to use excess heat from the power-generation project to run greenhouses. He's planning to install solar panels to power his new office building. And he is looking into new ways to process and reuse old plastic.

The land is a former wetland that was drained and is comprised of two important things: peat moss and clay. The peat is being hauled out of the ground, bagged and sold in hardware stores. The clay under the peat is so thick -- up to 18 metres in places -- that it will protect surrounding land from the contaminated rainwater from the landfill.

When you arrive at the site, it hardly looks like a landfill because the slope of garbage doesn't reach the tree line. The landfill is being worked in sections and won't rise above 15 metres. Unlike the Carp Road landfill, the one at Moose Creek isn't an eyesore and the smell is not too bad.

There are no seagulls. Staff at the landfill have been scaring them off with starters' pistols since Day 1. "Once they start nesting, you're done," says Mr. Lafleche. "We hound them."

Mr. Lafleche acknowledges that his landfill has seen some opposition among neighbours, but the objections haven't been strong enough to block any approvals he needed.

One of Mr. Lafleche's important decisions was to buy enough land so that residential neighbours aren't complaining about his business. In all, Mr. Lafleche has about 500 acres, and options on hundreds more nearby. The neighbours are mostly big farms and rural businesses. The Lafleche land is roughly one kilometre by two kilometres.

Andre Lafleche is ready for Ottawa's trash. Cruising through his big landfill site in Moose Creek, with mud flying from his SUV, Mr. Lafleche is very much the confident problem solver for one of Ontario's hottest municipal issues: What to do with all the garbage?

Toronto is shipping garbage to Michigan, but could soon find that door closed. Ottawa is in the midst of a big fight over the proposed expansion of Waste Management of Canada's mountain of garbage on Carp Road. Millions of dollars are being spent each month trying to find new waste-handling solutions in Ontario. Mr. Lafleche's answer is to bring at least some of Ontario's trash to his site at Moose Creek, east of Ottawa.

Lafleche Environmental, his landfill company, already has room under its licence from the Ontario government to handle the additional garbage load, which has a limit of 200,000 tonnes a year. But within three months, Mr. Lafleche is expecting the Ministry of the Environment to approve another 100,000 tonnes of garbage each year, bringing the licence to 300,000 tonnes.

That leaves plenty of room for garbage from Ottawa's east end, certainly 50,000 tonnes a year and perhaps up to 100,000 tonnes.

Mr. Lafleche sees great opportunity where others see nothing more than a green garbage bag at the end of the drive, or a hall full of voters fuming at the proposed enlargement of an already smelly landfill that is defining the western landscape of Ottawa.

For years Ottawa has followed a policy of dealing with its garbage within its own borders. But that may be changing. Recently Mr. Lafleche met with two of Ottawa's senior waste managers. He sent the city a proposal.

"Ottawa's been growing so fast. I sense openness," says the gregarious businessman in the leather jacket.

The City of Ottawa collects 319,000 tonnes of residential waste each year, diverts 34 per cent of it and dumps the rest in landfills. But there's growing opposition to expanding those landfills. An estimated 2,000 people packed a school gym for a meeting in Stittsville recently over the proposed doubling of the size of the Waste Management landfill on Carp Road.

The Lafleche operation is one of the few new landfills around. Municipalities and companies spend millions of dollars to start new landfill sites that often don't make it past the study stage. It took years for Mr. Lafleche to get his approvals in place and the landfill going. But Andre Lafleche is a very determined man with a wide-ranging life experience.

He was raised in nearby Casselman, survived a serious childhood illness, dropped out of high school, worked in cheese factories, mines and in construction, before getting into the garbage business, managing a landfill near Montreal.

Years ago, he figured the site at Moose Creek was a great spot for a centre to handle waste, so close to Highway 417. He was intrigued by the waste-handling technologies being used in Europe.

For some time he worked with the waste company BFI on the project, at one stage selling the project to the company, then buying it back when the company needed to shed projects. By January 2001, the garbage was rolling in.

"We're quite happy with it," says Dennis Fife, mayor of North Stormont Township. "We've had quite good reception so far."

The startup of Lafleche has actually been a big help to the township. It's been able to close its own dump, saving money and ending the worry over whether the garbage is being disposed of safely. The small rural municipality gets $1 from Lafleche for each tonne dumped, the most recent cheque being for $144,000. If the landfill's licence is increased to 300,000 tonnes, the township would get as much as $300,000 in a year, which would amount to about 20 per cent of the municipality's entire revenue. Mr. Lafleche has also made generous donations for the preservation of the Alfred Bog.

The landfill already takes about 11,000 tonnes a year of commercial garbage from Ottawa each year, some of the trash that isn't collected by the city in its residential collection. It also takes up to 40,000 tonnes of garbage from Toronto. Municipalities that sign long-term contracts with Lafleche are paying about $50 a tonne to dump garbage there.

The municipality of North Stormont only generates 1,400 tonnes of garbage for the landfill each year. Mr. LaFleche says that if he didn't take in garbage from other municipalities such as Ottawa, the counties of Prescott-Russell, and Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, wouldn't have a state-of-the-art landfill.

Neighbouring North Glengarry Township has a 20-year contract with Lafleche and Mayor Bill Franklin says he'd be happy to have the landfill in his own municipality. His township's alternative, to build a new landfill, would have cost an estimated $12 million.

Mr. Franklin met with Mr. Lafleche on Thursday to see if they can do more business. The municipality's recycling operation is small and the township wants to join with others to get a bigger operation going, perhaps at Lafleche's site. Mr. Franklin says that if anyone can make a financial go of recycling, it's Mr. Lafleche.

Reaction among some Ottawa councillors to the growing capacity of the Lafleche landfill is positive.

Councillor Janet Stavinga, who represents Stittsville residents and is fighting the proposed doubling of the Carp Road landfill, says she is impressed with the way that Lafleche Environmental is viewing garbage: various streams of materials that can be treated and used for something new, rather than simply burying it in a smelly mountain.

Councillor Peter Hume, chairman of the city's planning and environment committee, says the city will want to be careful about exporting huge quantities of garbage outside of its own borders, especially when the city doesn't want lots of waste from other cities and towns in Ontario coming to Ottawa. But he says he is impressed with Mr. Lafleche's landfill and it makes sense to use this landfill to serve Ottawa's eastern growth neighbourhoods.

"Securing landfill space on your borders is a strategically good idea," says Mr. Hume.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2006