Ontario Gets Even Tougher On Hazardous and General Waste

Ontario Gets Even Tougher On Hazardous and General Waste
Manufacturers, trucking companies and disposal sites handling waste must ensure that they don’t harm human health and safety or the environment. If they don’t, they could see life through an iron curtain.
- By Isaac Rudik

When it comes to insisting that businesses properly store and dispose of hazardous and other wastes, Ontario’s Ministry of Environment isn’t fooling around.

Ian Herd, apparently the sole owner of a numbered Ontario corporation, failed to properly clean up soil-contaminated property he purchased near St. Catherine’s after being ordered to do so by the Ministry of Environment. MOE, not only took him to court to enforce the order but then prosecuted him criminally when he kept ignoring the directive. It resulted in Herd being sentenced to six months jail time. It took the province more than three years to nail him but the ministry’s investigators chased after Herd with the tenacity of a nasty terrier sniffing a meaty bone.

Hazardous waste covers a broad range of materials from manufacturing residues such as acids, contaminated sludge and complex chemicals to biomedical wastes from hospitals, used photo finishing chemicals and unused cleaning products from homes along with discarded batteries. They require special handling to reduce harming both human health and the environment.
Manufacturers, trucking companies and disposal sites handling hazardous waste must ensure that they store, transport, treat and dispose of these products so as not to harm human safety or the environment. If they don’t, they could end behind bars, sharing a cell with Ian Herd.

Handling With Kid Gloves

The problem with hazardous waste is that even a slight mistake can create a major problem. For example, used oil from one oil change can contaminate more than 3.7-million litres of fresh water – enough to supply 50 people for a year.

Waste may be "hazardous" for many different reasons:

• Acute waste hazards are corrosive, ignitable, infectious, reactive and toxic.
• Chronic hazards will harm human health or the environment over repeated exposure and long periods of time.

Due to their inherently hazardous nature, these wastes must be handled or disposed of with kid gloves, so to speak, to prevent harming health, safety and the environment.

If hazardous products are improperly dumped in the sink, yard or storm drain, or sent to a landfill, they can poison drinking water, damage sewage treatment plants, contaminate soil and air, and poison aquatic life in our lakes and rivers.

Inexpensive Solutions To Costly Problems

Fortunately, economical products are available. A company called Drum-Stor offers several possible solutions.

Its 12-gauge, mild steel, non-combustible containment pan is powder coated for long life. Designed to use inside a building, containment pans will not melt from fire, removing the danger of a pool fire on the shop floor which could endanger lives and the safety of employees as well as the emergency response personnel. It is available in two and four drum sizes. Better still, Drum Stor units can be used outside, as well, next to an industrial building.

The product is suitable for:

• Storage;
• Dispensing;
• Transfer; and
• Collection.

Products such as these offer a wide range of solutions to prevent incurring the high cost of lawyers, professional consultants, clean-up costs, and court and ministry orders. Add in potential fines, penalties and surcharges to clean up the environment, and a container system is like lunch money by comparison.







Isaac Rudik is a compliance consultant with Compliance Solutions Canada Inc. (www.compliancesolutionscanada.com), Canada’s largest provider of health, safety and environmental compliance solutions to industrial, institutional and government facilities.

E-mail Isaac at irudik@csc-inc.ca or phone him at 905-761-5354.