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 at Compliance Solutions Canada, a Nimonik partner

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. Continue reading…

China stole the show today at the the UN summit on climate change by stating its plans to invest massively in energy-saving technology and nuclear power. Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, also pledged to “cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by a notable margin by 2020.” Pretty vague still, and it’s worth remembering that these amount to a commitment to reduce China’s energy intensity – not emission cuts per se. But in the lead up to Copenhagen (and the upcoming debate in the U.S. about passing climate change legislation), it is promising news nonetheless.

We just put together a short video that tries to explain the new remediation certificates in Alberta, please leave your comment bellow. Much more information on the new requirements is available at www.nimonikapp.ca

While leaders have the power to change things, they rarely do. How do you make world leaders act? They are bogged down by political considerations, powerful lobbies, historical issues and gigantic bureaucracies with entrenched interests. To break the deadlock, the UN is planning on mixing things up at the upcoming Copenhagen climate change conference (Guardian Article). One interesting idea is to strip the leaders of the attachés, assistants, and entourage and place them at a table with the leaders of countries their pollution is affecting most. In effect, they hope to strip the leaders of their protective bubble and return them to a more natural state where they might see the impact of their decisions in the eyes of others. From the Guardian article,

The leaders will also lunch with environmental activists and chief executives of corporations who have been pressing their governments for action. At dinner, the leaders of the biggest polluting countries will dine with the leaders of Bangladesh, Kiribati and Costa Rica – which are among the primary victims of climate change.

By the end of the day, the rationale goes, the leaders will be imbued with a new sense of purpose. Leaders of rich countries will have been galvanised to take on the big emissions cuts – 25-40% over the next decade, 80% by 2050 – needed to keep temperatures from rising more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels, the temperature set by science to avoid the most calamitous effects of climate change.

Will be interesting to see if these tactics have any effect. These noble ideas, that a few individuals can decide the fate of the world reminds me of a movie where a young lady infiltrates the G8 meeting and convinces the leaders to take a stance on poverty. She is promptly thrown out, but they do sign a more serious commitment to poverty alleviation. Speech on Millennium Poverty Goals:

Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, will be hosting the UN-sponsored global climate treaty negotiations, to be held in Copenhagen in December. In the coming months, expect her to get a lot of media attention. The New York Times profiles her here.