You’ll have to pardon most downstream or downwind from the Richmond Landfill near Napanee if they’re not jumping for joy at the latest announcement by Waste Management, owner and operator of the dump there.

The company plans to close, cap and decommission the old landfill — but hopes to build a new one there to take its place.

Waste Management personnel were aware some of us might “focus” on that pesky notion of another landfill where the fight just ended to close one.
It’s a landfill, if approved, that would see garbage dumped at a rate of 400,000 tonnes a year for 20 years — eight million tonnes of garbage in the ground beside the millions of tonnes already there.

“If they’re focusing on the landfill, it’s going to be state-of-the-art. It’s not a 50-year-old landfill we’re talking about here,” said site manager Randy Harris, of Waste Management. “This is going to be brand new, and its going to protect the environment, and we can stand up for that.”

Both Harris and PR spokesman Wes Muir said the issue of fractured limestone and the possible effects a new landfill could have on the water table have been addressed in a recent $1-million study, which is available on the Waste Management website.

Harris said the proposed redevelopment would create 75 jobs, and contribute $1 million in economic benefits to the local economy.

Ian Munro, a Napanee resident, and a member of the Concerned Citizens of Tyendinaga and Environs said he is “quite appalled at the prospect of them making the same mistake they’ve already made by putting yet another dump out there, given everything they’ve done in the past.

“It confirms what we’ve thought about the company for years, that they really don’t care about the environment and the people that live here, that they really only care about their own interests.

“I’m expecting another decade-long discussion of whether we should put more garbage on a site that the Environmental

Commissioner of Ontario says is possibly the worst site in Ontario. It’s the wrong place to put garbage.”

We agree and 75 jobs at a landfill and a supposed $1 million in local economic spinoff don’t offset, in our books, the centuries-long legacy of adding another 400,000 tonnes of garbage to the fractured limestone that makes up much of the overburden to the aquifer in this region.