Touring the TOHU recycling complex at St-Michel

This corner of the old quarry and garbage dump in St-Michel is slated to become a pond by 2020. Photo by Misha Warbanski

Every Thursday morning there’s a rush to get the recycling out to the curb. But other than the scramble to throw everything into a flimsy clear-plastic bag (in the Centre-Sud they’ve done away with the green bins), and get it out to the curb in time, I don’t really think about curbside recycling that much. In the city we’re very much disconnected from the garbage we produce. And it makes sense: who wants to deal
with smelly, sticky garbage? And so we design systems that take it all away; out of sight out of mind. This is the kind of attitude that Co-op la maison verte wants to reverse. The co-op is a big promoter of conscious consuming and so this afternoon, in the pouring rain, about a dozen of us boarded a bus to find out just where our recyclables go.

Up the Decarie and east on the 40, the bus pulled into the lot at the TOHU, the recycling and environmental depot in St-Michel. The place was busy, with Montreal city trucks coming and going. A large machine was offloading dumpsters. It’s a busy place — in fact, the centre deals with 25 tonnes of paper and 5 tonnes of glass, plastic and metal every hour, taking in recyclables from the east side of Montreal and part of downtown. There’s also an eco-centre, where Montrealers can bring their dead appliances, computers and other larger objects that don’t fit in the green bin.

Meanwhile, stem spews out of an energy plant that converts natural gas from decomposing old garbage into electricity that is sold to Hydro Quebec and fuels between 6,000 and 12,000 households, as well as the recycling plant itself.

A Bit of History

But the site at St-Michel hasn’t always been this “green”, explained our tour guide Partick. In 1925 the 175 hectare site was a limestone quarry, producing brick and cement. By the 1960s the mine met the water table and couldn’t go any deeper. The City of Montreal started filling it in with residual waste.

Needless to say the people who lived around the quarry-cum-dump weren’t impressed. Faced with the stink, citizens rallied against the City and the company that ran the dump. In 1984 they won their fight. The quarry and the dump were closed.

But closing the dump didn’t do anything about the 40 million tons of garbage already there. A water treatment facility was established to pump out the leachate (the “garbage juice”) for cleaning before pumping it into the sewer system—a practise that still continues today.

The gas produced from the decomposing garbage was another serious problem, especially so close to a residential area. Not only is it smelly, it’s also highly combustible. The hill of garbage is now tapped with hundreds of pipes that channel the gas to the on-site power plant. Sensors around the perimeter monitor air quality.

Inside the Recycling Depot

I wasn’t allowed to take photos inside, and almost everyone was on their lunch break, so the whole production had slowed to a crawl. Still, the huge warehouse was still wheezing and squeeling with continuous fans and conveyor belts. A front-end loader was piling recyclables into a machine that begins the separation process. Magnets pull the metal one way, a fan blows the plastic another and glass bottles are sorted into their various colour. Not everything is automated — some 80 employees earn their living keeping the recyclables moving, including a lot of hand sorting, especially for paper and cardboard. Once sorted, materials are compacted into one-tonne cubes and sold to a company that will process and resurrect them into everything from kayaks to carpet.

One fellow on the tour asks about the famous #6 plastic — the stuff of styrofoam and plastic cutlery. It probably could be recycled, our tour guide explains, but it’s a question of economics. There’s no money in it. It’s so light, you’d need such a huge amount to form a one-tonne block. This gets me thinking about why we recycle. It’s not so much for noble reasons, but it’s because someone realized they can make a buck off the 1/2 tonne of trash every North American throws out in a year.

The Future at St-Michel

It might still smell like methane as our school bus tour winds its way around the perimetre of the old quarry, but there are big plans for the site at St-Michel. It’s already the site of the National Circus School and Cirque du Soleil, as well as their residence buildings. The TOHU — la Cité des arts du cirque — is a museum dedicated to theatre history and also has a 750-seat round theatre to host productions. The recycling depot and eco-centre will stay where they are, but the rest of the area is slowly being converted to a public park, slated for completion by 2020. 800 trees have already been planted and there’s plans for a lake and an amphitheatre carved into the wall of the old quarry. Like Parc Maisonneuve in the East End, which also began its life as a quarry, the site in St-Michel will be a green space for the North End.