Ottawa's Garbage Crisis: Is There a Smarter Way Forward?
The city is weighing landfill vs. incineration, but a Canadian startup is proposing a radical third option—if councillors are brave enough to try it.
Ottawa's garbage problem is real, and city council faces an unglamorous choice: bury it or burn it. The city bought a landfill site near Carlsbad Springs earlier this year, solving the "where" question. But the "how"—landfill or incinerator—remains open, and the options feel equally dated.
Enter NH3, an Ottawa-based company proposing something different. Instead of combustion, the firm uses a high-temperature thermochemical process called anaerobic decarbonization to break garbage down into hydrogen—a compound already used in oil refining, fertilizer production, and methanol manufacturing. The waste is processed in a closed chamber with zero emissions, theoretically sidestepping incineration's air-quality concerns.
The economics are compelling, too. An NH3 system costs $26 million USD; the city would need four to six linked units to handle Ottawa's residential waste. By comparison, city staff estimate an incinerator would run between $497 million and $862 million. The company operates similar systems in Denmark, Florida, and the UK, suggesting some track record exists.
But here's the catch: this technology has never been operated at commercial scale in North America. A pilot project in Ottawa would be the first real-world test—a risk that echoes Ottawa's painful history with Plasco, an ambitious plasma-gasification venture that launched in 2006 with much promise and crashed by 2015 under undercapitalization and technical failure.
City council's waste-management plan calls for "proven" technology, code for established methods. The question, then, becomes: which risk is greater—trying something new and potentially superior, or defaulting to landfill because it's familiar? The answer will define how Ottawa manages its garbage for the next three decades.