PHOTOGRAPH BY BLAIR GABLE/ GETSTOCK
Allan Tipping, a 44-year-old auto mechanic who lives on the southern edge of London, Ont., had just arrived home from a feast of barbecued ribs one night last fall when he climbed out of his truck and into a fetid cloud of stink, so shocking to the system, he says, he was immediately sick in his driveway. The stench, says Tipping, emanated from the nearby Orgaworld composting plant, which began processing thousands of tons of green bin refuse from Toronto, York Region and St. Thomas, Ont., in 2007—the same year it also started generating smell complaints from neighbours, at this point close to 1,000 in as many days of operation.
Residents struggle to describe the odour—“it smells like Orgaworld,” says John Pieterson, a 56-year-old mail carrier—but when pressed reach for analogues like “vomit” or a “rotting corpse.” Barbecues on the back porch? Not in this neighbourhood. The locals speak of checking the way the wind is blowing before inviting guests, and the winds of southern Ontario are fickle.
To help remove that element of subjectivity so essential to all matters smell-related, the Ministry of the Environment has for the past few years dispatched field officers around the facility for periodic “360-degree observations.” They quickly learned how to pick up its unique signature. “These are people who go to sewage plants and, although this may not sound pleasant, they understand what they’re smelling,” says Kanina Blanchard, London district manager for the ministry. “And Orgaworld has a very distinct odour.”
Its neighbours protest that Orgaworld, a Dutch company bought by Britain’s Shanks Group in 2007, promised odour-free composting, and blame the rancid atmosphere they say spews from the plant’s 40-m stack on the diapers, pet feces and plastic bags it handles alongside kitchen scraps and garden clippings. Predictably, residents bemoan the hit to their property values.
The misadventure represents just the latest in a string of clashes between composting outfits and their neighbours, often in smaller blue-collar towns where taking garbage from big urban centres is slowly developing into good business. Orgaworld is so far fighting for crumbs (just $13 million in revenue in Canada this year), but it has invested over $50 million for a toehold here, banking on a Canadian organics boom. Orgaworld plans to do a lot more, no matter how bad it stinks—indeed, the smellier the waste, the more money it stands to make.
Such is the problem in London that, last week, the ministry stepped in to suggest that Orgaworld shut down awhile. The company agreed, calling the voluntary closure a welcome chance to retool. “We have been upgrading the site and now we’ve said, ‘Okay, let’s deal with it, finally,’ ” says Ward Janssens, Orgaworld’s manager of international operations, who argues the trouble stems in part from the fact that London is the company’s first North American experience, and poses different challenges than its operations in the U.K. and the Netherlands. “By nature you have more waste, per capita, and the waste is more contaminated by plastics,” he says.
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