The Pearson Eco-Business Zone is not only home to Canada's busiest airport, it's also the country's largest employment area, hosting some 12,500 businesses and more than 355,000 employees.
But most Ontarians would be hard-pressed to identify the Pearson Eco-Business Zone's borders. That's because it didn't exist until three and a half years ago. At least not in any formal way.
The borders of the zone, which compromises 12,000 hectares of industrial and commercial land around and including Pearson airport, were drawn in 2009 when a group of business leaders in the area joined forces to launch
Partners in Project Green (PPG). PPG promotes sustainable business practices in the Pearson airport area with the goal of creating an internationally-recognized eco-business zone in Southern Ontario.
The organization's newest project is a business-to-business waste exchange program.
Chris Rickett, senior project manager at Partners in Project Green (PPG), says that right from the start of PPG, waste management issues were "continuously identified [as a major priority] by the business community in the area." That’s why PPG recently partnered up with the Quebec-based
Centre de Transfert Technologique en Écologie Industrielle (CTTEI), an organization dedicated to by-product exchange.
"CTTEI developed a web-based software that basically allows us put a company's inputs and their outputs into the system and as we build that database, it will begin to identify potential waste synergy opportunities," says Rickett. "Ultimately if it looks like something that makes sense from a material standpoint, but also from an economic standpoint, we basically hand it over to the companies to figure out what that business relationship will look like."
The project is still in its nascent stages—the invitation letters to business were sent out just a few weeks ago—but Rickett and his team have targeted about 400 companies in the area that would be right for the program's first wave.
While this is a new program, Rickett says, these kind of waste-exchanges are already happening.
"We work with a lot of furniture manufacturers and a byproduct that a number of them have is fabric," he says, "but they didn't individually have enough to entice a hauler to take it off at no cost. We ended up connecting four furniture manufacturers, who were actually all competitors, but when they put their resources together they had enough to send it off. Haulers are now picking it up and it's being used for things like the inside of futon mattresses.... Before, all of that would have gone to landfill.”
The CTTEI computer system allows PPG to continue to foster these kinds of waste-exchange programs in more systematic way and at a significantly larger scale. The hope is that the data collected will not only help PPG identify the ways in which current business can begin to reduce waste, but also help them to inform future policy.
"There’s no real data on industrial or commercial waste in the province," says Rickett. "We don't know where it's going or how much there is because it's all basically handled by private haulers. But from the research we've done, we figure about 80 per cent of the waste in the airport area is going to landfill.... So we really see this as a tool to get a handle on what those waste flows are in the airport area so we can better inform potential future policy decisions and regulatory decisions."
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Chris Rickett, Senior Project Manager, Partners in Project Green