When Con-Strada Aggregates first set up shop on the outskirts of Markham along Highway 407 in 2002, its neighbours were little more than factories, shopping malls and empty lots.
Now, the industrial facility is increasingly surrounded by new condos and houses — and the newcomers are calling for Con-Strada to leave.
“The community today in 2011 is quite different to that in 2002, where there was little residential and major commercial development around the aggregate recycling facility,” says a 700-signature petition by the Markham Alliance for Clean Air, an anti-Con-Strada coalition of local businesses and residents. The petition was presented to Markham town council on Tuesday night.
The alliance’s leader, James Chang, lives in a nearby condo built in 2006. For months, his neighbours knew nothing of Con-Strada’s existence, but soon noticed their windows becoming caked in brown dust from the facility. Mr. Chang asserts that the community is being coated in a layer of potentially hazardous dust. “In restaurants across from Con-Strada, dust could be travelling into the kitchens where they’re cooking lunches and dinners — that is really, really disturbing,” Mr. Chang says.
Con-Strada was only supposed to be temporary.
“The aggregate recycling facility would not be an appropriate use over the long term,” read a city statement in 2002. Three years ago, the company’s bylaw to operate expired, and attempts to obtain a long-term licence have failed. “Since 2008, Con-Strada Aggregates have been operating illegally,” Mr. Chang says.
Grant Horan, a controller with Con-Strada Aggregates, maintains he has “no idea” where they got the idea that Con-Strada is operating illegally. “It’s a chosen few who find the site as something they don’t want, but from my own opinion, these facilities are required,” Mr. Horan says. “We have to store [aggregates] somewhere.”
It is a sentiment shared across the industrial sector. As Toronto-area housing developments expand deeper into rural and industrial areas, once-isolated industries are increasingly finding themselves at odds with residential newcomers.
For 20 years, Karl Molcar ran his Etobicoke insulation business in relative peace beside a four-acre compound owned by a Protestant church. Each day, Mr. Molcar’s Climatizer Insulation processes up to 100 tonnes of recycled Toronto paper and turns it into insulation, mulch and specialty fibres. With much of the paper arriving soaked in various garbage juices, it can be a smelly process.
“It’s not dangerous or anything. Just sometimes it smells,” Mr. Molcar says.
Recently, the congregation announced plans to build a one-room schoolhouse directly alongside Climatizer’s loading dock, an area often filled with idling semi trucks. Mr. Molcar worries it is only a matter of time before church members get tired of sending their kids to school next to an insulation factory and try to shut him down. “It’s an industrial park.I don’t see it as a place for kids to play,” he says.
Look before you buy, advises Moreen Miller, president of the Ontario Stone, Sand and Gravel Association (OSSGA).
“People purchase lands, and they don’t realize that they’re right next to an industrial facility,” she says. “There are still many people who don’t take a drive around the neighbourhood before buying a home.”
Stone, sand and gravel companies, especially, often find themselves at the front lines of industrial/residential conflict. Since aggregate facilities exist almost solely to serve local needs, they are often stationed close to residential areas. Rocks and sands are simply too heavy to ship long distances.
“If every load of aggregate used in Ontario had to travel one extra kilometre to the jobsite, an extra 2.5 million litres of fossil fuel would be consumed annually,” reads theholestory.ca, a website funded by the OSSGA.
Each year, Ontarians consume an average of 14 tons of aggregate each — the weight equivalent of a 20 metre-high stack of Honda Civics. The sprawling Toronto region is particularly aggregate-hungry, eating up more than 40% of Ontario’s total production. In an ironic twist, aggregate companies have often helped build the condos and subdivisions that now oppose them.
The OSSGA maintains a mantra of peaceful coexistence.
“We fully believe they can work side by side if everybody just gets it right at the beginning,” Ms. Miller says. Industrial companies can shift their schedules and put up walls to block noise and dust. In
exchange, residents can outfit their neighbourhoods with appropriate buffers.
The Region of Peel, for instance, sets out strict zoning limits to keep homes buffered from rock and gravel quarries. The region’s website even includes downloadable maps of mineral-rich areas that may be turned into aggregate quarries in the future.
Toronto, on the other hand, has a strong penchant for forcing loud or dirty industries deep into the countryside. Until the 1990s, Torontonians sent their waste to local landfills. Now, every mattress, broken TV and baby diaper collected within city limits is shipped 200 kilometres southwest to a city-owned dump south of London. The past few years have seen a round of Toronto-area dumps, power plants and wind turbines vigorously shot down by citizen’s groups.
“Municipal plans tend to focus on attractive development, and there’s less and less opportunity for heavy industrial — it’s not as welcome as it once was,” says Glenn Miller, vice-president of education and research at the Canadian Urban Institute.
He notes that local governments will sometimes “passive aggressively” approve housing complexes on rich sources of rock in order to block any future development of an aggregate facility.
Environmental groups and aggregate companies will often spend thousands of dollars battling one another in Ontario Municipal Board hearings.
But there may be hope yet for peaceful coexistence. On June 1, industry and environmental representatives joined together to form Socially and Environmentally Responsible Aggregate, a Toronto-based group devoted to finding ways to dig up sand and gravel without alienating the surrounding neighbourhood. Says Nicholas Schulz, a spokesman for the group: “They recognized a need to find a new way forward, because really, both sides were quite frustrated at the way things were working.”
National Post
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