Addressing a breakfast meeting of Westmount's Healthy City Project last Tuesday, Simon Naylor, an administrator with industrial composter GSI Environment, said the skyrocketing cost of waste landfills is creating a multi-million dollar market for alternatives like composting.

Quebec-based GSI, which started out 20 years ago as a pilot project, expects to do more than $100 million in business next year as the largest organic waste management company in Canada. The company manages about one million tonnes of organic waste annually, converting it into compost which is sold commercially.

Naylor said a provincial goal for diverting organic material from the waste stream into composting — set at 25 per cent by late next year — is unlikely to be met, since the means to administer it haven't been created. He lamented the emphasis that is being placed on recycling in the overall approach by government authorities to waste management.

"When you landfill organic material, it decomposes and it creates lots of biogases and odours and leeching problems in the underground water," he said. "If I was the minister of the environment … I would have axed my priority on composting."

According to Naylor, GSI is anticipating major growth. ONCAP, a private equity fund which is a subsidiary of the Toronto-based Onex Corp., controls 65 per cent of the stock of Environmental Management Solutions, GSI's parent company. Onex expects EMS's value to double in five years. Former Ontario premier Mike Harris chairs EMS's board of directors. Last month, EMS/GSI signed a five-year, $21 million composting services contract with the City of Toronto, Canada's biggest waste generator.

Despite the promising outlook, EMS/GSI's seven processing sites are all in Quebec. While the company's corporate headquarters are in Burlington, Ont. and they would like to open three sites in that province, resistance is being encountered from a number of municipalities. The Ontario environment ministry is also refusing to issue permits for composting centres.

As a result, Ontario's organic waste gets trucked to Quebec. "We are very close to a deal," said Naylor, adding that GSI has the land for the sites, but that many residents of suburbs in the greater Toronto area are concerned about odours given off by industrial composting operations.

Westmount city councillor George Bowser, who chairs the Public Works Committee and attended the HCP meeting, acknowledged that the smell of composting is an unresolved problem. "That would make it difficult for the City of Westmount to have its own composting site," he said.

Naylor said that the odour an industrial composting site gives off isn't all that bad. He described it as having a smell similar to that of wood bark. "Compost really smells like a farm; you feel like you're in the country," he said. "When people complain about the smell, very often it's because they're citizens who are not used to living close to nature."