Hamilton Landfill Scouting

I have been looking into the history of waste disposal in Hamilton, and found an interesting pattern. As with most urban areas, wetlands were targeted as ideal landfill sites because they land could be reclaimed once filled with garbage. Three of the four landfills within Hamilton proper were within the Red Hill Creek watershed. The valley was once the only remaining greenbelt between Stoney Creek and Hamilton; it now hosts a four-lane expressway connecting the Lincoln Alexander Parkway ("the Linc") on the escarpment and the QEW at the lake shore. At the top of the escarpment is the Upper Ottawa Street landfill, near the interchange between the Linc and the Red Hill Valley Expressway. At the delta of the creek, where it feeds into the Hamilton harbour, lie the Rennie Street and Brampton Street landfill sites. All three sites have been closed for over 20 years.

The Red Hill Valley Regional Map

The Regional Map shows the closed landfills that Hamilton-Wentworth is responsible for, as well as their relation to the Red Hill Valley Watershed. Also noted are the last remaining operable landfill, the nearest recycling facilities, and the Woodward Ave Water Treatment Plant.
The following images were taken of the landfills as best as I could access them without special permission. This was mostly just a site visit to get to know the places and their surroundings, I'm not trying to be too thorough or critical as of yet. I suspect that in the following trips I will request more access and begin dreaming up what these places could be.
For now I imagine a community recycling plant, gravity-fed, perched on the side of the dormant landfill site at the Upper Ottawa Landfill. There will have to be extensive landscape and ecosystem investigations in the valley since the watershed is so extensively effected by the site. For now, here's the photos:
 

Upper Ottawa Street Landfill from the Linc overpass

Red Hill Creek Culvert in the Upper Ottawa Street Landfill

Even the snails are evacuating the landfill!

An abandoned house on Stone Church Road at Upper Ottawa Street

Woodward Avenue Water Treatment Plant

The abandoned rail spur at the Woodward Street Water Treatment Plant

Considering the creek's origin and delta are both closed landfills, this seems appropriate

This snail is headed up to escape the landfill!

Mysterious blue outlets in the Brampton Street Landfill site- Methane?

A blue outlet, a creek, a forest, and the bicyclists enjoying a garbage mound.

What was that about not playing in the creek?

The cap on the mound seems to have been transgressed by escaping garbage.

Garbage underfoot in the Brampton Street Landfill

A lovely wetland in the distance, bordered by the highway and the landfill in the foreground

By far the most brave snail yet. He was on the pedestrian overpass handrail at least 40' above grade

Goosenecks belie the "public parkland" between the Rennie and Brampton Street Landfills. The creek is behind me.

Spending our resources, keeping the change

The more that I concern myself with resources using an accounting metaphor, the more I think about the nature of money compared to how we treat our resources.

There is a limited quantity of money printed by any governing body in order to maintain the value of the cash itself. So when you spend a bill, it becomes the possession of the store, which in turn returns it to the bank, which is promised to you through a paycheck at the end of the week. You might never see the same bill twice, but you can be assured that money is cycled through the system and not just recklessly reprinted every time. Money is in a closed-loop system, and is only replaced when it cannot be used anymore.

We need to imagine our resources like this. They don't just go away once we've used them. We have to put them into a closed-loop where we can extract the useful components out of the waste product to be reused in the same manner that the original product was used for. Recycling a plastic bottle into a rug has limited uses. The value of our resources is diminished because we just get more when we need it. Nobody sees the value in a used piece of paper when we can just make more new ones at the mill. 

We're creating a problem of value. If we placed more value on our resources, we would produce less. Instead we would cycle it through the loop until it can no longer function and THEN and only THEN can we break it down into its components to be re-distributed into the cycle. This is similar to the way that we wash and reuse beer bottles several times before they are melted down and remade into the same beer bottles anew. The glass industry gets it, but what is everyone else doing?

What money we spend comes back to us. What we throw out, must come back to us. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart propose in "Cradle to Cradle": Waste equals food.

How much of the planet did you spend today?