Keele Valley Landfill

The Keele Valley Landfill was the largest landfill in Canada and the third largest in North America during its operation. It was the primary landfill site for the City of Toronto and the regional municipalities of York and Durham from 1983 until 2002, and was owned and operated by the City of Toronto. It was located at the intersection of Keele Street and McNaughton Road in Maple, a community in the northeastern part of the City of Vaughan in Ontario.

In 1985, the initial portion of a landfill gas collection system was installed to reduce emissions and associated odours emanating into the nearby community. This has been used to generate electricity, which it has continued to do since the landfill's closing, sufficient to power 20,000 homes.

The facility is registered in the National Pollutant Release Inventory, with site identification number 7371. The site emitted about 314 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases in 2007.

In 2002, the site was identified by the Government of Ontario as an Area of High Aquifer Vulnerability, which would prohibit waste disposal and organic soil conditioning facilities being built or operating there per the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan. Vaughan's Official Plan Amendment 604 (OPA 604) specified that the site would be redeveloped as an open public space.

Read more about Keele Valley Landfill:  Operation, Issues, Closing, Redevelopment

Famous quotes containing the word valley:

    How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!
    Denis Diderot (1713–1784)