ap photo Citizens and politicians protest eastern Michigan landfills taking in a weekly 15,000 tons of exported Canadian trash.

Trash in a can on the curb along a Toronto street is emptied into a garbage truck and driven away.

All the way to Michigan.

Canada’s largest city is exporting more garbage across the border than ever, a practice protected by the Constitution and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Michigan politicians are mounting a new round of challenges, but the truckloads of trash streaming across the Blue Water Bridge at Port Huron won’t stop anytime soon.

“If the Canadians would have us believe they are the environmental protectors of North America, this isn’t a very good example,” said state House Majority Floor Leader Bruce Patterson, R-Canton Township.

Patterson’s district includes the Carleton Farms landfill near the hamlet of Waltz, 25 miles southwest of Detroit. Since Jan. 1, at least 30 trucks have dumped some 1,000 tons of garbage there every weekday after completing the 250-mile trip from Toronto.

Toronto will pay about $9.7 million to landfill owner Republic Services Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to bury more than 300,000 tons of garbage this year, said Matt Neely, a company administrator.

“We’re a business, and we want to operate at full capacity,” said Neely, whose company won the five-year contract after Toronto scrapped plans to ship city trash by rail to an abandoned mine in northern Ontario.

“We look at waste disposal as a regional issue,” Neely said. “The environmental issues don’t recognize political borders.”

Not if Patterson and Michigan politicians ranging from Republican Gov. John Engler to Democratic U.S. Rep. John Dingell can do anything about it.

Environmentalists have long accused Engler of ignoring, if not encouraging, the importation of trash to Michigan. But he wrote to Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman on Feb. 6, asking him and the City Council to reconsider using Carleton Farms.

U.S. Rep. David Bonior, D-Mt. Clemens, whose district includes a 50-mile stretch of the Toronto-to-Waltz route, wrote to Lastman the same day, concluding, “Michigan is not a ‘dumping ground’ for other countries—our land is not for sale.”

The governor’s letter produced “a verbal, not-so-nice response from the mayor,” Engler spokesman John Truscott said.

Lastman’s spokesman, Simon Dwyer, did not return several telephone calls.

Toronto also is in the third year of a five-year contract in which it ships about 495,000 tons of garbage a year to a landfill near Northville in Wayne County.

“Given the magnitude of its garbage problem, Toronto can breathe a huge sigh of relief that Michigan generally appears to be a willing host for its garbage,” the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator said in an editorial published last fall.

Engler and Patterson concede that the key to rejecting Toronto’s refuse is not in Lansing, but in Washington—yet it’s a key that Congress might not even hold.

In 1992, the Supreme Court struck down a state law permitting counties to enact laws barring waste from other countries or states. The state happened to be Michigan, which wanted to keep imported waste out of a private landfill in St. Clair County—just a few miles from the Blue Water Bridge used by Carleton Farms-bound trucks.

Subsequent efforts to block garbage imports by revamping constitutional protections of interstate commerce and/or international trade agreements have fizzled in both the Legislature and Congress.

“We can pass all the bills we want here” in Michigan, Truscott said. “But we can’t do anything that overrides federal law.”

Spurred this time around by Toronto’s deal with Republic Waste, Patterson in late January introduced legislation prohibiting trash haulers from transporting or disposing of solid waste not generated in Michigan.

“We can’t put up a stop sign... (but) this bill puts Michigan in a position to act immediately if Congress acts. We’ve got to get Congress off the dime,” said Patterson, whose bill was sent to the House Committee on Land Use and the Environment.

State Sen. Kenneth DeBeaussaert, D-New Baltimore, is pushing legislation that would ban imported waste that doesn’t meet the standards for what’s generated within Michigan.

Legislation giving local communities more power to decide whether to accept imported trash likely will be introduced in the House Commerce Committee in a few weeks, according to spokespersons for Bonior and U.S. Rep. John Dingell of Dearborn, the committee’s senior Democrat.

The federal legislation likely would be limited to new landfills. To James Clift, policy director of the Michigan Environmental Council, that means existing vast amounts of landfill space will keep imported trash flowing into Michigan for years.

“Why are we becoming a trash magnet? There’s a number of landfills that take out-of-state trash, and there’s overcapacity,” Clift said. “All of a sudden, (dumping) rates get cut, cut, cut... Michigan has so much excess capacity, we’re able to underbid” landfill operators elsewhere.

Carleton Farms’ 335-acre site won’t be full for an estimated 60 years, Republic Waste’s Neely said.

Opposition to Toronto’s trash exports isn’t unanimous in Michigan.

Wayne County’s Sumpter Township, where Carleton Farms is located, is paid a $1.50 royalty for each ton of garbage dumped at the landfill. That could come to $470,000 this year alone.

Patterson said the wife of a township board member told him that Sumpter officials were pressured to accommodate the landfill, and “we expect to go ahead and milk the cow that we were forced to take.”

Toronto now sends most of its garbage to the Keele Valley landfill in nearby Vaughan, which is to be closed next year. The city of 2.3 million recycles an estimated 25 percent of its household solid waste but is aiming for 50 percent by 2006.

Canada accounted for 4.5 percent of trash dumped in Michigan in 1999, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality. Michigan also receives greater amounts of trash from states stretching from Connecticut to Illinois.

“I don’t think Canadian waste is that different from our waste,” Patrick Harrington, a Lansing lobbyist representing the Michigan Waste Industries Association, told the Detroit Free press in January 1999.

“But for some reason it’s a flash point when you mention it’s from Canada.”