Introduction

Wearing masks and keeping our distance from each other and everyone else, I recently walked around the circumference of Frédéric-Back Park with Hillary Predko, one of my graduate students. The walk was months in anticipation, as COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in Montréal have precluded such get-togethers. But on this sunny day, Hillary and I – like the other people we see bicycling, walking their dogs, jogging or picnicking with members of their ‘bubble’ – are grateful and more than a little elated to be (socially distanced) among other people.

And what a place to be! Frédéric-Back is not just any park. Some 192 hectares (474 acres) in the Villeray-Saint-Michel region of the city, this park is built on top of a landfill. The area’s industrial life began as a privately owned quarry, which the Miron family transformed into a landfill when neighbouring residents protested against the constant blasting (Ville de Montréal, nd). The City of Montréal bought the site in 1988 and continued to fill the quarry with MSW. Over the course of the 1990s, the city constructed a recycling centre and a biogas power plant to collect and convert the methane produced by the landfill into energy (linear economy). And as of 2020, nearly 75 hectares of this vast space is still being used for landfilling waste (ibid).

In countries in the globalized north, waste repositories tend to be sited away from residential communities so that (municipal solid) waste is more likely to be out-of-sight and, according to plan, out-of-mind. That is, as Chapters 2 and 3 detail, individuals, families and households are supposed to consider, take responsibility for and shoulder the financial, behavioural and moral burden of waste from the moment of post-consumption (that is, MSW) to the moment of disposal or diversion. After that, we are meant to forget about what happens to our waste. Concerned about the health, environmental and financial effects of living near landfills or incinerators, many people strongly prefer – and lobby for – landfills and incinerators to be as far away from their homes as possible, which often means these waste technologies are sited near communities without the money, power and/ or influence to object.