Cities in Ontario will stop sending their residential solid waste to Michigan landfills before the end of the decade under an agreement announced Aug. 31 between the provincial government and Michigan´s two U.S. senators.

In addition, cross-border residential waste shipments will decrease by 20 percent by 2007 and drop another 20 percent by the end of 2008.

The agreement, which came as a surprise to many people, could bring an end to a long-running feud between Michigan politicians and many residents and their neighbors to the north. Residents complained about hundreds of trash trucks crossing the border every day.

In return for an agreement from Laurel Broten, Ontario´s Minister of the Environment, to eliminate the waste shipments, Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin, both Michigan Democrats, agreed to drop their attempts to add amendments to this year´s Homeland Security appropriations bill that within months could have halted all Canadian waste from entering Michigan, or made it prohibitively expensive.

Reaching the agreement gives Toronto, York, Peel, Durham and other Ontario municipalities more time to find alternatives to disposing of their residential waste. The province is promising to work with the cities on finding solutions, including boosting recycling, encouraging development of new waste technologies, and building additional landfill disposal capacity.

The agreement would not prohibit industrial, commercial and institutional waste from entering Michigan. Ontario estimates that about 2.5 million tons of industrial, commercial and institutional and construction and demolition waste entered Michigan in 2004.

However, the agreement would stop more than 2.78 million metric tons of household Canadian trash from crossing the border over the next four years, according to Stabenow and Levin.

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