Like many in the County, we received a flyer recently from the Lehigh Cement plant talking about their intent to use low carbon fuels to provide supplemental heat for the plants manufacturing of concrete products.

In reading more closely this new fuel is actually about 100 tons a day of selected garbage diverted from landfill. Lehigh didn’t indicate how much CO2 this would produce or whether CO2 capture technologies would be used.

What I find incredible is that while we are accelerating into a climate crisis that a significant energy project would choose to burn garbage rather than use green technologies. Even Ontario’s electricity must be a substantially greener choice.

I sincerely doubt that Leheigh are trying to do anything that isn’t in compliance with legislation. (Indeed the fact they are doing this shows how far our legislation is away from dealing with climate change.) However, we all must acknowledge our climate change is real. Must corporations wait for governments to do the right thing? I think not. The challenge I would put to Leheigh is to be a leader in the manufacturing sector and make this new investment perform with zero CO2 emissions.

Doug McGregor

Milford