NewmarketToday welcomes your letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication).
I am a senior environmental health and safety scientist and have worked in the field for over 30 years.
This proposal to build a phosphorus recycling plant has been tabled over and over through many levels of governments and now it has been tied up literally with the Upper York Sewage System proposal, which is weighing it down. How can we, the educated public, see over and over again these terrible decisions and actions to halt this plant when scientifically there is such a need for it?
Lake Simcoe watershed is taking such a beating despite this so-called protection plan. There is a problem: Too much phosphorus and the solution to resolve it is to remove some of the tonnes (2.5 to approximately 10 tonnes) of phosphorus. The intensification discussed unfortunately was stated at a 50 to 55 per cent in the Lake Simcoe watershed but this percentage should have been much much higher.
Urban sprawl into whitebelts and greenbelts will damage the watershed even more and add to the phosphorus, salt and other pollutants, suffocating the tributaries and wetlands and Lake Simcoe watershed; hence, more pollution. Remember pollution causes human health problems! See Canadian Association of Physicians of the Environment, CAPE.
Also, important and valuable farmland will be destroyed once urban sprawl gets its teeth into the ecologically sensitive lands. These should be protected but Premier Doug Ford's MZOs override everything. More population means we will need more food not more pavement and runoff, especially during this climate crisis we are experiencing.
Someone with authority in the government needs to be making better decisions faster. The feds gave $16 million, where are the others with their dollars to fund this project? It's not rocket science.
M.J. Hanley, Georgina
