Methodology

This site joins three public systems that share no common key. Each supplies what the others lack.

1. The site universe — Environmental Compliance Approvals

Every waste ECA issued since 2022 is harvested from Ontario's Access Environment map service, and each approval's instrument PDF is downloaded and read. Rule-based extraction, followed by manual review of every flagged figure, produces each site's classification (Class 1 processing/transfer, landfill, or landfill hosting a Class 1 facility) and its approved limits: annual receiving rates, daily limits (annualized ×365 where no annual is stated), storage caps, and — for landfills — lifetime fill capacity. Tonnes convert to cubic metres at 1.5 t/m³.

2. Coverage — Environmental Registry of Ontario

The Access Environment layer lags ministry decisions by months. ERO decision notices, matched by approval number, name, and proximity, add recently approved sites and their instrument documents before the official map catches up.

3. Actual movements — the RPRA Excess Soil Registry

Registry project filings name destination sites informally (“GFL Unwin”) with no ECA number, and one facility appears under many name variants. Destination entries are matched to approvals using operator brands, street-address tokens, fuzzy name similarity, and coordinates (within 500 m), with brand mismatches blocking proximity so neighbouring facilities don't merge. About 90% of registered Class 1 volume attributes to a specific approval; unmatched destinations — mostly facilities on pre-2022 approvals — are shown as their own category, never hidden.

Landfill layer

The provincial landfill layer comes from the ministry's official landfill-sites map service (620 open sites, with coordinates), enriched with operator and municipality from the Ontario open-data landfill inventory.

Regions

Six regions — GTA, Hamilton–Niagara, North Central, Southwestern, Eastern (including Ottawa), and Northern — assigned by municipality with a coordinate fallback. They reflect soil-hauling economics: soil rarely moves more than 75–100 km.

Honest limits

• Registry volumes are proponent estimates on filings, not weighbridge records.
• Approved capacity is a ceiling, not throughput: storage limits, hours, and logistics bind first.
• Projects below filing thresholds, waste-manifested soil, and directly procured cover soil never appear in the registry.
• Landfill ECA annual reports (with actual soil tonnages) are filed with the ministry but not published; the few public data points come from municipal council reports.

The approach builds on analysis first published in Environment Journal (“Digging into Resource Recovery,” May 2026). Data refresh: registry monthly, approvals quarterly; the footer badge shows the current build date.