Ontario Regulation 347 (Waste Management – General), made under the Environmental Protection Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. E.19, determines a material's hazardous-waste status through a two-track test that parallels the characteristic/listed-waste structure used elsewhere in North America:
Track 1 — Characteristic testing. The material is analyzed (or evaluated by generator knowledge of the process that produced it) against the Regulation's defined hazard characteristics — ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity, and leachate toxicity (analogous to the tests applied directly in Question 3) — along with additional Ontario-specific criteria such as acute lethality (fish bioassay) and carcinogenicity. Exceeding any ONE threshold classifies the material as a hazardous waste by characteristic, regardless of its industrial source or process.
Track 2 — Listing (Schedules to the Regulation). Independent of measured properties, O. Reg. 347's Schedules specifically enumerate: acutely hazardous wastes (Schedule 1), hazardous industrial wastes generated by named processes (Schedule 2, process-specific listings analogous to the US RCRA K-list), and hazardous wastes from non-specific sources such as spent solvents (Schedule 3, analogous to the US F-list, and directly relevant to Question 6(b)). A waste appearing on any Schedule is hazardous by listing, whether or not it is separately tested.
Generator responsibility. The Regulation places the burden of classification on the generator: the generator must determine, using process knowledge and/or laboratory analysis, whether its waste meets either track, register with the province if it does, and track the waste from generation to final disposal through the manifest system administered via the Hazardous Waste Information Network (HWIN).
This two-track structure exists because a purely test-based (characteristic-only) approach can miss wastes whose hazard is well documented from the generating process but not easily captured by a simple lab test (e.g. certain listed process residues), while a purely listing-based approach would fail to catch a genuinely hazardous waste from a process not anticipated when the Schedules were written — running both tracks together closes that gap.
