Rogers Says Canada Trucks Its Trash Into Michigan. Trump's 50% Trash Tariff Starts Friday

Mike Rogers, the Republican running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, walked on stage with President Trump in Port Huron on Sunday and took aim at a problem Michigan has griped about for two decades. "Those Canadians send truck after truck after truck loaded with their trash into our state," Rogers told the crowd, with Trump standing behind him. "The president just this week announced he's going to tariff those trash trucks."

He wasn't exaggerating. Starting Friday, Oct. 30, Canadian municipal waste, sewage sludge and clinical waste get hit with Trump's 50% tariff on Canada. They're on the list of products added in the order Trump signed Friday, which lists them by tariff code: 3825.10, 3825.20 and 3825.30 (White House, Annex I).

Most of the rally write-ups treated it as an applause line. It's more than that. Here's how much trash we're talking about, where it goes, why it keeps coming, and what the tariff can and can't do.

How much, and where it goes

Michigan's own landfill numbers answer the first question. In the state's 2025 fiscal year, Michigan landfills took in 3,189,313 tons of waste from Canada. That's 14.1% of everything buried in the state, and more than all the other states' imports into Michigan combined, about 3.6 times as much. Canada has been Michigan's top source of imported trash every year in the report, and the five-year range runs from 3.16 million to 3.46 million tons a year (Michigan EGLE, FY2025 landfill report).

It isn't spread around. One landfill, Pine Tree Acres in Macomb County, took 2,222,079 tons of it, about 70%. Carleton Farms in Wayne County took another 811,519 tons and Arbor Hills, also in Wayne County, took 96,141. Of Canada's total, 2,951,992 tons fell into the state's municipal and commercial waste category, the everyday garbage kind.

Twenty years of 'we'll fix it'

Rogers called it "this problem that we've been talking about in Michigan for 20 years we haven't been able to get fixed." That's about right. In August 2006, Michigan's two Democratic senators, Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin, announced a deal with Ontario to phase out Toronto-area household trash shipments by the end of 2010. At the time, about 350 trash trucks a day crossed the border, according to their own announcement. In return, the senators dropped their bills to close the border to the trucks (Stabenow-Levin release, Aug. 31, 2006).

The household loads did stop. But the deal never touched commercial and industrial waste, and when the senators declared victory in January 2011, the city shipments they'd stopped were only about 40% of the Canadian trash coming in. The rest kept rolling. Fifteen years later, it's still more than 3 million tons a year.

Why Michigan is the cheap dump

Here's the part almost nobody mentions. Michigan charges a state surcharge of just 36 cents per ton of trash landfilled. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's own budget office has proposed raising it to $5, which it says would bring Michigan "in line with regional peers" and reduce "the economic incentive to ship waste across our borders." The legislature hasn't passed it.

Think of it like a parking garage that charges a dime while every garage around it charges five bucks. You don't have to ask why it's always full. Local deals can make it cheaper still. In St. Clair County, home of Port Huron, Kimball Township posted the county landfill's Canadian hauler contracts in 2023, with rates it said were generally about half what local haulers paid. The newest state report shows no Canadian waste going to that landfill in fiscal 2025.

Rogers asked, the White House acted

Rogers has been the Michigan Republican pushing hardest for a smarter Canada fight, one that doesn't land on Michigan factories. He'd called for ending the tariff war outright. When the new order came out Friday, he said he'd told the administration where to aim instead.

"I called for an end to the tariff war with Canada, and told the Trump Administration if you're going to be putting tariffs on anything from Canada, it ought to be the d*** trash they've been dumping in our state for decades," he wrote. "And today, they acted. This is a HUGE win for Michigan."

It's the same move the order made for Sen. Susan Collins in Maine. It took the tariff off Canadian goods that American farms and plants need, like packing boxes and sorting machines, and put it on things America can do without. Canadian garbage made that list.

What happens Friday

The 50% tariff applies to the goods' customs value, and the order doesn't spell out how a truckload of garbage gets valued. It says questions about which goods are covered go to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, so expect the haulers' lawyers to be asking. What's clear is the direction. Every Canadian load that crosses after Friday costs more to bury here than it did last week.

The order also doesn't cancel any contract. Landfills that signed deals with Canadian haulers can keep honoring them. Whether the trucks keep coming now depends on whether Ontario's haulers decide Michigan is still the cheapest place to dump, once the tariff lands on top of that 36-cent fee.

The bottom line: For 20 years, Michigan politicians promised to stop Canada's trash and settled for half a deal. Trump's order puts a real price on every load starting Friday. And Rogers is the one who asked for it.