The Garbage Game

New York's Gotham Gazette newspaper has created a neat online "Garbage Game". (Thanks to No Impact Man for the link.) To play, you make choices about the fate of waste, first as a New Yorker sorting her own household waste, then as a sanitation engineer charged with managing the entire municipal waste stream. You also get to decide which neighbourhood, municipality, or state to burden with the ultimate disposal of the city's waste.

While the Garbage Game is tailored to the specific contexts of waste management for New York City , there are instructive parallels to Metro Vancouver. In the game, you make decisions surrounding the contentious issue of transporting New York City's garbage to New Jersey or to the outer boroughs. Meanwhile, here in the Lower Mainland, we are still contending with the GVRD's 2000 plan to build a landfill in Ashcroft, and to truck Vancouver's garbage nearly 400km to get there. (See Helen's post, "New Year's Resolution: Stop Ashcroft Landfill".)

Of course, the best way to avoid transporting vast amounts of waste is to reduce the amount of waste generated in the first place! As noted in the Garbage Game, diverting recyclables from the garbage stream is an improvement but doesn't mean zero waste. The majority of New York's recycled raw materials are exported overseas by large polluting ships.

I played The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game and sent 2,643,029 tons of refuse across 2,300,565 miles.

Here are my own dubious results from the Garbage Game. (It generates code which I believe you could paste into a comment to this post, if you’d like to share your score!)

Recycle ~ or else!

Metro Vancouver controls the garbage disposal system in our region. This gives them the power to "shut the gate" on items that should not be thrown away.

Last summer, at the urging of political leaders who are championing a Zero Waste Challenge, Metro Vancouver approved a policy that anything that can be recycled must not go in the garbage.

Currently thousands of tonnes of newspaper, cardboard, yard waste and other easily recyclable products go to waste each year. Almost half of our garbage is things that could be recycled but aren't!

The new rules will change all that ~ if enough people know about the new rules. Did YOU know that you will no longer be allowed to throw your Georgia Straight in a street litter bin, starting on January 1st?

Maybe the Straight and other free newspapers should provide handy recycling containers next to their distribution boxes, eh?

(As far as we can tell, only Burnaby seems to be publicizing the new bans. Good work, Burnaby! Has anyone seen notices of the impending disposal bans in other municipalities?)

New Year's Resolution ~ stop Ashcroft landfill

If this were your backyard, would you want half-a-million tonnes of someone else's garbage dumped there? Metro Vancouver staff and contractors seem determined to build a 100-year landfill in these beautiful hills. It's time they checked in with us, the citizens of this region.

The Cornwall Keepers are asking for our help.

BACKGROUND

In 2000, GVRD puchased Ashcroft Ranch (price $4.5 million) and announced a plan to build a landfill there for our garbage. No-one asked us if we wanted to send our garbage to someone else's backyard.

From 2000 to 2005, GVRD carried out expensive procedures seeking provincial approval for the landfill. No-one asked us if we supported the project.

In June 2005, the Minister of Environment suspended the approval process saying "an amendment to the GVRD's solid waste management plan is required for the project to proceed." No-one has asked us if we wanted to amend our waste plan.

Last month Metro Vancouver staff set aside $6 million in the 2008 budget to continue preparations for building the landfill at Ashcroft, despite the suspension. This is on top of hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain agricultural operations on the ranch. No-one asked us if we want to put good money after bad into this project.

As 2007 draws to a close, there are signs of change at Metro Vancouver. The political leaders in our region are beginning to have second thoughts about shipping our garbage out of the region. They forced their staff to find $40 million for the 2008 budget for composting (incredibly, staff had not allocated a nickel for this priority.) They have approved tough new disposal bans that will come into effect on January 1st. They are betting we are ready to get serious about reducing waste.

Zero Waste Vancouver was formed to give the citizens of this region a voice, finally, in how our waste is managed. For too long, Metro Vancouver has made it easy to be wasteful, sending our garbage up the Fraser Canyon to someone else's backyard. We are the most wasteful urban region in the province. It's time to acknowledge this and do something about it. The people who live in our "wasteshed" deserve no less.

You can lend them your support right now by visiting the Cornwall Keepers website and signing their petition.

Dream Job Available

The Recycling Council of BC has just posted an employment opportunity to work as an Information Officer on the BC Recycling Hotline.

If you are looking for a really interesting full-time position where you will learn all there is to know about waste reduction and recycling (preparing you for a career in the field?), this is the job for you. You will work with great people, help manage a database of all the recycling services in BC and AB, and have direct contact every day with people who want to recycle but don't know where or how.

The application deadline is December 11th.

Zero warming!

Check out this amazing little video clip that makes the critical link between Waste and Warming.

Read Zero Waste Vancouver's backgrounder on incineration/gasification of waste.

BC politicians think we want to burn garbage!

When the times get tough ~ and they will! ~ everyone is going to be looking for cheap alternatives to the fossil fuels that have powered our economy in the past 150 years. And sooner or later they will seize on GARBAGE as the cheap energy resource of the future.

It's already started. And Sweden is the role model.

A few years ago the chair of the Metro Vancouver Environment Committee, Joe Trasolini, toured Sweden and today he is pushing for a form of waste-to-energy alchemy called "gasification."

Metro Vancouver intends to issue a request for proposals early in the New Year to build huge huge new incinerators that will burn up to 3/4 million tonnes of waste each year (for comparison, our region's Burnaby incinerator burns 285,000 tonnes per year).

Last month, BC's energy minister Richard Neufeld came back from Sweden smitten with that country's energy plants that burn wood waste along with municipal waste. This minister comes from a northern riding that is drowning in wood waste like we're drowning in garbage. He's sure to see this as the perfect way to turn a problem into a solution.

Except, of course, that the last thing responsible political leaders should be promoting now is dumping our waste into the atmosphere. Please read the Zero Waste Vancouver backgrounder on waste incineration, and send a quick email to Trasolini and Neufeld:

Joe Trasolini, Chair

Metro Vancouver Environment Committee

joe.trasolini@cityofportmoody.com

Richard Neufeld, MLA

Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources

richard.neufeld.mla@leg.bc.ca

The Story of Stuff!

Here's a catchy 20 minute film just released by a well-known American anti-incineration activist Annie Leonard. The movie is a simple animated backgrounder on the "materials economy" - extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal.

Enjoy!

Learning from the garbage strike

Garbage continues to rankle our public conscience. In the Tyee last week writer Ruben Anderson ruefully pointed out that we have learned nothing from the garbage strike last summer.

"People are breathing easier as their cans once again fill and miraculously empty every week...Which means we've missed a huge opportunity here. We should still be asking the true question raised by all that smelly inconvenience: Why do we have garbage in the first place?"

The reason, he rightly goes on to explain, is that things are designed for the dump. To solve our problem, we need to be thinking of "cradle to cradle design."

Michael Braungart and William McDonough came up with the "cradle-to-cradle" concept in 1995 and copyrighted it in 2001 ~ but since then the amount of throw-away products and packaging in US waste has increased 20%. Here in MetroVancouver, our waste has grown 46% since 2000, five times greater than our population growth.

What's standing in the way of cradle-to-cradle design? Public policy.

Throwing things away is culturally sanctioned in our society. We take it as one of our basic civil rights that we will receive convenient collection and disposal of our throw-aways, provided as a free public service, just like education and health care.

If we want cradle-to-cradle design, maybe we should stop providing the grave?

Looking behind the headlines

Garbage is in the news. Last week it was a ban on plastic bags (going to Council tomorrow). This morning we learn that downtown businesses are working with "binners" to get rid of messy dangerous dumpsters. And tonight at 6 pm Global BC news hour is going to take a close look into our garbage cans...

But the big story is that politicians on City Council are hinting that they might give Vancouver ratepayers their money back for services they didn't receive during the garbage strike.

Here's something to think about as you bank that $7.65 that represents the cost of hauling your garbage away for 10 weeks: this is about the price people were paying to have one bag of garbage hauled away by entrepreneurs last summer.

What does this tell us about the efficiency of our municipal garbage services ~ can you think of a better bargain than the garbage services we receive from our city? They take away anything we put into that black bin, week after week, no questions asked, at a rate that ranges from $1.44 to $2.88 a pick-up, depending on whether we use the mini can or the jumbo can that's 5 times bigger...

The question we might ask as citizens is: are these bargain rates for public garbage collection really serving the public interest? Who wins in the long run when it's cheap and convenient to throw things away?

Maybe politicians should be looking at a revenue neutral "tax shift." Raise the rates for garbage collection to discourage wasting... and then put the money into, say, keeping our libraries open longer?

Buy Nothing Day celebration a success

While cross-border shoppers were steaming at 3-hour border line-ups last Friday, a hearty group of Zero Wasters were enjoying trad Irish music (at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church!), swapping CDs and viewing a classic film that diagnoses our society's epidemic of "Affluenza." It was lots of fun ~ and just the first of a series of community events that Zero Waste Vancouver will be hosting in the months to come... Thanks to Vanessa and her musician friends who showed up with concertina, bouzouki, fiddles, guitars and pipes. If anyone wants to borrow the DVD of the film for a community showing, let us know!

Islands of plastic in the mid-Pacific

If you haven't heard about the floating plastic in the mid-Pacific, here are some interesting links. Not recent, but still current. Our casual conveniences can make waves far away...

Trashing the Oceans, US News & World Report:

Most plastic bags end up in landfills, part of the millions of tons of plastic garbage Americans dump each year. But whether jettisoned illegally by ships at sea, washed out from land during storms, or, as in the case of the chalupa bags, accidentally lost overboard from containerships, countless tons of plastic refuse end up drifting on the high seas....

Moby-Duck, or the synthetic wilderness of childhood, Harper's Jan 07:

The correspondent who forwarded this link to me commented: Donovan Hohn is one of the really great writers that no one knows about.

The wasteful pay less in Vancouver!

The Vancouver Solid Waste Utility charges us for garbage based on how much we put out, right?

Wrong.

It turns out, the more you waste the better a rate you get.

The city lets you choose between five garbage can sizes, ranging from 75 litres to 360 litres. The problem is that the rates don’t go up at the same pace as the volume.

If you choose a “small” can, you pay $1 per litre of garbage. If you choose the HUMONGOUS 360 litre container, you pay only 44 cents per litre of garbage.

Is this any way to encourage waste reduction???

Tell Vancouver City Council to fix the garbage rates in 2008. They'll be discussing the 2008 rates on Thursday, November 29th, at their City Services & Budget committee meeting.

Let's have a public conversation about plastic bags

Once again, civic leaders in the Lower Mainland are sending a strong signal to retailers about their practice of handing out free plastic bags which become a public nuisance. An unimaginable 4 - 5 trillion of the flimsy bags were dispensed in Europe and North America in 2002, making them a visible target for public concern.

Last year North Vancouver District Council and Coquitlam City Council called for a hefty tax on plastic bags to discourage their use. Next week Vancouver City Council will consider a motion calling for a staff report on options on "phasing out" plastic bags within the city.

Both proposals have legs because they have been successfully implemented elsewhere. Ireland imposed a 25 cent PlasTax in 2002 that almost immediately reduced bag use by 90%. San Francisco considered a tax and then opted for an outright ban last March -- the first in North America.

Most importantly, these tough measures have been popular with the public, despite the plastic and retail industry doing their best to shoot them down.

It's all very well for the retailers to tout the benefits of the bags, but they don't pay the cost for the waste. It's local politicians who have to tax their communities to provide disposal services. No wonder they are turning to harsh measures! The industry has a lot to answer for.

Zero Waste Vancouver supports the motion to look at options to deal with the plastic bag problem. We would like to see Vancouver City Council convene a Waste Advisory Committee to look at this and other priority issues identified by the public and civic leaders. The committee could work with staff to explore the options, evaluate them, and come back with recommendations that would work for Vancouver.

Just say no to throw away water bottles

If you insist on drinking water from bottles, you won't have the option of a home dispenser using non-refillable bottles if Metro Vancouver politicians have anything to say about it.

They took a hard stand on this issue after a local distributor who uses refillable bottles like the one in this photo complained that his competition is introducing a single-use alternative made of thin PET plastic rather than reusable polycarbonate.

When politicians saw two of the single-use bottles fill a large blue recycling container and learned that they would be worth only a 20 cent deposit, they put their foot down: tell the province to simply ban them! BC's beverage container regulation is too weak and the delay to prove that the system needed change would simply cause problems in the industry, said politicians on both the Environment and Waste Management Committees, who called for an outright ban on non-refillable bottles. (image http://www.recyclethis.co.uk/)

Of course, with new information emerging about chemical additives in plastics, the market for water bottled in plastic may dry up anyway... anyone see the CBC segment last night? I can't find a link on their website.)

Politicians question focus, assumptions and methodology of study

A report went this week to two Metro Vancouver committees (Environment and Waste Management) and came under fire from politicians. The study, which had not requested by the committees, compared “life cycle environmental burdens” of landfilling and WTE (mass-burn incineration). The intent of the study was to identify major material and energy inputs & outputs and quantify them to “create an equivalent basis for comparison.”

Environment Committee member Lisa Barrett (Bowen Island) said: “You have given us two scenarios, but what about the third: Zero Waste?”

Looking at a table showing emissions under the two scenarios, Hal Weinberg (Anmore) noted that the mercury emissions from WTE were 35 times higher than from landfilling and was told that the study "assumed" that mercury is “bound up” in landfills and not released in emissions.

Weinberg also wanted to know what the reported emission levels meant in terms of impact on human health (staff responded by saying they have “no expertise” in this). Weinberg commented that without the link to health impacts, these numbers are “meaningless.”

Several of the Environment Committee members including Heather Deal (Vancouver) insisted they want more information before they can draw meaningful conclusions from the study.

When the report goes to the GVRD Board, Zero Waste Vancouver will point out another deficiency of the study: it doesn’t talk about inputs. Both landfilling and incineration take large quantities of highly refined materials and remove them from use, acting as a gear that drives the industrial system to replace the lost materials as fast as it can. From a climate-change perspective, the useful comparison, as Lisa Barrett pointed out, is not between landfilling and incineration. It is between wasting and not wasting. (Image: www. keaggy.com)

Zero Waste presents paper at major BC conference

Zero Waste Vancouver will present a paper next week to an audience of 250 local government officials who will be seeking ideas for moving "from awareness to action" in making their communities sustainable.

Joining a line-up of internationally known speakers including Bill Rees, developer of the ecological footprint tool, Zero Waste Vancouver coordinator Helen Spiegelman will show how local governments hold the key to moving "From Unbridled Consumerism to Zero Waste" but must first overcome a daunting barrier: the feeling it is their responsibility to pick up after the consumer society by providing convenient disposal of society's discards. This paper builds on work done by Spiegelman for the US-based Product Policy Institute, but uses Metro Vancouver as a case example.

Open letter to Tony Sperling

Tony Sperling is the president of a consulting firm trying to convince Metro Vancouver to send our garbage to the Highland Valley copper mine, a 4-hour uphill truck ride from here, where his firm and the mine-owner, Teck-Cominco, want to build a "Centre for Sustainable Waste Management." Tony asked for my comments on the proposal. I sent a reply, which he tried to understand. He wrote back again, still

Thank you for asking me to comment on the Highland Valley landfill proposal. I was at the meeting of the MetVan Waste Management Committee in April 2006 when the committee heard a presentation on the HVL proposal. I recall that the politicians had many thoughtful questions suggesting that they had concerns. Speaking as a citizen, I think this proposal will not be accepted because the public is beginning to understand that this is a 20th Century solution to a 19th Century problem.



In the 19th Century garbage was a threat to public health and safety because it attracted rats and caused disease. Citizens like me demanded action, politicians listened, and engineers developed solutions. The most common sanctioned practice was landfilling of municipal refuse in authorized facilities. This practice continues until today.



But waste was different then. Data carefully gathered by municipal engineers at the turn of the 20th Century showed that 75% of the refuse then was inorganics (coal ashes, crockery, etc.), another 15% was organics and the rest (7%) was rubbish, simple manufactured goods like textiles, bottles and cans, etc.

Over the course of the 20th Century waste changed. Today the inorganics aren't even counted any more (homes are heated with gas, oil or electricity). The amount of organics doubled due to suburban yard trimmings. Most significantly, manufactured products and packaging now makes up 75% - 90% of our waste.

Landfilling of masses of manufactured products, many laced with hazardous compounds, is both wasteful and risky. We have a different waste problem today and we need different solutions ~ 21st Century problem, 21st Century solutions!

The HVC has another flaw, identified by members of the Waste Management Committee in their discussion. It is a 4 hour drive uphill to Logan Lake. At the time the committee was considering the proposal, oil had reached the unprecedented price of $65/barrel. This week it reached $80/barrel. Waste export was a solution for a time when fuel still seemed limitless, but it would be a bad investment today.

What I was challenging you to do at the Nelson meeting, Tony, was to come back to us with engineering solutions that address today's waste stream and work within today's limits. The provincial government is providing the legislative tools to redirect the products and packaging out of our municipal waste stream. We will no longer need the massive mixed-waste landfills of yesteryear. Rather, we will need effective, well-designed composting facilities for the organic materials that will remain once the product-related wastes are gone. This is the problem we are asking you and your engineering colleagues to solve for us. There will be huge technical challenges as well as political ones in building solutions for source-separated organic waste.

I'm prepared to help with the political challenges, if you will provide the technical expertise.

Composting grows ~ everywhere but BC!

"British Columbia was the only province where household participation in composting declined from 1994 to 2006," according to an article in Solid Waste & Recycling providing highlights of a newly released Stats Can study of household recycling practices.

The study also found that 40% of Victoria-area households compost, compared with only 23% in the Vancouver area.

The most avid composters in Canada in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, where provincial regulations ban disposal of organics from landfills and incinerators.

A regional ban on landfilling of yard waste in Metro Vancouver will come into effect on January 8, 2007. We can catch up to the other provinces as soon as households and businesses in our region have access to composting services for food scraps!

Take burnt-out compact bulbs to IKEA

Did you know you can take your burnt-out compact fluorescent bulbs to IKEA for recycling?

IKEA Canada just posted a release to Canadian News Wire reminding us that they have been taking back both CFLs and batteries since 2001.

Does anyone know who their recycler is? Here's what the release says: IKEA Canada works closely with Raw Materials Company (RMC, A division of International Marine Salvage Inc.) who specializes in battery recycling,hazardous waste hauling and processing, and have been actively recycling formore than 25 years. The bulb goes through a separation process into glass,powder and mercury. Separated mercury goes through a triple distillation whichtakes away all contamination.

I will check with folks who know the marine salvage industry for background on this company.

Batteries not included ~ CBC Marketplace

Did anyone catch the investigation of throw-away batteries on CBC Marketplace (aired on Halloween)? It really skewered the harried director of the rechargeable battery recycling program (did YOU know there was a rechargeable battery recycling program?) but the entire industry that produces the half-billion batteries sold in Canada each year didn't escape derision. You can watch the segment here. The only puzzling moment was at the end when they offered viewers advice on what to do about the battery problem. "Contact your municipality!" they said ~ but the Mayor of Port Perry had been saying all through the show that the producers should provide convenient service, say, through stores...

For another great riff on battery waste see the brilliant photo work of Chris Jordan.

Taking charge of our waste

Yesterday I wrote that two politicians on the Waste Management Committee were “incredulous” about things they found in a staff report on programs and priorities for 2008. It does strain credulity that we would allocate no funds in 2008 for composting while earmarking half a billion dollars for waste-to-energy (incineration) without any discussion.

I singled out Dan Johnston (Burnaby) and Peter Ladner (Vancouver) and thanked them for raising important questions about these priorities, but all 9 members of the Waste Management Committee deserve recognition. They are working hard on our behalf and making great headway.

This is a big change from five or six years ago. The waste committee used to receive reports and adopt staff recommendations with little or no comment. It’s easy to see why. These folks are overseeing the regional waste system - both sewage and garbage - off the sides of their desks, on top of all the work they do in their own municipalities.

This is why Zero Waste Vancouver will be calling on the Committee to form a public advisory committee to support them. Public participation was the key to success in Halifax, which has the most progressive waste management system in North America. The people of Halifax got a place at the table planning their community’s waste system. It got results. Let's do it here.

Half a billion dollars for incinerators???

At the last meeting of the Metro Vancouver Waste Management Committee, Vancouver Councillor Peter Ladner was incredulous. Here's how the discussion went:

LADNER: I am interested in the financial projection of the household impacts. I read in the middle of this report that there will be $446 million being spent on waste-to-energy by 2017. Are we saying that we will be hit with a half-billion dollar expense?

TOIVO ALLAS (staff): there will be full discussion by the board of each expenditure as we go along…

But once we issue the Request for Proposals "early in 2008" we will be headed down the road towards that half-billion expense. Shouldn't we be talking about the expenses now, rather than after the RFP is issued?

Why is MetroVancouver willing to earmark half a billion dollars for unproven waste-to-energy technology, when they won't spend any money at all on composting - a technology that local municipalities say they want, and which is an unfulfilled promise from the 1995 Solid Waste Management Plan?

No money for composting???

At the most recent meeting of the MetroVan Waste Management Committee, Burnaby Councillor Dan Johnston was incredulous. Here's how the discussion went:

JOHNSTON: In Solid Waste planning we have said we want a process and strategies to target food composting. Is there going to be money for infrastructure included this year, so municipalities can get going? We are really keen to get going on this.

TOIVO ALLAS (staff): No, there is no money in the 2008 budget for capital for composting…

JOHNSTON: When will composting be actually implemented?

ALLAS: Well, the revised SWMP will be complete in mid-2008, it will include a schedule for implementation and budget for composting… including a capital budget, once we get the plan approved… then we’ll finalize a budget…

Meanwhile today a new government-backed campaign was launched in the UK to tackle the food waste problem, from cradle to cradle. Why is Metro Vancouver moving so slowly on composting, when the rest of the world is charging ahead?

Fire or frying pan?

MetroVancouver is still moving forward on its plans to build a landfill in the pristine interior grassland at Ashcroft, even after the project was put on hold by the environment minister in June 06.

The Waste Management Committee was told at its meeting last month that several million dollars will be spent on archaeological work and detailed design work ~ this is on top of the $1.1 million to keep the cattle & ginseng ranch running in 2008 .

The Cornwall Watershed Coalition and the local First Nations, who have been fighting the project for years, are worried they will be the "frying pan" for MetroVancouver's garbage if we don't go ahead and burn it in incinerators. The then-GVRD Board approved the purchase of the ranch in an in-camera meeting in 2000 to develop into a landfill -- without consulting either their own citizens or the local community in the Ashcroft area.

(The photo above was taken by a youth, Will Morris-Nelson, who came down to Vancouver several years ago to give a moving talk about his ties to this land.) Are we willing to dump our trash in his backyard?

Ireland shifts away from incineration

Ireland's Environment Minister said in a speech earlier this month that he intends to shift his country's waste management away from reliance on incineration. Noting that existing solid waste management plans will bring "a very substantial over-capacity for incineration," he is asking his staff to explore alternative technologies for pre-treating non-recyclable waste before it goes to landfills. One technology being looked at is mechanical biological treatment (MBT). In this process, non-recyclable waste is composted before being buried in the ground in order to reduce the amount of methane it produces. MBT is one of a suite of measures that will be looked at during a major review of waste policy in the coming year. Gormley is the leader of Ireland's Green Party.

Residential Composting Works! Being expanded...

Article in the Times Colonist, Thursday, October 25, 2007

CRD out to expand organic waste program

by Rob Shaw, Times Colonist

A pilot program to recycle organic food waste has been so popular in Oak Bay and View Royal that officials want it to continue for another 12 months while they try to lure other municipalities to join.

The Capital Regional District's environment committee voted yesterday to endorse extending the curbside pickup program -- which collects such things as vegetables, meat, fish and bones -- pending funding approval next month.

The Oak Bay and View Royal pilot programs were started last year to pick up special biodegradable food waste bags, set out alongside normal recycling bags, at approximately 4,000 homes.

Read the rest of the article...

article: Fraser Valley reps worried about Incinerator Plans

published in many local papers on Oct 19th. read the entire article:

Incinerator sparks fears of pollution
Air quality an issue in hunt for garbage solution

Fraser Valley reps are deeply worried their citizens will breathe more pollution if Metro Vancouver builds a new waste-to-energy incinerator to deal with the region’s rising garbage volumes.

Metro officials intend to call for bids early next year for a new incinerator or other “non-landfill technology” that could consume up to 750,000 tonnes of waste per year by 2012.

Abbotsford Coun. Patricia Ross fears emissions from such a plant will blow east and seriously worsen Fraser Valley air quality.

“We’re very concerned,” said Ross, who chairs the Fraser Valley Regional District environment committee.

“You just don’t put significant point source pollution in confined air sheds where the mountains trap pollution for very long periods of time.”

Big day Sunday: Dream Vancouver & Global Warming Cafe

Zerowaste Vancouver will be at both the Dream Vancouver conference and the Global Warming Cafe on Sunday (see coming events). Some of you may not have seen the Zero Waste "dream" I posted to Dream Vancouver some days ago.... hope to see lots of Zero Waste supporters at one or both events on Sunday. We have a lot of work to do!

Composting in action

A delegation from Zero Waste Vancouver toured the UBC composting plant on October 11. Five tonnes of organics are processed each day, coming in green bins from campus locations as well as the Quest Outreach Society's warehouse. Thanks to Mike, Christian and Nick for showing us around! Find out more about the UBC composting program here.

Helen Spiegelman, on CBC's "The Early Edition"

Helen spoke with Marvin Hunt and Rick Cluff. The interview is linked from the CBC website.

As our garbage gets collected and landfills fill up where will all the waste go? We speak to environmentalist Helen Spiegelman and to Marvin Hunt, the Chair of the Metro Vancouver Waste Committee. Listen to this interview.

Reno not Demo ~ the zero waste way!

Peter LeBlanc flagged this great story in the Oct 11 edition of the Georgia Straight ("Second Life," by Mike Usinger in Georgia Straight Living section). A couple brings a Strathcona house back to life instead of sending it to the dump... but neighbourhood historian John Atkin says in the article that one of the reasons more people don't do this is city policy:

"Then you've got city hall," Atkin continues. "If you want to do a renovation, there are a pile of hurdles that they stick in front of you. But if you come in for a demolition permit and plans for a pseudo-craftsman house, they are, 'Okay, fine, boom.'"

Time for new rules that encourage reno not demo?

The hope of Zero Waste

Shelagh Lindsey has been researching the international Zero Waste movement (of which we are a part!). She flagged these good diagrams developed by the Zero Waste Alliance in Portland. Check out the link for more info.

Pete McMartin connects the dots

Pete McMartin just wrote of Campbell's press conference last week: "It was the first time I'd heard a politician draw a direct line between western democracy and the importation of cheaply manufactured brand-name running shoes..."

Public policy and public investment in our "democracies" is being directed into domestic infrastructure that supports a consumer society, a "rich" consumer society reliant on poor communities with labour and environmental standards that we would not tolerate.

Our local governments are caught up in the same economic vision for Canada. Metro Vancouver's incinerators are the Gateway Program for garbage. Like roadways conveying goods (and consumers) to market, the incinerators will create more and more "induced" consumption.

ZWV Backgrounder on incineration

I am posting a very simple introductory backgrounder on waste incineration. There have been several recent articles and reports written about the serious downsides of waste incineration, which is being pitched as a solution to climate change. I am preparing a slide show to present to municipal councils, as well as the MetVan Board. Would anyone like to appear before their local council and show it?

Gateway and waste

Zero Waste Vancouver prepared a flyer to hand out at the rainy rallies against Gateway. If we missed you, you can download the document here.

An incinerator????

The incinerator salesmen are lining up to speak at Metro Vancouver meetings now that staff has issued a report (see Item 5.6 in this report) saying that the region will build new incinerator(s!) of a scale unprecedented in our region.

We have one incinerator in Burnaby that burns 285,000 tonnes of waste a year, but report's appendix (see the chart, Item 5.6a) shows an extra 1.25 million tonnes of waste-to-energy capacity by 2025.

Staff told the MetVan Board that they are already having "informal conversations" with incinerator vendors. There has been no public discussion about the pros and cons of this, and in fact our approved Solid Waste Management Plan says nothing about incinerators.

Similar moves in Ontario and the UK are setting off a storm of protest. Check out the CIELAP report from Ontario. Zero Waste Vancouver is developing a backgrounder to tell citizens and politicians what the incinerator salesmen are NOT saying... we'll post it soon.

Saturday, Sept. 29 - The Day to STOP Gateway!

Local groups and citizens preferring rail and busses to more highways will be out in force this Saturday at two Gateway-related events, with a mass bike ride between them!

The first event is The Spirit of Sustainability at the Unitarian Church in Vancouver (949 West 49th at Fremlin, just east of Oak), starting at 3pm. There will be some truly excellent speakers, displays and entertainment.

Then at 5pm, outside the Westin Bayshore Hotel in Coal Harbor, there is Hello Al, Goodbye Gateway, a rally to welcome Mr. Gore to Vancouver and to demand action on climate change, with more great speakers and entertainment. Bring your banners and prepare to make some noise!

Bridging the two events, for anyone on a bike, is a mass ride from the The Spirit of Sustainability Rally to Hello Al, Goodbye Gateway Rally! Meet at 5:00pm at the Unitarian Church, by the bike parking. The ride leader is Stan Jang stan.jang[at]gmail.com.

Can you feel the groundswell of opposition against Gateway?

Zero Waste Vancouver’s anti-Gateway flyer can be downloaded here – feel free to print up some copies and distribute them at Saturdays’ anti-Gateway festivities.

See you there!

Vancouver's Landfill Crisis?

There’s no time like the present for long-overdue waste reduction measures in Vancouver, because the Cache Creek landfill, where 500,000 tonnes of Metro Vancouver trash is trucked each year, is rapidly filling up. Regional senior management is looking into “quick and dirty” solutions to this “landfill crisis”.

The senior management at the GVRD have launched a “Chicken Little” campaign trying to convince the public that there is a new landfill crisis. A July 5 media release warned that “the issue of short-term disposal capacity is becoming critical.” The Vancouver Sun editorial board’s response called for “quick-and-dirty” solutions to meet this crisis (”Garbage solution has to be quick and it will likely be dirty,” June 29, 2007).

Is this a manufactured crisis? We think so.

Howdy and Welcome

Howdy folks, and welcome to the Zero Waste Vancouver blog. This will soon be the source of relevant local information about waste reduction possibilities and initiatives, as well as a hub for discussion.

In the meantime, however, please bear with us as we figure out a few technical things…

All the best! A bientot!