Citizens taking action ~ Vancouver, Lower Mainland, and beyond.


Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Provincial government slips in a surprise

The provincial government introduced a bill last week that appears to make incineration a form of recycling.

Bill 29 contains amendments to the Environmental Management Act that would include:




"... requiring the owner or operator of a waste management facility to recycle certain wastes or classes of wastes, and to recover certain reusable resources, including energy potential from wastes or classes of wastes..."




If you, dear visitor to this blog, have expertise in this area, we'd all welcome your interpretation of where the government seems to be headed with this. There has been a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war over the "4th R" for years. It will be too bad if it is legislated to have equivalency to the 3rd R.


Pic: 10000birds.com

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There is a biomechanical solid waste processing technology called ArrowBio that can process curbside residential waste including garden clippings in a very environmentally friendly way. This odor-free process, slits the black-bag plastic containers, washes and sorts all recyclable content including film plastics, separates plastic from the cardboard in food and other containers, then reduces the remaining biodegradable content into a biological slury. This slury is further processed into methane gas and a form of fertilizer. The methane can be used to generate electricty. 500,000 tonnes of curbside waste can return as much as $20 million in energy and recyclables. If you include the $32.5 million cost of hauling waste to Cache Creek, the overall savings could be as much as $52.5 million.