Vancouver moves one step forward on food scraps

Our city staff and elected officials need moral support. They are about to do something scarey -- but wonderful!

It's all in a staff report that will go to Vancouver City Council next week.

The report acknowledges that over one-third of our waste is compostable food scraps and food-soiled paper, that this yucky stuff produces greenhouse gases in the landfill, and that we have to get these materials out of our landfill if we want to meet our GHG reduction targets.

This means we have to change our ways, all of us. At home and at work.

The good news is that everybody I talk to is eager to change. The only complaint I've heard about the first phase of the City's composting program (which began just over a year ago) is that apartments and condos were left out.

The report asks Council permission to embark on Phase Two: a cautious pilot program.

Two percent of the houses in Vancouver, along with a small sample of carefully-chosen businesses and apartment houses, will get a chance to set out all their food scraps for composting instead of putting them in the garbage. The City will collect the composting containers every week.

The pilot will start up this fall. Once the 6-month pilot is complete and the City staff have analyzed all the data they intend to collect about the pilot program, they will come back to Council again and ask permission to go City-wide with the new program.

City Council and the cautious engineers who deliver our waste management services need reassuring words from us.

Come to Council Chambers next Thursday, 9:30 am, and let them know you are ready to take this big step.

Will Vancouver come from behind to win gold?

You might have noticed I took 2 weeks off. It was time well spent cleaning the garage -- and watching the unfolding of our remarkable Olympics from a distance.

When I left my desk back in the darkness of February, when the Olympics were still a legitimate subject for whining, the one bright spot was that Metro Vancouver's incinerator plan seemed to be coming off the rails.

There was no more "landfill crisis" driving the construction of garbage burners because the province extended the life of the Cache Creek Landfill. On top of that, the recession had clearly taken a big bite out of the garbage. I learned today that the shipments of trash to Cache Creek are down from forty truckloads a day to 28. Cities that had foolishly invested in incinerators are running out of fuel.

And now I come back to my desk, flush from our community's truly endearing success hosting the Winter Olympics (Transit is Fun!) and, like everyone else, I am feeling that we are capable of achieving great things.

The first email I open this week tells me that the City of Vancouver is going to hit the ground running and bump Port Coquitlam from the top podium in Zero Waste. A staff report will go to Vancouver City Council tomorrow setting out a 3-step program for cutting our waste in half.

By this time next year, residential garbage service will be scaled back from weekly to bi-weekly. How will we do it? By getting serious about food waste. Vancouver has drunk the kool-ade, as they say. PoCo got off the blocks first, but we are going to come from behind and win gold.

Kelly Sinoski reports in today's Vancouver Sun that the field of contenders in the Food Scrap Composting race is getting crowded, with a half-dozen cities rolling out new programs. But what will give Vancouver the edge, based on this report, is the staff's recommendation to seriously beef up communications and "community based social marketing."

What drives excellence in any race is good training. It looks like the City is ready to invest in helping us Own the Podium.

City is being outmanoeuvred by Metro

The City of Vancouver has been seriously outmanoeuvred by Metro Vancouver in the Zero Waste competition.

The question is: can Vancouver politicians pick up their game in time to avoid an embarrassing pratt- fall during the Vancouver Olympics?

Metro Vancouver scored the first point by framing “garbage dumps” as outmoded, dangerous, and barbaric. This subtly reinforced long-held public attitudes and boxed the City of Vancouver in a corner. The City is the owner of the region's largest "dump."

Then Metro framed “waste to energy” as clean, modern, safe and efficient. The region has spared no cost in reinforcing this message through politician junkets to Europe, invited "experts,"and a steady stream of biased commentary through the local media.

Ane what was the City of Vancouver's reponse to all of this? Deafening silence.

Vancouver's staff commissioned two consultant reports in January 2008 as soon as they got wind of Metro's plan. The Deloitte Touche and CH2MHill reports gave the City all the tools they needed to mount an effective campaign against Metro's incinerator plan.

But Vancouver's politicians missed the play.

While Metro is actually rolling out pilot programs to compost food waste (a clever foil for their incinerator preparations) the City of Vancouver will apparently have nothing in place for expanded organics collection until as far away as May, 2010.

Meanwhile, what will the world see when they visit in February?

The Vancouver landfill -- although it meets all of our environmental requirements here in British Columbia -- would be illegal in Europe.
Under a directive by the European Union, all of the nations of Europe have laws banning the disposal of organics in landfills. They took this strong action years ago to prevent the formation of the potent GHG methane in landfills.

When European athletes and fans arrive here in February and learn that the host city is dumping raw, unprocessed organic wastes in its city landfill, they will see us as worse than syrup-suckers. They will see us as climate outlaws.

How embarrassing will that be to our Greenest City mayor?

Pic: It will take more than photo-ops, like this one posted by City Farmer, to win Vancouver the Greenest City medal.

Change the law, or ban bags province-wide, says report adopted by Vancouver City Council

Vancouver City Council has been trying to get traction on the plastic bag ban for almost two years. The Mayor's Greenest City Action Team issued a challenge to the province:


"Plastic bags and polystyrene foam (Styrofoam) take-out food containers, cups and utensils should be banned or taxed, as many cities and even nations have already done. (Vancouver currently lacks the statutory authority to enforce such a ban, so the provincial government should be pressured to either impose a province-wide ban or amend the Vancouver Charter to allow the city to act on its own.) Vancouver lags behind other cities (e.g. San Francisco, Toronto) in tackling these symbolic sources of trash and litter. San Francisco has achieved 94 percent compliance with its bylaw prohibiting Styrofoam and requiring all take-out food containers to be compostable or recyclable."



Pic: Vancouver Surfriders Plastic Bag Monster on the bridge to a cool planet... they hold their AGM on November 5th.

Vancouver landfill is no place for organics

Vancouver City Council received a long-awaited report this morning that could open the door to a huge opportunity for our city to shine.

The report was a response to Metro Vancouver's power play a year ago, when out of the blue Commissioner Johnny Carline announced to the astonished politicians on the Waste Management Committee that Metro was abandoning a plan to build a new landfill in the Interior.

Instead, Metro was going to shut down the Vancouver Landfill and build a whole suite of brand new garbage incinerators.

This took the City of Vancouver by surprise. They own the Vancouver Landfill.

Vancouver staff immediately asked the Council of the day to authorize a comprehensive study of the "environmental, financial and regulatory" impacts of Metro's new proposal. The study's findings were the subject of the report made public today.

Not surprisingly the study found that taxpayers will take a hit of $700 million if we have to ship our garbage to Metro Vancouver's new incinerators (cost: up to $130/tonne) instead of burying it in our own facility (cost $20/tonne).

But the report conceded that our landfill currently performs worse than an incinerator, measured measured in greenhouse gas impacts. This is because of the methane produced when we bury food waste and other organic materials underground.

So Vancouver's challenge is this:

Can Mayor Robertson and his Council get behind a massive mobilization to get every last shred of organic material out of the City's landfill? Can we do this by February 2010? Can we come from behind and score Gold in the Zero Waste competition? Now that would be an Olympic legacy we could all benefit from...

Pic: Oakland, California organics program

Waste plan coming off the rails?

At 9:30 tomorrow morning Vancouver City Council will receive another strongly worded report from Tom Timm, the City's General Manager of Engineering Services, about Metro Vancouver's increasingly controversial waste management plan.

In a January report, Timm flagged a provision in the just-announced draft regional plan to double the burden on the Vancouver landfill while the region tries to site waste incinerators. This resulted in a rushed motion by the Metro Vancouver Board to seek approval to export waste to the US if necessary.

Now Timm is recommending to Council that it take a political stand along with other municipalities in the region to block the juggernaut regional waste planning process, which has been fast-tracked to drive home a completed plan by the autumn.

Timm suggests the process may not be compliant with the Ministry of Environment's requirements for amending regional waste plans because of its "very abbreviated and superficial consultation process with stakeholders and the public." The last waste plan took four years to complete.

Vancouver is really concerned that Metro's plan would effectively shut down the Vancouver Landfill by 2020, seventeen years early.

This would cost the city significant future revenues from the landfill. The operating cost is $20 while the disposal fee is $68. Metro, Vancouver and Delta share the profits under the provisions of a Tripartite Agreement.

But switching from landfilling to incineration would significantly raise waste disposal costs for every municipality in the region. The regional rate for each tonne of garbage will double.

"There has been no technical, scientific or engineering analyses conducted to support the proposal that waste-to-energy (WTE) s the sole appropriate strategy for handling all of the region's solid waste," the report says.

"There has been no analysis of the sensitivity of the operating costs for WTE to the quantity of waste processed. The significant capital expenditures for WTE facilities also require consideration."

Politicians at the regional Waste Management Committee last week were grilling Metro Vancouver staff about these same concerns. With civic elections on the horizon, they may not want to be committing billions of dollars on projects that are not tested technically, let alone politically.

pic: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=22877&in_page_id=34

Plastic bags targeted again

What do South Africa, San Francisco, Leaf Rapids (Manitoba) and China have in common? They all cracked down on stores handing out free plastic bags.

The Australian government stopped short of a legal ban, instead challenging retailers to cut back on bag use voluntarily, achieving mixed results. The Irish government imposed a punitive tax on bags and consumption quickly dropped by over 90% ~ prompting the government to ratchet up the tax even higher.

These tough actions have been popular with the public and the plastics industry is going to have to act fast to stem the rising tide of public revulsion against the ubiquitous eyesore, dubbed South Africa's "national flower" because it was littered so profusely along roadsides.

Local politicians here in the Lower Mainland are sensing which way this wind is blowing. Will we be next?

But here's something to think about: the bags are only popular because our local governments obligingly collect them from our homes and dispose of them for us.

Isn't it about time our communities stopped enabling our addiction to waste by making it so irresistably easy to get rid of all our useless throw-aways?

Are we ready to tell our politicians to put a ban on disposing of plastic bags in the city garbage? That would sure make consumers would think twice about accepting a free bag.

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?

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.

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?