The future is of garbage is plastics.

Vancouver City Council signed on last week to the Greenest City Action Team's ambitious plan of cutting the city's waste by 40% in ten years.

What will our waste look like when we meet that goal? The biggest change is going to be a dramatic reduction in compostable organics.

Four Metro Vancouver pilot food scrap composting programs are already underway in smaller cities in the region, and the City of Vancouver is preparing to roll out the first phase of a city-wide composting program within weeks.

In addition to food scraps composting, both Metro Vancouver and the city are targeting wood and paper products for more aggressive recycling programs. The reduction of food, wood and paper products is going to change the composition of the region's waste.

A report presented to Vancouver City Council last March suggests that this will have a big impact on the GHG emissions of incinerators compared with landfills.

Currently a tonne of waste sent to the Vancouver landfill emits the equivalent of 382 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. Incinerating that waste, by comparison, emits only 336 kg of CO2 equivalent.

But in ten years, because of the change in the composition of our waste, the landfill will have lower GHG emissions than an incinerator. Because there will be less biodegradable material going to the landfill, there will be fewer methane emissions. The study estimates that the GHG emissions from a tonne of waste in 2020 will be reduced to 243 kg of CO2 equivalent.

The emissions from an incinerator burning that tonne of waste, on the other hand, will increase to 460 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. Why is that?

Because when we get all those biodegradable organics out of our waste what's going to be left is a higher and higher proportion of non-recyclable plastics. (Remember, plastics are made from fossil fuels.)

One more reason to hold the order on waste incinerators.

Cache Creek expansion shifts focus from CO2 to CH4

Belcorp's announcement last week that it is committed to expanding the Cache Creek landfill for Metro Vancouver garbage takes us out of the fire into the frying pan.

Belcorp is likely to get a permit to expand the interior landfill. This certainly will make it twice as hard for Metro Vancouver to defend its case for building waste-to-energy incinerators at a cost of $3 billion, including ongoing disposal fees that will be double or triple today's rates.

But will that extra 15 million tonnes of easy disposal capacity lull our region into dealing with our waste problem the way we always have: loosening our belt rather than going on a diet?

Metro Vancouver is close to the bottom of the list in the provincial rankings of per-capita waste disposal. We produce 731 kg of waste per capita each year, compared to the provincial average of 609 kg ~ or Victoria's rate of 452 kg per person.

But an even bigger challenge we'll face if Belcorp lets us loosen our belt is going to be gas.

It's not a pretty subject, but when we shovel untreated garbage full of juicy organics into a landfill, the enteric bacteria in the landfill's bowels produce staggering quantities of potent and smelly methane.

An urgent priority for public policy is to reduce society's contribution of methane to the atmosphere.

The provincial government is seeking public comment right now on a landfill gas regulation that won't help much, because its focus is on landfill gas capture rather than landfill gas prevention.

Turns out it's hard to capture methane ~ the estimates of efficiency range from 2% - 90%. At an intensity 21 times worse than carbon dioxide, methane does not provide that much room for error.

Right now our region is sending 350,000 tonnes of compostable organics to landfills every year ~ simply because we have no alternative. Add to that over 30,000 tonnes of pet wastes (there's a subject you will be hearing more about!). We could cut our waste by one-third ~ and prevent climate change ~ just by setting up programs for organics.

Back in the late 1880s, New York City's Commissioner of Streets Colonel George E. Waring, Jr. said:

“There is no surer index of the degree of civilization of a community than the manner in which it treats its organic wastes.”

Pic: Kidzworld.com

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)

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.

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?

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.