Reinventing our cities: is waste a public responsibility?

It's time to ask ourselves whether we want entire departments of our local governments devoted to management of waste.

The city of Vancouver spends upwards of $13 million dollars each year sending trucks around to collect our garbage and empty our recycling containers. Another $6 million emptying street litter bins.

So we're incurring public costs of more than $20 million a year to manage what we call "municipal waste." But is that waste really municipal?

Three-quarters of what we set out at the curb is throw-away products and packaging.

A strong case can be made that these are not "municipal" wastes at all. They are private wastes, produced by companies profiting from disposability. They are sold to consumers who turn to their local governments to make the problem go away.

EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) is a policy that would turn the clock back to a hundred years ago, before the birth of the Throw Away Society.

In 1900 most of our waste (75%) was ashes from heating our homes. Look for the blocked-off openings in the exterior walls of the basement in older homes, where the coal chute used to deposit fuel for the furnace.

Then there was food waste from our kitchens. Not surprisingly, our great-grandparents threw out about the same amount of food waste as we do. Stomachs have not changed much in all that time.

What has changed is that each of us produces 13 times more throw-away products and packaging than our grandparents did. They lived in an era before plastic water bottles, "milk to go," squeezable ketchup bottles, Swiffers, etc. etc. etc.

You may think life is better now, with all those conveniences. But surely it doesn't make sense for public servants to be providing the clean-up for all our throw-aways. How much more sensible for the producers to take them back and recycle them, the way beer bottles still go back to be refilled in this country of ours.

If we could eliminate all the private wastes from our public garbage system, that might just free up resources to spend composting food waste. This is a project that has been woefully neglected while our city chases after milk jugs and yogurt containers and squeezable ketchup containers...

Pic: The Benson Bubblers were a gift to the city of Portland from a rich businessman to facilitate the provision of public water for free.

A crisis of leadership

Two years after our local politicians committed to a "Zero Waste Challenge," they all seem to be falling off the wagon.

Why are they sitting quiet while their staff enshrine a $3 billion expenditure on incinerators as the lynchpin of a new waste management plan? Did they think we wouldn't notice if they gave us a landfill in the sky, as long as they called it Zero Waste?

Then last week they approved trainloads of trash heading to the USA -- just until we get those incinerators built.

The burdens of leadership are heavy. History will judge whether building better burners will solve the waste/climate change crisis.

And the upcoming elections will judge whether appealing to the public's greed, laziness and apathy will inspire support from voters.

I'm waiting for someone in public office to stand up and say that burning waste is a dumb idea. Is anyone out there?

Council to decide on plastic bag action

Today Zero Waste Vancouver will be on the speaker's list, along with many other organizations and concerned individual citizens, as City Council considers a motion to "phase out" plastic bags.

Will our city join the growing number of communities that are taking tough action to curb plastic bag use?

This blog has taken note of recent landmark legislation in places as diverse as China and Ireland, London UK and Leaf Rapids MB. Even Uganda has a law banning plastic bags.

The sanctions range from taxes (Ireland) to outright bans (Leaf Rapids) to retailer take-back requirements (New York City) to requirements that retailers use only biodegradable bags (San Francisco).

Politicians are safe in taking strong action on this issue, because they are responding to a deep public concern. The plastic bag has become an object of revulsion all over the world.

Photo documentation of the impacts on wildlife has put the plastics industry and the retail industry on notice: do something to clean up your act or lose the privilege of doing business.

Name-brand retailers like Ikea and Whole Foods are scrambling to claim the high ground, while their industry associations still insist that public education will solve the problem (plastic bags don't litter, people litter...).

The Retail Council's proposed fixes for Vancouver do not include retailer take-back. They haven't grasped the principle of cradle-to-cradle recycling, where producers are expected to provide take-back and recycling, rather than counting on public garbage services.

If you can handle it, here are some great online sources of ghastly photos of plastic's impact on marine life:

Planet Ark still photos

Message in the Waves videos

pic: http://www.answers.com/topic/vancouver-city-hall

Styrofoam ban in Toronto?

Communities do their best to pick up after the Throw-Away Society. This is a thankless task that costs local residents and businesses in North America tens of billions of dollars each year and engenders more complaints than kudos.

But when a city goes to the trouble to recycle a product only to find there's no market for the collected materials ~ what's the solution? Check out this interesting article by Adria Vasil in Toronto NOW magazine:

"The new year did not commence well for Canadian recycling, especially right here in Toronto. In late December, 10 months before the city was poised to start adding polystyrene, aka styrofoam, as well as plastic bags to its blue bins, Canada’s only dedicated styrofoam recycler sent out a closure notice, effective immediately...." (pic: NOW)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.