Council of Councils learn about garbage, not recycling

Gosh, if you had a chance to get all the councillors from the 23 municipalities in the Lower Mainland in the same room to learn something new about waste ~ in the context, of course, of the Zero Waste Challenge ~ wouldn't you think there'd be something to talk about besides burning and burying garbage?

But, darn-it-all, that was the opportunity squandered this past weekend, when Metro Vancouver convened the Council of Councils for its first meeting in a year.

Here we are, trying to imagine a path to a world without waste, and our regional authority responsible for planning offers three speakers who address, respectively:

• Processing garbage through mechanical and biological treatment;


• Incineration of garbage;


• Gasification of garbage.

The middle topic was dubbed reassuringly "traditional technologies" guiding the good aldermen and women into viewing striped smokestacks as benign monuments on the urban landscape. Sort of like the church steeples of yesteryear.

Why weren't the speakers talking about the next great challenge in waste reduction: food waste composting. While we're busy building incinerators, the regional district of Nanaimo has just completing a successful pilot of food waste composting.

In 2000, when Metro Vancouver was laying down $4.5 million for a hundred-year landfill, Halifax launched a full-scale composting program that cut their waste by fifty percent within months.

Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto... why are they able to not only talk about Zero Waste, but do something about it? Is it a new set of politicians we need, or a shake-up in Metro Vancouver management so they stop steering us down the path of burning and burying.

Wouldn't it be fun to get busy solving the waste problem instead of talking about ways to prolong it?

Break the cycle of waste

Dear elected officials:

You're starting to wake up to the financial costs of Metro's proposed solution to our garbage problem.

The $1.4 - $3.0 billion dollars in capital expenditures.

The disposal fees that would be double what we are paying now.

The double-billing. We will pay twice to dispose of the same waste, first to incinerate it, and then to dispose of the toxic ash ~ a quarter of a million tonnes of ash will be disposed of each year.

Metro staff refuse to give you hard numbers on the actual costs of their plan, saying they prefer to set "visionary" goals for us to follow.

But what sort of a "vision" is incineration?

An incinerator is a machine that needs to be fed. The incinerators that would be built under the Metro staff's plan would consume one and a half million tonnes of waste each year. For comparison, this is approximately 50% more waste than we dispose of today at all three of our regional disposal facilities.

Where will the waste come from? All the useless products that your citizens complain about will continue to be produced because we will need them for fuel. The excess packaging, the plastic bags, the toxic toys, the Lexan bottles, the unrepairable appliances, the fast-food packaging.

We will continue to be part of the dangerous cycle of poor product design that cities and towns like ours make possible by providing landfills and incinerators.

This is not a new problem: the Throw-Away Society with its rising tide of disposable products has been a concern for generations.

What is new is the global impacts. We are about to enter into a very rocky period of human history: the end of cheap oil and the unpredictable effects of climate change caused by our profligate use of oil.

We have become dependent on people in poor countries to supply us with the food and products we buy, use up, and throw away. Those people are now leaving their workplaces and joining in food riots. They are hungry because we have disrupted grain markets in a desperate effort to fuel our cars with ethanol. We are starving them to feed our cars.

The new container terminals and perimeter roads and incinerators may all be idled if the people we count on to fill them with cheap goods don't have enough to eat.

Will prosperous cities like ours have the courage to break the cycle of waste? Or will we build 19th Century infrastructure to allow it to continue?

Who will decide?

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

Why didn't the politicians see Guy Dauncey's letter?

At the end of January, Guy Dauncey wrote a letter to the Metro Vancouver Board on behalf of the BC Sustainable Energy Association. But you won't find it in Metro Vancouver's public record.

Dauncey was writing to express the association's concern about Metro Vancouver's proposal to build waste incinerators.

The letter cited the fact that half to two-thirds of the carbon in our waste is of fossil origin (including plastics, textiles and rubber) which will emit 240,000 - 730,000 tonnes of "climate-relevant" carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, just like the CO2 from gasoline and coal.

Dauncey also mentioned health concerns from incineration. He is Co-Chair of Prevent Cancer Now, an organization that has just been awarded a grant to look at the link between waste incinerators and cancer.

But there is no mention of the BC SEA letter in the agendas or minutes of Metro Vancouver Board meetings since the end of January. Did our political leaders see this letter? Why is it not part of the public record?

(I found the letter entirely by chance on the Fraser Valley Regional District website.)

Mixing recyclables a bad idea

Is your city switching to "single-stream" recycling, so you put all your recyclable materials together instead of separating paper products, bottles and cans?

If so, complain!

Single-stream recycling is a slippery slope that will take us right back where we started before recycling. Remember: the more materials you put in a recycling container, the more it resembles a garbage can.

The materials you recycle lose value when they're scrambled together. Someone has to be paid to unscramble them. And that's not all: valuable paper gets contaminated with the dreck from dirty containers. If you want your city to get top dollar for the materials from your home or workplace, insist that they give those materials the careful handling they deserve, starting with your participation at the curb.

Ask how much revenue your city is earning from mixed materials, compared with other cities that collect paper and containers separately.

Single-stream recycling is favoured by garbage companies who want to look good by appearing to divert large volumes of (low-value) material. Mainly they want to reduce their up-front collection costs, even if the cost is passed on to the recycler.

Every nickel they save is a dollar lost for the environment when the messed-up materials can't be used to make new products. Dumbing-down recycling is not the way to build a healthy new recycling economy.

A lot of gasification

First there was the phone call on Monday, January 7th from Mayor Joe Trasolini of Port Moody. He wanted to help me understand the new plasma gasification technology for solid waste. It is not incineration, he assured me. He had visited the Plasco plant and looked thoroughly at it, and he was "pushing" this technology (his word) as the solution to our growing waste problem.

Then a few weeks later the phone rang again. It was a representative of Plasco. He was offering a chance to sit down with Plasco CEO Rod Bryden to learn more about the technology. I told him it was not a good use of either Mr. Bryden's or my time, since I had read Plasco's publicity about plasma technology.

Then last week another phone call. This time it was a familiar name: Ron Unger. Ron was getting back into waste management consulting after a number of years. He wanted to sit down with me and get some background to help him with a new client. I agreed to meet Ron for coffee.

And who did his new client turn out to be? Plasco.

I gave Ron more than two hours of my time and asked him to take back the following message to his client:

There is no way that I will ever support the development of a plasma gasification plant for my region's solid waste. In fact, I will do everything in my power as a citizen to ensure that such a plant is never built in Metro Vancouver.

Like mass-burn incineration, which I also oppose, plasma gasification converts garbage to CO2 and dumps it straight into the atmosphere. This includes biogenic carbon (yard waste, food waste, paper) that could be used to replenish the soil, as well as fossil carbon (plastics) that we should put safely back in the ground where it came from. It also includes the embodied carbon (the energy that was consumed to make the products destroyed through incineration/gasification) -- which may turn out to be the greatest waste of all.

For a really clear explanation of the embodied carbon concept, listen to Clarissa Morawski answering the nonsense peddled by another of Plasco's salesmen, Conservative MP Bob Mills. Mills and Morawski were interviewed on The Current last week. You'll have to wait for the second segment of the show, and the second half of the segment, to hear Clarissa.

Now, Plasco, please take me off your distribution list. It's bad enough to be mined for counter-arguments by paid hacks. But I am particularly uncomfortable when elected politicians "push" specific technologies. This is not their job. It makes me wonder who they are really working for.

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?