Is this Zero Waste?

This picture will be of historic interest someday.
It will show how we managed recycling before we became a Zero Waste society.

People will look at this picture and laugh ruefully. Weren't people clueless then! Those were the days when recycling was just an extension of your public garbage service. No wonder people treated that paper like garbage.

In the Zero Waste Communities that are yet to come, "recycling" will be liberated from the Garbage & Recycling Department and integrated into the commercial core of the community.

Recycling shops will occupy cozy storefronts and clean indoor premises rather than being relegated to a derelict corner of a parking lot.

Discards will be "goods." They will be handled carefully, sorted, traded, upgraded. Specialized shops will be able to give you top dollar for your discards, or lose business. Recyclers will entice customers with daily specials.

There will be Designer Recycler outlets specialize in Name Brand products to be returned, repaired or replaced. There will be unique outlets specializing in a particular line of goods: paper products? plastic products? electronics? hardware? athletic equipment? sewing notions? used books? kitchen gadgets? office supplies? bike or auto accessories?

There will be Discard Malls where a whole range of recycling centres will be clustered, one-stop-shopping for cleaning out the garage or the basement ~ or finding that item you need.

This will happen when cities and towns stop competing against private recycling services, but instead use their zoning and economic development powers to encourage the emergence of stores like Urban Ore in Berkeley (closer to home visit Jack's in Burnaby), consignment stores, second hand shops, bottle depots, used book stores...

The evolution to a Zero Waste society will happen when we get our Engineering Services departments working on food waste composting and hand over the recycling file to the Community Planning department.

Planners will help us make recycling part of the fabric of our community, a way to grow the tax base and create jobs, a way to attract tourists, a way to tap into local assets and express the community's unique style and character. And a way to eliminate landfills.

pic: Gibson Park Plaza Recycling Depot, operated by the Sunshine Coast Regional District

Ashcroft all over again?

On Saturday I spent a couple of hours at the Earth Day celebration at Jericho Park.

I spoke to several dozen people about the plan to build waste incinerators in our region. Not a single person had heard that Metro Vancouver was intending to do this.

Interestingly, two people had seen the ads for the public meetings about waste management, but they had not understood that the meetings were about a plan to build incinerators.

Some of the people I spoke to were worried about possible health impacts. More were worried, as I am, about the climate change effects from burning plastics that will emit CO2. Most of all, people wondered why we would be spending money to burn all those throw-away products that shouldn't be sold in the first place. What better way to lock in the Throw-Away Society?

In 2000, without any public discussion, the GVRD Board agreed to spend $4.5 million on Ashcroft Ranch. Another $5.5 million were subsequently spent trying to get approval for a 100-year landfill there.

That mistake will pale in comparison to the blunder we are about to commit with the staff's new so-called waste solution. The Metro Vancouver Board agreed on Friday to authorize a quarter of a billion dollars in new debt to build incinerators.

A challenge

The provincial government just announced that two more product categories are going to come under the recycling regulation.

Producers of mercury containing products, notably the CFL lamps that are now flooding the market, are going to have to present a business plan for taking back burned out bulbs from consumers. (Major retailers are already taking back CFLs.)

And a broader range of electronic equipment is going to be collected back through programs provided by their producers, like the program for TVs and computer recycling system launched last August. We'll be able to dispose of defunct stereos, cellphones and other hand-held devices in programs paid for by producers and scrutinized by the government.

These programs are the envy of other jurisdictions. In most places, programs for taking back and recycling throw-away products and packaging are provided at public expense.

The purpose of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is to stimulate better product design and marketing systems by shifting the cost of waste back onto those with control over product design.

BC is one of the world leaders in EPR. During the 1990s those of us who were involved in pushing for it had a lot of hope that we had found a way to turn the waste tide.

Throw-away products and packaging comprise three-quarters of everything we throw away. Biodegradable materials like food and yard waste the remaining quarter. We thought we had found the formula for Zero Waste. Zero Waste = EPR + composting.

It makes good sense to make producers take back toxic products. But how about EPR for the high-volume trash that has filled our landfills prematurely? Those huge detergent bottles, for instance. Carpeting. Unrepairable furniture?

If we didn't create such huge haysacks of garbage, the needles would be easier to find.

Something in common

That's me in the second bed on the right. I hope I didn't breathe on any of you out there and expose you to the pestilence that has struck me down. If you get it, cancel all your meetings and go to bed.

While I wasn't sitting in the Alice McKay room last night listening to Metro Vancouver staff talk about incinerators, I was thinking about our region.

I was thinking about the dairy farmers in the Fraser Valley. The fishboats in Steveston and False Creek. The people handing out home cooked food at the Baisakhi festival. Our Chinese Greengrocer. All the coffee shops. The community gardens. The cranberry bogs in Richmond. The artisanal bakeries. The neighbourhood Tim Hortons wherever we go.

What if we just started by getting these people together to offer their pungent wastes as a community resource?

San Francisco sells compost to California vineyards. We've got vineyards. Why can't we do that?

Pic: 1918 Spanish Flu

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

Give us a Green Bin!

What should we tell our civic leaders at the public meeting downtown tonight?

What can they do right now, without waiting for Metro Vancouver to sort out whether to build three new incinerators or six?

What can they do to have an immediate positive impact on the environment?

The answer: give us a Green Bin program.

It is not that hard to get the sloppy wet stuff out of our gargage. Toronto loves their Green Bin program. Food waste is the main source of the greenhouse gas methane that makes our landfills one of the top contributors to climate change.

It's something we should be taking responsibility for.

We have seen the future, and it is green.

The new pollution

The Earth Day celebration spills over into today's morning paper.

Typically, the Vancouver Sun sends us a confusing message, from a reassuring "corporate embrace" of Earth Day in the United States to a grim, rub-our-noses-in-it reminder that we Canadians are the world's No. 3 polluter.

And what is the new pollution that earns us the Bronze Medal of shame? Carbon dioxide.

Who would have thought that CO2 would be called a "pollutant"?

The fact is, we have licked many of the conventional pollutants that worried us in the 19th and 20th Centuries. We solved those problems by exporting our industrial production.

It's someone else's community that suffers environmental and health impacts to produce the low-cost goods that we bring home and stuff in our garages and garbage cans.

Instead of supplying ourselves with daily necessities, we supply the world with fossil fuels. Most of our CO2 pollution, according to the StatsCan report cited in the Sun, comes from "the production of fossil fuels... for export." We are increasing our CO2 pollution this way faster than any other industrialized country.

And the rest of the world suffers twice: first from the direct impacts of supplying us with our daily necessities, and then from the global impacts of climate change caused by our supplying them with fossil energy.

The StatsCan report says we are each responsible for 23 tonnes of CO2 per year. I bet they didn't count "embodied carbon."

Embodied carbon is the CO2 pollution emitted on our behalf by those faraway factories that supply us with our daily necessities. Bill Rees calls it appropriated carrying capacity.

When we burn or bury our trash, we not only dump the physical carbon content of our waste directly into the atmosphere, we simultaneously stimulate those factories to stoke the furnaces to send in the next containerload, creating, of course, secure markets for our fossil fuel exports....and continuing the cycle of waste.

We can do better, but only if we do things differently.