Metro doesn't get it

Metro's waste plan could have been written in 1990. It is completely uninformed by all the important developments that have happened over the past 20 years. It's like they've been in a time warp.

This province is setting the pace for North America -- even the world -- in Extended Producer Responsibility, which will eliminate waste by shifting waste management from a public bail-out to a strict producer/consumer responsibility.

Through EPR, we could be the leaders in re-visioning recycling, so it becomes part of the shopping experience rather than part of the garbage collection experience.

If we do it right, producers will be courting consumers with enticements to bring back their worn-out products so they can be safely "stewarded" from cradle to cradle. Retailers are already showing signs of recognizing this opportunity: London Drugs taking back styrofoam, retailers making a commitment to cut plastic bag use in half.

But Metro is doing it wrong. Rather than building on these promising starts, Metro is proposing welfare for waste.

Metro's recycling innovation: a bunch of publicly funded Eco-Centres. These centres will compete against EPR. They will steal business from the small businesses that could provide better service at no cost to the taxpayer. Corinne Atwood, Executive Director of the BC Bottle Depot Association, made an impassioned statement at the Metro consultation session in Delta last week. She -- and I -- want to see the recycling industry grow, but Metro will kill it.

The rest of the world is looking to British Columbia to show the way to cradle-to-cradle EPR recycling. Metro's ill-conceived public Eco Centres will fail at recycling and their staggeringly costly public incinerators will turn the next generation's resources into Greenhouse Gas.

Surely we can do better. After four years of trying to talk sense to Metro, Zero Waste Vancouver is going to give up and start working with local municipalities to pursue the vision of community economic development that EPR promises. Municipalities will fill the gap that Metro has left.

Municipalities busy solving waste problem while Metro dithers

Metro Vancouver is increasingly living in a world of its own, isolated from the reality unfolding all around it.

Two cities have openly challenged the regional government's proposed solid waste management plan. More cities will defect as the preposterous cost and risk of Metro's proposal become clear.

And meanwhile, our cities are busy building programs to eliminate the million tonnes of "non-recyclable waste" that Metro wants to burn.

Half the waste in our region is compostable organics. Port Coquitlam and Port Moody are already reducing their waste by collecting food scraps for composting. The City of Vancouver is prepared to ban compostable organics from disposal in a mere 5 years. By that time there will be composting plants and anaerobic digestion facilities across the region turning these materials into soil amendments and truly clean energy. Abbotsford has already approved a special facility to turn agriculatural manure into clean energy through anaerobic digestion.

The other half of our waste is the throw-away products and packaging that have become a hallmark of our Disposable Society. But these, too, are not inevitable. Policies are in place to make them obsolete.

A ground-breaking waste reduction policy pioneered in British Columbia two generations ago when the Social Credit Party introduced North America's first mandatory deposit refunds on beer and soft drink containers will end the municipal responsibility for cleaning up after the producers of throw-away products.

Producers are being called to the table one sector of industry at a time, and told to take back their products and recycle them: old paint, old televisions and computers, used oil, tires -- soon any appliance with a cord will go back to be recycled instead of ending up in our municipal waste system. The current minister of environment has told municipalities that ultiimately provincial law will require producer responsibility for all products and packaging.

Our municipal and provincial governments are busy solving the waste problem while Metro Vancouver is still caught in a time-warp.

Cities defecting from Metro's incinerator plan

Two data points don't make a trend yet, but Metro staff are probably not going to be pleased that a second city appears to be defecting from the region's incinerator plan.

Coquitlam Council's Standing Committee on Energy, Utilities and Environment received a report on Monday that is sharply critical of assumptions in Metro's proposed waste management plan and recommends asking the Metro Board to develop a better case for building incinerators.

The report presents a number of "issues that are yet to be resolved," mainly relating to Metro's projections of the actual cost of incineration compared to other options. The report calls for Metro to either put out a request for proposals with detailed cost estimates or have an independent review of Metro staff's assumptions.

Cost and risk are important issues for the region's municipalities.

"Local ratepayers will have to carry the full cost of capital and operations [of new disposal facilities] as it is highly unlikely that other levels of government will participate in capital cost-sharing, unlike in other Metro Vancouver services where senior governments often assist with capital costs."

(Metro's draft plan proposes senior government financial support.)

The report also covers a number of measures that Coquitlam is undertaking right now to reduce waste, including a going city-wide with a comprehensive composting program. A successful pilot this year found that the city-wide program could cut disposal costs by $70K per year.

Pic: Lou Sekora, long-time Coquitlam politician who leads the city's Regional Solid Waste Solutions Standing Committee appointed by the Mayor.

E-waste program success story?

In BC we take computers back to be recycled in a program that is authorized by Sony, Dell, HP, Apple, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

All those good names and logos are on the line that our e-waste won't end up in the place pictured here.

This is the place where our federal government sent its e-waste until good work by the Basel Action Network brought images like this home.

The timing couldn't have been better. British Columbia's landmark, earth-changing Industry Product Stewardship legislation was shining the spotlight on major brand-owners, calling them to the table, saying: "This is your problem. Solve it."

The brand-owners got the message. Seeing the handwriting on the wall -- that they were going to have to take back e-waste and recycle it -- they developed a sheet of Vendor Qualifications setting out for the recycling companies wanting to do business with them what could, and couldn't, happen to all those products bearing their brands. What couldn't happen was prison labour or export to non-OECD/EU countries (such as China).

The Electronic Stewardship Association of BC is the group of brand-owners that oversees what happens to ewaste in our province. They are asking their Advisory Committee (on which Zero Waste Vancouver has a seat) what should be their priorities for the coming year when they sit down in the fall to develop an Annual Plan for 2011.

What should I tell them on your behalf?

For myself, I'm going to ask them what they are doing to avoid the public relations disaster being suffered this week by the Ontario government, which is allowing e-waste to end up in landfills.

Pic: Huffington Post -- The World's Most Bizarre [and heartwrenching] Man-Made Disasters.

plastic teabags?????

Day One of Vancouver's new food scraps composting program:

Bev Ramey of Nature Vancouver & BC Nature writes that she has found ghosts of past teabags all over her garden.

Turns out some company has switched from biodegradable to nylon teabags. Bev put them in her compost bin all last year. Can someone find out who that company is, so we can start sending them emails?

Pic: piansuo.com

Metro is hiding data on waste quantities

At last Friday's meeting of the Metro Board I requested specific information that should be made available to the public before the consultation on the regional waste plan begins.

I was speaking of information requested in a letter of April 1, 2010, signed by myself and three others and copied to all members of the Board as well as the Minister of Environment and other interested parties.

I said to the Board that it was impossible for the public to evaluate the propsed waste plan without this information.

One of the things we asked for was the annual solid waste management plan reports for the years 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

At the meeting, I held up a copy of the Annual Report from 2004. It is no longer accessible on Metro's website. And it was the last Annual Report ever published, as far as I know.

Why are these reports so important?

Metro is basing its case for building a huge incinerator on the premise that we are running out of landfill space. They have been instilling fear in the region for years that we are about to be buried under a tide of garbage if we don't act quickly to build new disposal facilities.

Metro introduced its draft plan by saying (see page 3 of 13 of this report) that "waste quantities in Metro Vancouver are increasing every year as the population expands and particularly since 2004 when the economic fortunes of the region improved."

Far from being substantiated by annual reports, this claim was actually contradicted by a staff report to the Metro Finance Committee in July 2009 (Item 5.1, page 23 of 72).

This report advised the Committee that the waste disposal "tipping fee" has to be raised from $71/tonne to $82/tonne this year because of "declining waste flows".

The report advised the Committee that, along with declining waste flows, another factor that will drive up household costs still further (to as high as $126 per household by the year 2014) is "[t]he financial impacts of the current draft of the Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) which is currently in the consultation process."

"In particular," the report explains, "the [rate increase] projection reflects the debt service costs associated with the projected construction of new waste management facilities at a cost estimated, at this stage, to be likely in excess of $700 million...."

This report not only contradicts Metro's public messaging about our waste, it also discloses the huge financial risk we will incur if we build too much disposal capacity at huge public cost.

Is our waste growing -- or declining? If it's declining, why are they proposing we go out and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new incinerators that we may not need? Why won't Metro show us the actual data about our waste?

The Board listened politely to my presentation, but took no action on our request.

Vancouver takes a stand against Metro's incinerator plan

It was a remarkable reversal of the evasive namby-pambyness that has been the hallmark of Metro politicians in their public statements about our region's proposed waste plan.

The City of Vancouver came into last Friday's showdown meeting of the Metro Board with four amendments to the region's plan before it went out for consultation.

Vancouver's amendments were not adopted by the Board (they were "deferred to Committee" in one last gesture of timidity by the Metro Board) but they are going to prove a game-changer. They were accurately deemed "contrary to the motion" on the floor (meaning that they fundamentally altered the Plan).

But the Vancouver Amendments will be appended to the plan when it goes out for public consultation. And they are sure to be the focus of public interest because they finally speak to the real needs of our region.

Here they are:

• set a waste reduction target - Vancouver proposed a 56% reduction in waste generation (from 1.65 tonnes to 1.1 tonnes of waste per capita per year). Presently the Plan contains only a "diversion" target to increase the percentage of waste we recycle. But embedded in the Plan is an assumption that our waste will actually increase in the years to come, justifying the construction of the big new incinerator.


• ban all compostable organics from disposal - this sends a clear policy signal to everyone in the region that we are serious about reducing our waste and about reducing the horrific climate impacts of our landfills through simple measures that everyone can understand and contribute to.


• ban all commercial wood waste from disposal - this will cut an additional 90,000 tonnes of waste from public waste facilities, in addition to reducing the appalling wastefulness of the construction industry in our wood-producing province.


• remove "combustion" from the waste-to-energy options - this is the coup de grace. It would leave some niche forms of energy recovery on the table, but prohibit the traditional mass-burn incineration that is currently proposed.

The Vancouver Amendments may be the instruments for derailing a plan that has been sliding towards approval for three years -- despite being fundamentally out of step with public desire for waste reduction.

Vancouver may have created the space for other political leaders to step forward and take a stand for real waste reduction. It may grate on some suburban politicians to be annexed into the "Green Capital" -- but their alternative will be to make a convincing case for spending a half-billion dollars on a waste incinerator when schools, parks and libraries are being cut back.

Pic: Vancouver Green Capital