One sided panel criticized at Metro Forum

OK, Metro Vancouver CAO Johnny Carline is no longer pretending that he is open-minded about how we should manage waste in the region. He is reported in today's Vancouver Sun to be in "the burn-it camp."

But yesterday's news warned that he will face "a wall of public opposition" if he tries to move his agenda forward. And he got a taste of that at the first of Metro' sgarbage forums yesterday.

Metro was repeatedly critized for presenting a one sided panel. Here is some
background on the "experts" Metro flew in from Europe to speak at the forums and a Myth Busters reference sheet for deconstructing the experts' testimony.

These were being handed out by the new Zero Waste BC Network. A whole lot of new people are helping to build that wall of opposition.

The experts will face their fourth and final audience this noon in New Westminster.

Take a day off work to talk rationally about incinerators

We hope lots of folks can take time off work next week to attend the Metro Vancouver Forums on Waste Management. They'll be held from noon to 2 pm on September 15 (Vancouver) and September 16 (New Westminster).

Tell the boss that $3 billion dollars and your family's health are at stake. In times like these we have to get our priorities straight.

Pic: image from GAIA, used by Sierra Club of/du Canada: "Sacrifice Zones are Not Acceptable"

Here we come, Covanta!

In the 1980s a powerful North American incinerator industry was hog-tied by local citizens groups.

Elected politicians in dozens of local communities were nodding in a torpor ~ a state of altered consciousness induced by the empty promises of incinerator salesmen. They were about to sign contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars that would have shackled the communities with debt (to say nothing of the unmeasurable impacts on their health and safety).

But in one community after another, citizens managed to snap their Mayors and Councillors out of their trance just in time. Over 250 waste incinerator projects across North America were cancelled between 1985 and 1995.

The citizens were successful because of a crackling information network that connected local communities together and dispensed the magic weapons they needed -- facts and figures that could dispell the misinformation from the incinerator salesmen and release their politicians from their daze.

That movement was led in large part by Paul Connett, who will be stopping through Vancouver next week. Connett is coming to BC to help the Interior community of Christina Lake. They need to talk some sense into the Kootenay Boundary Regional District Board, which will shortly be considering a proposal to burn petroleum waste from California in that bucolic corner of the province.

Connett says that the incinerator industry has risen from the ashes of its 1980s defeat, and in response he is pulling together a new citizens' movement to defeat it again.

The focus of the new campaign will be a company called Covanta Energy, which he describes as "a giant octopus." Like a lot of companies in the garbage industry, Covanta's strategy is acquisition. They grow by taking over other companies and then spreading into new communities.

We will be Ground Zero for a Covanta campaign. The company is taking over Veolia, who currently run Metro Vancouver's Burnaby incinerator. And they are also pitching a proposal to politicians to rescue the community of Gold River from economic ruin by building a big garbage incinerator.

Pic: Myzerowaste.com

Will pols listen to Swedish salesmen or their own constituents?

Today the four regional politicians who went to Sweden last month were summoned to report back to their peers on what they learned about "waste to energy."

To hear the travellers tell, Sweden is a perfect fairy tale land where everything is harmoniously integrated through "systems thinking." A cheery sort of Escheresque community in which waste is tranformed into pure energy. It was all summed up in diagrams that the travellers brought home and put up on the screen: "Symbio-City."

Waste incineration in Sweden happens in clean buildings that fit right into the urban landscape. (The buildings have smokestacks, but, the delgation was told with wry Swedish humour, the smokestacks serve no purpose. They were just put there to comply with quaint rules that were written before technology advanced.)

"We saw a different culture there," testified Metro engineer Ken Carrusca, who was along on the trip, "People carry their own ceramic plates." In one travel photo, West Van Mayor Pamela Goldsmith-Jones is indeed seen picnicking in a park holding a tray with a china cup and plate.

So what can we learn from their visit? How do we transform ourselves from rude louts who line up at Tim Horton drive-throughs and pitch our cups into landfills, into citizens worth of living in magical Symbio-Cities like the ones in Sweden?

The answer, it was clearly implied, is that politicians must exert "political will."

They must show leadership and overcome their constituents' strong misgivings about waste incineration. You can bet that there will be a full-court press this summer to nurture Sweden-envy in our populace.

Pic: Lego Escher impossible staircase

Public meeting June 17th!

We scheduled this meeting in June to coincide with Metro's public consultation on incineration. It must have spooked the planners at Metro, because they've postponed the consultation till next September!

But come on out to the meeting just for the fun of it.

We'll have a couple of very interesting speakers and a chance to send an early signal to our regional politicians, including those who were flown to Sweden to help Metro staff make their case that we need incinerators.

Three of our four junketing pols were on CKNW's The World Today on Saturday, reporting out on their trip. But they got a wake-up call from listener "Joe" who warned that they'll be in the incinerator, politically, if they follow Sweden's example.

Our meeting is Wednesday, June 17th, at SPEC House (2150 Maple Street). Doors open at 6:30, with speakers, awards and action starting at 7:30. Our meeting is part Langara's 2009 Summer School on Building Community, organized by the inimitable Leslie Kemp in collaboration with Village Vancouver and a whole host of other interesting groups. The series runs June 15 - 25 (details about the series in a current Common Ground article). Hope to see YOU there!

Pic: Sam Bradd

What you can't see can hurt you

Incinerator salesmen reassure politicians by taking them on tours of incinerators. Politicians come home and tell citizens:

"We have visited plants in Denmark and we were very impressed. They are incredibly clean. There was nothing toxic coming out at all - they were shining and spotless and you could have eat your dinner off the floor."

But what you can't see can hurt you.

Things like nanoparticles, particles so small that they penetrate living tissue in a way that larger particles can't do. Scientists, who understand uncertainty, sound the alarm.

But regulators, who are supposed to be our bulwark against uncertainty, say:

"It's possible to have a really well-controlled incinerator. I know there's a lot of scare out there just with the word incinerator in general, but it can be done right."

Those are the words of Heather Valdez, an environmental engineer with the US Environmental Protection Agency. She is quoted above in an article in a Salem, Oregon, newspaper back in April 2005, reassuring citizens worried about a medical waste burner in their county.

Heather will be speaking in Richmond on March 9th in a panel discussion hosted by the Fraser Basin Council. The event is paradoxically titled "BC Clean Air Forum 2009."

pic: The Galway Tent Blog

Who is measuring incinerator toxics in agricultural land? Nobody!

When the GVRD (now Metro Vancouver) fired up its new incinerator in Burnaby in 1988, there was a requirement to test the soil and vegetation for heavy metals and other harmful substances produced by incinerators for three years following the facility's start-up.

A report was produced in 1990 that found lead, mercury, cadmium and other harmful substances in various crops in the six agricultural sites in Richmond, Delta and Burnaby that they tested.

The report recommended that "a routine soil and vegetation monitoring schedule be established."

But ongoing monitoring of soil and vegetation is not being carried out.

Instead, the Ministry of Environment requires only "source" and "ambient" monitoring, which includes smoke stack monitoring and an ambient monitoring station on the roof of the Burnaby South High School.

The rationale for not monitoring levels of toxic substances in soil and vegetation is that "it is not scientifically possible to determine the source of any contaminants found in the soils and to link soil sampling results directly to emissions from the incinerator."

If you don't measure it, it doesn't exist.

Pic: Burnaby incinerator, August 2008

What Metro's incinerators will cost us

One of the things that Metro Vancouver is not talking to us about is the cost of incinerating waste.

This graph is from Metro's Strategy for Updating the Solid Waste Management Plan, page 10.

The Scenarios for Metro Vancouver are to spend $2.5 billion on a "centralized" system with 3 incinerators, or $3 billion on a "distributed" system (6 facilities required).

The Metro Board has already authorized the first quarter of a billion dollars on "Waste-to-Energy" facilities.

Is this where we want our money spent?

Do we want to spend billions of public dollars to build and maintain machines that will destroy materials that will someday have greater value for recycling?

Plasco dragon slain ~ but more on the way

Congratulations to the citizens of Port Moody ~ democracy is alive and well.

Through the dog-days of summer, hundreds of citizens showed up night after night and made an irrefutable case against Plasco Energy Group's dioxin factory.

Listening to arguments from citizen heroes like JoAnne Parneta, Elaine Golds and dozens of other well-informed speakers, the City's task force had no choice but to recommend that Council not pursue the foolish plan to let Plasco gasify hundreds of thousands of tonnes of garbage in their city.

But the work has just begun.

"Waste-to-energy" is still is still lurking like a cancer at the heart of Metro Vancouver's mendacious "Zero Waste Challenge."

Need evidence?

Next week Metro's Waste Management Committee will consider a budget that allocates over $33 million dollars in 2009 on direct expenditures for incineration. (For comparison, the amount they are allocating for "solid waste demand reduction" -- measures to work with the community to make less waste in the first place: $939,159.)

The incineration expenditures will include not only building new incinerators, but ongoing costly upgrades to the existing facility in Burnaby.

One of the "Operational Priorities" in the budget is inspection and overhaul of WtEF turbo-generator." The turbine was installed only 5 years ago at a cost of $36 million and it already needs an "overhaul"??

Build incinerators and you just keep spending good money after bad.

Zero Waste Vancouver has been silent for a while because we are gearing up for a campaign to make these incinerators an election issue in the civic election campaign. Not a single elected official has made a peep against the plan to spend $3 billion on garbage burners. Most of them, I am betting, don't even know it's in the works.

Watch for our launch at the Metro Waste Management Committee meeting next week, where we'll be joining JoAnne and Elaine and their delegation from Port Moody. We will be issuing a 4-page backgrounder that lays out an alternative plan of action for Metro and our communities. And while you're waiting for the campaign to start, sign our petition to Choose Zero Waste over Incinerators.

Pic: Deliberative Democracy Handbook

White elephants

One of the best arguments against waste incinerators is that they lock in high waste levels. A waste-to-energy incinerator can't make energy without waste.

Well it seems that Germany, one of the world leaders in waste incineration, is facing a crisis. They don't produce enough waste to feed all their incinerators.

A write-up in the webzine Monsters and Critics, citing the German environment ministry, reports that Germany had to import 6 million tonnes of refuse last year.

In the bizarre logic of trade, Germany exported 1.8 million tonnes of trash the same year. This summer Germany imported 160,000 tonnes of garbage that had been piling up in the streets of Naples.

The new incinerators planned by Metro Vancouver will require 1 million tonnes of waste each year. We produce barely one-million tonnes of waste right now. If we get serious about food waste composting, which could cut our waste by up to a third, what will we do? Will we look for someone else's trash to burn? Or operate the plant at a loss?

Or, maybe, plan ahead and not build the burners in the first place?

Pic: Nicholson cartoons in Australia.

Even Chair Hunt said the timing was "horrible"

Metro Vancouver Commissioner Johnny Carline slipped an item onto the Waste Management Committee's already packed agenda on Wednesday afternoon. Committee Chair Marvin Hunt headed the new agenda item "Waste Export."

But as it turned out, the 4-page on-table report that was put before the committee had two recommendations, and only the first related to waste export.

The second recommendation was to authorize a letter to go out to all municipalities in the region, over Marvin Hunt's signature, asking the Mayors and Councils to propose sites in their communities for waste-to-energy incinerators.

The proposed letter was attached to the report. It asked the Mayors and Councils to suggest "potential areas or specific sites, preferably under municipal ownership or control, where waste-to-energy infrastructure could be integrated into existing land use or proposed land development."

Because the report was introduced "on table" those of us in the peanut gallery didn't have it before us during the discussion that ensued. But it quickly became clear that several members of the committee had serious concerns about the optics of this recommendation.

The committee had just heard from New Westminster citizen Neil Powell that members of his residents' association were beginning to suspect that the decision to build incinerators was a "done deal," despite all the public reassurances from politicians that no final decisions had been made.

This letter, several committee members pointed out, would certainly lend credence to those suspicions. A motion was debated to receive the report for information rather than sending it on to the Board with their blessing.

In the end, the committee approved the recommendation with a minor and meaningless amendment (broadening the site usage to include "other technologies"). Four members of the committee voted nay and their names will be recorded in the minutes under Agenda Item 5.14.

What the Board does with this report is still to be seen.

Waking up the citizens

It was standing room only at the church hall in New Westminster last night when Paul Connett gave a rousing hour-long speech about waste incineration.

You could have heard a pin drop in the audience during Connett's slide show. He covered the reasons we need to take a "front end" approach to our waste problem rather than wasting money and time on "back end" facilities that destroy resources.

Four of New Westminster's six city councillors took the time to attend the session. It will be interesting to see how many members of the Metro Waste Management Committee are in the Coast Plaza Ballroom tonight.

Zero Waste Vancouver sent two notices of the event to the elected leaders who sit on the Metro Waste Management Committee. Burnaby Councillor Dan Johnston sent regrets due to a prior commitment, saying "I am not sure whether I am pro or con on the issue of Waste to energy."

Johnston is a thoughtful politician who has made good contributions to the Waste Committee's work (we have him to thank that Metro has budgeted funds for composting this year -- he caught the omission last November).

However, it is getting late in the day for elected politicians to demur on this issue. After all, they approved the "Strategy for Updating the Solid Waste Management Plan" as well as the borrowing bylaw that authorizes borrowing of a quarter billion dollars for waste to energy (identified as a "Major Capital Project").

Tonight Zero Waste Vancouver will formally launch a campaign to prevent the Metro incinerators from going ahead. We will be seeking support from citizens in the region when we appear as a delegation to the Waste Management Committee on July 9th to state our position opposing the incineration plants and presenting recommendations for alternatives.

What Metro Vancouver won't tell us

Tonight is the first of three public meetings (see sidebar to the right) that will will tell us what Metro Vancouver won't tell us.

Metro has been pitching its audacious proposal to build up to 6 waste-to-energy incinerators in the region, burning over a million tonnes of garbage each year. It's the centrepiece in the region's draft solid waste management plan.

And our regional politicians have been going along with it every step of the way. As recently as CBC's Early Edition this morning, Surrey Councillor Marvin Hunt was claiming incineration is all the rage in Europe (is this what they told him in Paris).

But Fraser Valley politician Patricia Ross isn't buying it.

She arranged to bring Paul Connett here to do what he did in hundreds of communities across North America during the 1980s: tell the other side.

The downwind communities in the Fraser Valley will learn what's in store for them tonight. The host communities in New Westminster and the Tri-Cities will get their chance tomorrow.

And on Wednesday night, at the Coast Plaza Hotel Ballroom in downtown Vancouver, we'll look at what incineration will cost all of us: more waste, more lost opportunities.

Can our politicians really convince us that Zero Waste means whatever you can't export to the USA, you just burn?

Pic: Clarington Watchdog ~ we are not alone!

Lining up the financing before checking with the public

Metro Vancouver is so secretive about its intentions that even its own staff are in the dark. A Metro employee was surprised to hear me claim this week that the Board had approved borrowing authority for a quarter-billion dollars to build waste-to-energy projects.

I checked my sources and found the February 1 report with the Commissioner's recommendation to authorize $250 million in borrowing for waste-to-energy, listed as one of the "major planned GVS&DD capital expenditures" (emphasis added) in Appendix 1.

So: the borrowing is approved, an RFP has been issued. What's next? Oh, yes, check in with the public... or maybe that's not necessary. Another Metro employee once reassured me that once an incinerator is in place the public gets used to it. Maybe they figure if they work fast we won't notice?

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?

Let's hear from you

Just a couple weeks to the public consultations in April on Metro Vancouver's solid waste management plan.

Between now and the first consultation session (Tuesday, April 8, in Surrey), have a look at our Zero Waste Vancouver slide show.

Tell us what works, what doesn't. Are we speaking your mind?

During the month of April (and probably beyond) we hope to take the slide show to every municipal council in the Lower Mainland. It's time to start a serious conversation with our elected leaders about waste in our region. This is an election year, and they will all be paying attention.

If you would like to work with us to deliver the slide show to your municipal council, let us know.

We're also keen to talk to any community groups interested in thinking about whether they support spending $3 billion on waste incinerators.We'll all use them and pay for them if they're built, whether we want them or not.

The Zero Waste slide show is a living document. Help us grow it.

pic: www.only2clicks.com