Zero Waste Blog

Mayor Corrigan: is the Burnaby incinerator a good neighbour?

2010-03-09T07:29:00.000-08:00

It's a point of pride to Metro that many folks are unaware we have a garbage incinerator right here in the region.

But the fact is that the Burnaby incinerator has been destroying resources and pumping out emissions since 1988. It is owned by Metro Vancouver and operated under a contract to a private company. That private company has changed hands three times within my memory.

Now the contract is owned by the largest incinerator company in the world, Covanta (the same company pushing a new incinerator in Gold River).

Watch this video to learn more about Covanta.

When Covanta "acquired" the contract to operate the Burnaby incinerator I wondered if Metro would be able to terminate the deal because of uncertainty about Covanta's record. As far as I know, the subject never came up (though we would never know because the public is always shut out of discussions about contracts).

Along with incurring fines for pollution, Covanta has also provoked a campaign by unions seeking "Justice for Covanta Workers."

Does this sound like the kind of company that Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan and his Council would seek out to be their neighbour? Send Mayor Corrigan a quick email and ask him what he thinks of Covanta's record: mayor.corrigan@burnaby.ca

Pic: Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan

Carline still pushing incinerators down the Fraser Valley's throat

2010-03-08T17:37:00.000-08:00

Even as spring breaks out all over, with food scrap composting programs blooming across the Lower Mainland, I am told that Metro Vancouver CAO Johnny Carline is still fanning the flames of incineration, slandering the science that questions the rationality of burning the furniture to heat the house.

Here's what the legendary Paul Connett, slayer of dragons across the world, says about how to beat incinerators:

"In our experience you don't beat incinerators with lawyers or experts but by mobilizing the public to put excruciating pressure on your politicians. This approach has served us well from the USA to China. I like to say in my presentations that 'effecting change is like driving a nail through a piece of wood, experts can sharpen the nail but you need the weight of public opinion to drive the nail home'."

Right now, Carline is organizing a campaign to put excruciating pressure on Abbotsford Councillor Patricia Ross, the Chair of the Fraser Valley Regional District, who has been fighting for clean air in the Valley for a decade - first against the Sumas 2 burner and now against Metro's incinerators. Send her a quick email of support: patiross@shaw.ca

Pic: Councillor Ross in Grist Magazine, August 2001

Will Vancouver come from behind to win gold?

2010-03-03T13:26:00.000-08:00

You might have noticed I took 2 weeks off. It was time well spent cleaning the garage -- and watching the unfolding of our remarkable Olympics from a distance.

When I left my desk back in the darkness of February, when the Olympics were still a legitimate subject for whining, the one bright spot was that Metro Vancouver's incinerator plan seemed to be coming off the rails.

There was no more "landfill crisis" driving the construction of garbage burners because the province extended the life of the Cache Creek Landfill. On top of that, the recession had clearly taken a big bite out of the garbage. I learned today that the shipments of trash to Cache Creek are down from forty truckloads a day to 28. Cities that had foolishly invested in incinerators are running out of fuel.

And now I come back to my desk, flush from our community's truly endearing success hosting the Winter Olympics (Transit is Fun!) and, like everyone else, I am feeling that we are capable of achieving great things.

The first email I open this week tells me that the City of Vancouver is going to hit the ground running and bump Port Coquitlam from the top podium in Zero Waste. A staff report will go to Vancouver City Council tomorrow setting out a 3-step program for cutting our waste in half.

By this time next year, residential garbage service will be scaled back from weekly to bi-weekly. How will we do it? By getting serious about food waste. Vancouver has drunk the kool-ade, as they say. PoCo got off the blocks first, but we are going to come from behind and win gold.

Kelly Sinoski reports in today's Vancouver Sun that the field of contenders in the Food Scrap Composting race is getting crowded, with a half-dozen cities rolling out new programs. But what will give Vancouver the edge, based on this report, is the staff's recommendation to seriously beef up communications and "community based social marketing."

What drives excellence in any race is good training. It looks like the City is ready to invest in helping us Own the Podium.

Netherlands puts a moratorium on incineration

2010-02-09T16:14:00.000-08:00

Using the interesting regulatory approach distinct to the country, Netherlands has signed a "covenant" that no new incineration capacity will be built in that country.

Why? Because they have too much incineration capacity. The recession -- with declining waste volumes -- shot many European countries over the optimal capacity.

Netherlands is also legally rebranding their top-performing incinerators as energy "recovery plants" in hopes that they can recover some of their costs by importing waste from other countries. That sucking sound you hear in Europe is waste flowing in from across national borders.

We still have time to get ahead of the curve, not build excess capacity in the first place, and put our effort into real recycling.

Will we be clever enough to do that?

Taking back the news

2010-02-03T21:25:00.000-08:00

Alter-net news sources are proliferating. The latest to come to my attention is SustainableCoast.ca, a feisty brand-new venue for Sunshine Coast citizens to rant against the people at Sunshine Coast Regional District who run their waste system.

A photo of one of SCRD's drop-off recycling stations graced a post to this blog a couple years ago, sent to me by a local recycling business operator, Buddy Boyd of Gibsons Recycling. Buddy has been in constant battle with SCRD over their program of dumbed-down single-stream recycling and transporting the mess to distant recycling plants, effectively bypassing Buddy's local business.

Now it turns out SCRD is maneuvering to shut down the landfill in Pender Harbour, directing that community's trash to its own landfill in Sechelt instead. In an unusual twist, citizens in Pender Harbour are organizing a Yes In My Backyard campaign -- and using very reasoned arguments to do so. Read all about it in the News section of SustainableCoast.ca.

Citizens of this province are taking matters into our own hands. We are writing our own news -- and making our own decisions about what happens to our rubbish.

Pic: Illegal dumping on Sechelt Band land by SCRD's garbage contractor. Source: SustainableCoast

Time for Metro Vancouver to forget about incineration, get going on composting

2010-02-03T06:52:00.000-08:00

Canada figures prominently in a survey of North American cities that have moved "beyond recycling" and are providing composting programs for organic wastes -- but BC is hardly on the map.

Of the 121 cities surveyed, 55 were Canadian, but only one was British Columbian. (The BC city that made the survey? It was Mission - a community that has been collecting food scraps separately since the 1990s.)

The major cities in BC are late entrants to food scrap composting. None had the track record to make the EPA survey. Vancouver, which touts itself as the Greenest City, hasn't even left the starting blocks.

The EPA report offers a rich mix of lessons learned by these 121 communities over the years.

While our waste management officials dither about what kind of incineration technology to choose, other cities are cutting their waste in half at a fraction the cost to burn it.

The hypocrisy of energy from waste

2010-01-28T07:11:00.000-08:00

I woke up today with a severe case of White Guilt.

I am a citizen in a community where my politicians and waste engineers are fatuously promoting waste as "renewable fuel" to heat our gleaming downtowns.

Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan -- rightly respected by his citizens as a champion of workers' rights -- is insisting that his community has no problem with the waste incinerator that produces valuable steam and electricity there.

Meanwhile the workers producing that fuel are dying from chemical exposure.

It's bad enough that we have squandered our children's share of the planet's supply of fossil fuels. Now we are preparing to compound the offence by building a new energy system that relies on a continuing flow of cheap goods from the so-called Developing World.

And we are protected from guilt by science.

Is this the Greenest City we want to build?

Giants of garbage staking claim on our organics

2010-01-26T08:29:00.001-08:00

As reported a couple days ago, the garbage industry is recognizing that landfilling is "flatlining" and they are looking for future growth opportunities. The biggest one looming is biodegradable organics -- up to half our waste is biodegradable and there is big money to be made as local communities get serious about keeping these volatile materials out of landfills.

Already, Wall Street and the Giants of Garbage are laying claim to the territory.

Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre was their first target. It is a family owned company (mainly in the business of hauling wood chips) that has been processing Metro Vancouver yard trimmings for the past several years. The company just signed a modest contract with Metro to process 50,000 tonnes of mixed food scraps and yard trimmings. The City of Vancouver will shortly announce that they have signed a separate contract and will begin shipping mixed yard trimmings and food scraps in the spring.

This was enough for Fraser Richmond to be snapped up by a bigger company called Harvest Power.

With typical Wall Street hype, Harvest is describing this primitive little facility as "the largest composting facility in North America."

Also, Harvest Power touts itself as a company with "industry leading technologies" but it turns out Fraser Richmond is the only plant they have "up and running." And the Fraser Richmond facility is in fact a very simple windrow composting operation that has never done the anaerobic digestion process that Harvest is marketing as its key product.

Now Harvest has signed a deal with garbage giant Waste Management Inc.

Is this a sign that the garbage industry is re-inventing itself as a composting industry -- or will all this go up in a puff of Wall Street smoke and mirrors?

When corporations leave town

2010-01-22T08:36:00.000-08:00

Today's news that the Catalyst's two recycling mills in BC will close is an opportunity to consider the bizarre reality of global marketing -- and the continuing impacts on local communities.

Two decades ago I wrote a newsletter for the Recycling Council of BC that was prompted by a call from Newstech Recycling, as Catalyst was called then. They were ramping up production of recycled newspaper to satisfy growing demand in the US, where we sell most of our newsprint. Their problem was obtaining adequate quantities of recycled newspapers in good enough condition to use in their recycling plants.

Looking into the background of that story I learned that Canada supplied almost 2/3 of the world's newsprint. We were emptying our forests to provide groundwood pulp and paper to countries that didn't have forests.

But the upsurge in demand for recycled paper created serious problems for our industry -- and potentially for our environment.

I calculated that if Canada shifted to just 10% recycled content in all the newspaper we produce to meet that demand, we would have to import staggering quantities of old newspapers (I've forgotten the exact figures) to use as feedstock in our mills.

Furthermore, the amount of toxic ink washed out of the old newspaper to prepare it for recycling would be greater the total tonnage of old newspapers that we throw out ourselves here in Canada. By becoming recyclers of the world's newsprint, we would end up importing far more waste than we avoid.

Any surprise that Catalyst set up a paper recycling mill in Arizona, right next door to the vast "urban forest" in California? It makes much more sense to put the recycling plant where the supply of old newspaper is.

Since the early 1990s when I wrote that newsletter, Canada's share of the global newsprint market has dropped from 62% to 53%, reflecting the rise in recycling. The companies like Catalyst can just shift their assets to where the market exists. But our forests and the communities they supported are left behind to start all over again.

Even with the decline in Canada's share of the market there is still a huge imbalance when a country with 0.5% of the world's population supplies over half of the world's newspaper. This system is going to crumble, piece by piece, one plant at a time.

Big shake-up on Metro Waste Committee

2010-01-21T14:29:00.001-08:00

Today brings yet another sign that Metro's waste plan is off the rails.

Surrey Councillor Marvin Hunt -- the chief champion of incinerators -- was demoted from the chair of the Waste Management Committee. Metro Board Chair Lois Jackson, who makes the appointments, told BC Local News reporter Jeff Nagel: "Marvin's been there for a long time and we've been having some difficulties concluding this file. Maybe some new ideas and a fresh look will assist us."

I don't think Hunt deserves all the blame for the mess we're in. It has been my observation that almost all the Metro Board members have been allowing their staff to lead them deeper and deeper, one breadcrumb at a time, into the dark forest they find themselves in now, with no clear path out. They have assented to a series of staff recommendations that shut off debate and drew needed resources from better courses of action.

And this Board is not alone. For a hundred years elected officials all over North America have been relying on their professional staff for guidance in utility decisions. Like most citizens, politicians have very little understanding of the technical issues around waste management. When I started going to Waste Management Committee meetings, the meetings wrapped up so fast I hardly got a chance to pull out my agenda. All of the staff recommendations were approved essentially without discussion, sometimes bundled together and approved all at once as a "consent agenda."

But things have changed on that committee in the past few years. The meetings can go on for several hours of lively discussion.

My impression is that politicians are beginning to realize that we are in a paradigm shift here. Progressive waste policy is acknowledging that the old solutions have patently failed. Public programs to guarantee convenient removal of anything the resident puts out at the curb, no questions asked, is one of the root causes of our Throw-Away Society. Wasting has become normalized. (Never mind that we produce 13 times more garbage than our grandparents did.)

Ask Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore, who has just been appointed to replace Hunt at the head of the waste committee.

Mayor Moore is taking political heat in his community for scaling back garbage collection to once every two weeks. Quite a few angry citizens feel a sense of entitlement to waste as much as they want. Never mind that PoCo is offering scaled up organics service to compensate for the scaled back garbage service.

This makes Mayor Moore an interesting pick for waste committee chair. He is the one politician in the region who seems ready to spend real political capital helping his community become a leader in the 21st Century Zero Waste approach. Maybe he can build some teamwork on that committee and spread the vision region-wide.

Metro claims about waste growth contradict waste industry's assessment

2010-01-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

When the US EPA issued its latest annual update on waste trends in November 2009, the waste industry's largest trade publication saw the handwriting on the wall.

The article in the December 1, 2009, issue of Waste Age said: "The growth trend between 1960 and 1980 suggested that both the amount of waste generated and landfilled would grow dramatically in subsequent years. However, while 249.6 million tons of MSW [municipal solid waste] were generated in 2008, only 135.1 million tons of that material was disposed in landfills. Disposal at landfills essentially flatlined for the past three decades."

The EPA study also reports (page 9) that incineration has flatlined since 1990. In fact, the amount of waste incinerated declined, per-capita, from a high of just under one pound per person per day in 1990 to just over half a pound in 2008. Less than 13% of US waste is incinerated, a percentage that has also declined since 1990.

The US EPA figures on waste disposal are national averages, showing the broad trends in the United States. But they are entirely consistent with the data from Metro Vancouver's own local waste composition reports, cited in this blog yesterday. Waste disposal here has also flatlined.

Next year's numbers will show a drop in landfill volumes which will last until the recession is over. This is not a good time to be investing in new disposal capacity.

Organics composting is a "recession-proof" waste market. Unlike recycling, composting doesn't rely on global commodity markets. The markets are right here in our own backyard.

Tide turns on Metro's incineration plan

2010-01-20T10:45:00.000-08:00

It took a few days for the penny to drop but the press seems to be approaching a consensus that Metro's incineration plan is "burning out."

Those were the words of Province reporter Brian Lewis, published yesterday under the headline "Extension buries incinerator proposal." The previous day Coquitlam's former Mayor (and current City Councillor) Lou Sekora laid out several good reasons why he opposes Metro's incinerators in an interview with theleftcoast.ca . "

So the big question hanging in the air is: where will Metro's waste go, now that the First Nations don't want it and the incinerators are off the table?

The first step is for Metro to put the real numbers on the table. Just how much waste is actually there to be disposed of?

Every three years Metro does a "waste characterization study" looking at samples of our waste to see what kinds of things we're throwing away. Then they look at "the total municipal solid waste stream received by the entire Metro Vancouver waste transfer and disposal system" and project how much of each kind of waste (newspaper, food scraps, plastic bags, etc.) we throw away.

Here are the total amounts of waste reported in the last 3 studies:
2000: 1,066,520 tonnes
2004: 1,060,748 tonnes
2007: 1,013,700 tonnes

What's surprising about these figures?

Do you see the staggering growth in our waste that Metro Vancouver keeps claiming in order to justify the construction of incinerators (or even new landfills)?

We are well within the limits of our existing landfills and incinerator. Even if we lost the Cache Creek landfill this year, we would still have nearly enough space at the two remaining facilities (Vancouver landfill is permitted to take 750,000 tonnes each year and the Burnaby incinerator 290,000 tonnes).

It's a success story. We managed, largely through an expansion of composting programs for yard trimmings, to hold down our disposal for the last decade to zero growth.

And what of the future? The latest waste study found 350,000 tonnes of compostable organics that are taking up space in our landfills (and producing methane and toxic leachate). It also found 144,000 tonnes of recyclable paper, which is banned from disposal in our region.

That is a half-million tonnes of waste right off the top that we don't need to send to the waste incinerator or landfill. On top of that, there is 136,000 tonnes of non-recyclable plastic packaging and other products that we could give back to the producer to recycle, instead of ending up in our disposal system at community cost.

Doesn't it make sense to get aggressively behind programs to solve these problems instead of investing billions and offending our neighbours by building new incinerators and expanding landfills?

Metro’s source on health impacts of incinerators doesn’t actually measure health impacts of incinerators

2010-01-18T20:49:00.000-08:00

Metro Vancouver frequently cites the conclusions of the UK Health Protection Agency to reassure us that incinerators won't harm our health.

The HPA is often quoted as saying things like this: "The HPA considers that modern, well-run incinerators pose only a very small and probably undetectable risk to health. This is because they have a very small impact on pollution levels locally or at a distance. In assessing risk, we take into account not only the toxicity of the compounds concerned but, very importantly, the likely concentrations to which people may be exposed."

In a letter posted on a UK Health Research website, HPA Chief Executive Justin McCracken repeats this statement, and goes on to admit that "we have not studied the 'rates of illness or premature deaths at electoral ward level around any incinerator'."

Why don't they look at the health of people living around incinerators?

Because "the number of people around an incinerator is too small to detect whether or not the incinerator is having an impact on health."

If people aren't healthy around incinerators, the HPA contends, it could be any number of things that are causing their problems: "Such studies need to be able to distinguish any influence of the incinerator (which is expected to be extremely small) from the many other factors that influence rates of illness or premature deaths."

How would you feel if the agency established to protect your health based its conclusions on what it "expects" rather than what it actually finds -- or doesn't find because, in fact, it doesn't even bother to look.

What you don't look at is, indeed, "probably undetectable."

(Metro Vancouver and the Ministry of Environment made a similar call 20 years ago when they ignored a recommendation from an early study of emissions near the Burnaby incinerator. The study had said it was unable to establish a clear link between the new incinerator the elevated levels of toxics it found in soil and vegetation in the area. It recommended that the measurements continue, to build a better database. Those tests have never been done.)

Carline advises Metro Board: put a ceiling on recycling to ensure fuel for incinerator

2010-01-17T10:28:00.000-08:00

A report from Metro CAO Johnny Carline didn't make it to the Board agenda on Friday. But it is definitely worth a read (see Item D1 on this agenda) It shows, right there in black and white what Metro staff's priorities are. It also raises the question of whether staff are overstepping their role as implementers of political direction.

The report was Carline's response to Metro politicians who have called for a higher diversion rate in the new waste plan. This has been a frequent question asked by politicians (and the public) ever since Metro staff pitched its arbitrary 70% target two years ago. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson is only one of the politicians who called for the Plan to set higher goals.

Carline's recommendation was NOT to establish a higher target. He said:

"It is recommended that the 70% diversion target... be retained. It is also recommended that additional in-region waste-to-energy capacity be established... to ensure adequate in-region capacity is available for all waste that is not diverted to recycling."

With that second sentence, Carline makes it clear that he is more concerned about building new disposal facilities than about building a system that reduces waste.

He is making the political judgement that balancing supply and demand of waste is a more urgent priority than reducing waste -- and that building too much waste disposal capacity is better than building too little.

Carline's case that our current disposal facilities won't be enough to manage future waste volumes is far from air-tight. The figures in the report are misleading and should be challenged by politicians (I suggested questions that should be asked in an email to the Directors last week.)

Furthermore, Carline presents absolutely no scientific basis for the claim that higher diversion rates are unachievable. Rather, he offers a news article saying that Toronto is going to miss its recycling goal. According to Statistics Canada, Ontario has lagged behind BC in waste reduction for years. In 2006, their per capita waste was 822 kg, while ours in BC was 675 kg. Furthermore, Ontario has just introduced sweeping changes to its recycling legislation to bring it more in line with ours in British Columbia. We are world leaders in Producer Responsibility policies ~ why should we compare ourselves with Ontario?

Carline tells politicians that getting beyond 70% diversion "will require significant changes to the global economy." The question for our politicians -- not Carline -- to answer is whether we are going to adopt a waste management plan that supports global change and extends our leadership -- or one that locks us into yesterday's levels of wastefulness.

Metro Board's embarrassing exploitation of the gentle Chief Pasco

2010-01-15T15:23:00.001-08:00

Today's meeting of the Metro Board was a study in what's wrong with governance in our region.

The first thing the Board did was to retreat behind closed doors. For an hour and a half the rest of us -- several local citizens and a much larger group of people from First Nations communities as far away as Fort St. John -- milled awkwardly in the lobby waiting to be re-admitted to the Board Room.

At quarter to eleven, the doors were re-opened and Nlaka'pamux Nation Tribal Council Chief Bob Pasco was admitted to the microphone. Pasco has sat in that chair many times, and over many years, speaking out against Metro's earlier plan to build a 100-year dump in Ashcroft. On those occasions, the Board gave him a patient hearing and then directed staff to continue doing just that.

This time Chief Pasco was invited to appear before the Board.

They gave him all the time he wanted to speak from the heart about what the land means to him and his community and future generations, and to invite one patient articulate First Nations speaker after another to take a turn at the mike. (Only Don Maclean from Pitt Meadows spoiled the moment by asking the Chair at one point how much longer this would go on and then sitting back and fuming in his chair until it was over.)

At the end of the delegation, Pasco noted that "there's a difference after all these years." In earlier times, he said, the message he picked up in the Metro building was "you don't belong here." But now "things have changed."

What has changed? Merely that Pasco is now a convenient tool in Metro's petty turf war with the provincial government, a totally trivial non-issue that has eclipsed all matters of public interest in deliberations about the future of our region's waste.

It turns out that the Board laboured so mightily behind those closed doors this morning to issue forth a long-winded motion that Metro send a delegation to Victoria.

What really has the Board's knickers in a knot -- the "elephant in the room" as Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan called it -- is the infuriating fact that Victoria approved the Cache Creek landfill permit extension while rejecting an essentially identical facility in Ashcroft. It was Corrigan who noted that Victoria's high-handed interference in Metro affairs was lubricated by paid lobbyists working for entities with a "financial interest" in the matter.

It was gruesomely clear in the discussion that followed that some on that Board appear to be more worried about the public money lost when Ashcroft was turned down than about the disdain for First Nations they would rightly have been accused of if it had gone ahead. Pasco's lessons had clearly fallen on deaf ears.

Corrigan I feel sure spoke for many on that Board when he expressed the view that recycling has "reached the point of diminishing returns." We should just get on with it, Directors kept saying, and build a landfill, or an incinerator, "or whatever" -- because, after all, we're in a desperate situation.

In a desperate situation to find someone's airshed or someone's traditional territory -- whatever -- to get rid of a problem that, after all, we can't do anything about.

After the meeting I went up to Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore and asked him how things are going with their food scraps program. He said he's still taking lots of heat from citizens, but it's mainly about switch from weekly to bi-weekly garbage pickups.

Unlike Mayor Moore, who is not afraid to wade in and take political heat for helping his community get their waste on a diet, the rest of the politicians on that Board -- to a person -- seem ready to cave to the troglodyte element in every community who feel that wasting is an entitlement: "I pay my taxes," they hear, "now you clean it up or we'll remember you at election time."

Landmark lawsuit challenges New York City recycling law

2010-01-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

We are poised at a turning point in the history of waste management, and the outcome of a lawsuit against New York City may confirm that we have really turned a corner -- or send us back to the bad old days.

Computer makers are challenging a municipal ordinance that requires them to collect old computers ("e-waste") from households and recycle it. This is a somewhat unusual formulation of a broader principle, called Extended Producer Responsibility (or EPR). BC happens to be the place where this new principle is most widely applied in law, so this suit could be interesting to us.

Here's what the plaintiffs in the New York suit said, according to a recent article in the magazine Recycling Today (emphasis added):

“The E-waste Program retroactively and fundamentally alters the terms of the original contract of sale for a CEE (consumer electronics equipment) between the manufacturer and the consumer (or distributor, retailer, etc., as the case may be). Prior to the enactment of the E-waste Program, a manufacturer sold the CEE for a certain price, relying on the fact that the manufacturer was permanently transferring full title and it would not be required to take title to the product again at the end of its useful life.”

The article says that the brief was jointly filed by several non-electronics manufacturing associations who said they 'are also greatly concerned that allowing the E-waste Program to take effect will encourage other jurisdictions to adopt laws that shift disposal costs historically borne by voting local taxpayers who discard consumer products onto non-voting, out-of-state or off-shore manufacturers who make them.'"

Clever lawyers!

By sticking up for aggrieved out-of-state manufacturers they are distracting the Court from the greater injustice. For the better part of a century global corporations have been dumping responsibility for disposing of their products on voting local taxpayers in local communities -- many of whom may not have purchased a computer at all.

Indeed a whole raft of legislation exists now that puts the onus on local governments to clean up after the Throw-Away Economy, spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars dollars on incinerators and landfills.

It will be really interesting if this lawsuit finally tests whether a company can absolve itself of responsibility just by transferring ownership of a product from itself to the consumer. EPR is based in the idea of a chain of custody that starts with the brand owner and ends with the consumer -- but does NOT include the taxpaying public in the communities where the products are sold, used, and discarded.

Why can't we have this kind of political leadership here?

2009-12-22T06:56:00.000-08:00

The Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, is showing the kind of leadership that we need in our region.

Newsome teamed up with a union leader to publish a strong editorial opposing waste incineration. The article appeared December 19, 2009, in the Sacramento Bee. Here are highlights:

"Increasingly, local and state governments are adopting "zero waste" goals to counter the real dangers of climate change and worldwide resource depletion. But what does "zero waste" mean?

... There are some tempting new technologies that reduce the amount sent to landfills, but in doing so they expend vast amounts of energy and other resources.

... For each ton of paper, bottles and cans we don't recycle, we end up generating an additional 71 tons of waste to create a new ton of paper, bottles or cans. This is because 71 tons of "upstream" waste – raw material extraction, product manufacturing and distribution – is created.

That's one reason high-temperature disposal technologies are so problematic (they're called waste-to-energy, gasification, pyrolysis, plasma-arc and a few other things, but they're really just glorified incineration).

Proponents are roaming the globe to sell governments on the idea that all of our discards – plastics, food scraps, computers, almost anything – can be "converted" in a high-temperature (up to 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit) machine to produce energy.

But when we burn a ton of recyclables, we capture only a small amount of energy compared to all the upstream energy used to make those products. We lose the valuable materials that could easily be turned into new bottles, cans and other products, avoiding other environmental costs as well. And again, we generate that 71 tons of upstream solid waste to create replacement products.

Because thermal technology destroys the resources that go into it, you cannot call the energy it produces "renewable" or "green." It also leaves behind toxic ash, slag and air emissions, including putting a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.

... On a per-ton basis, studies show that recycling and composting on average reduce carbon emissions 18 times more effectively than thermal processing.

And while it is possible to capture a percentage of the greenhouse gases emitted from landfills – and while we are on the road to zero waste, we should capture as much of it as we can – we'd be better off if the materials had been recycled or made into compost.

When we turn food scraps, yard trimmings and even used, food-soiled paper into compost, which some cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles are now doing on a large scale, and apply it to farms, we replenish depleted soil with the nutrients and carbon that healthy plants desperately need.

About 90 percent of what people throw away is recyclable or compostable, and manufacturers can improve their products so we can recover even more of what's left. In a zero-waste world, there will not be much waste to burn, and most of what's left would yield little energy.

Equally important for the future of our green economy is that recycling and composting mean jobs. The Institute for Local Self Reliance reports that every additional 10,000 tons recycled translates into 10 new frontline jobs and 25 new jobs in recycling-based manufacturing. Landfilling or incinerating those tons creates only one job.

Recycling and composting have proven benefits for people and the planet; allowing you to read next month's stories on today's paper. Landfilling and incineration waste valuable resources that can never be used again. It makes no sense to burn materials or put them in a hole in the ground when these same materials can be turned into the products and jobs of the future. *

Where are our Mayors and Councillors as Metro Vancouver prepares to send potential jobs -- and our children's future resources -- up in smoke?

Pic: Newsom signs mandatory recycling ordinance last June, SF Examiner

Study exposes failure of "single stream" recycling

2009-12-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

Some municipalities are trying to save money by collecting recyclable materials (newspaper, magazines, junk mail, yogurt containers, bottles and cans, etc. etc. etc.) all jumbled up together in plastic bags or wheeled toters.

They have been convinced that this will increase the payload of recyclable materials ~ based on the assumption that their citizens are too lazy to sort their trash (how condescending is that?)

This is the sales pitch from the garbage industry, which is really concerned with saving itself collection costs.

And indeed, a new report from the US Container Recycling Institute (carried out by a brilliant Canadian researcher named Clarissa Morawski) looked at dozens of careful studies comparing various ways of collecting recyclable materials and concluded that single stream recycling costs more for everyone except the hauler -- and that the evidence that it actually boosts recycling volumes is only "anecdotal."

Watershed Sentinel on incinerators

2009-12-14T20:07:00.000-08:00

The first instalment of Joyce Nelson's expose of the incinerator industry's shenanigans is running in the current issue of Watershed Sentinel.

It details how the fancy new-generation "waste-to-energy" plants don't make their profits from actually selling energy (few of them have actually managed to produce any energy). Rather, they ensure their profitability by locking municipalities into long-term contracts to supply the facilities with "fuel."

Series author Joyce Nelson quotes Dino Milli, vice-president of Quebec-based Enerkem Inc., chortling to an audience at an incinerator industry conference last summer: "Supply agreements that are fixed and long-term are virtually worth their weight in gold."

Nelson got a media pass to attend last month's national conference of the Canadian Energy from Waste Coalition and she shares further examples of this industry's business model in the next instalment of her 3-part Sentinel series coming out in January.

(That November conference was the same one where Marvin Hunt was scheduled to explain how to overcome public fears about incineration... until his trip was quietly cancelled without explanation).

Metro waste plan sends wrong signal to businesses (and residents)

2009-12-14T13:49:00.000-08:00

The Vancouver Sun ran two columns this morning under the same headline. One was a strange piece of vitriol by the unpredictable Marc Jaccard, who indulged in vilifying environmentalists for setting "unrealistic" targets for GHG reduction (why does this man want to abuse people who could be his base if he were a bit more polite -- and if he could be a bit self-critical of his silver bullet cap-and-trade?).

The other comment, written by the CEO of the Globe Foundation, was the one with the interesting content. The important point of this article was that Harper's climate program sends the wrong signals to the business community.

"Businesses require a clear and unambigous signal that the world is finally serious about tackling global warming," wrote John E. Wiebe.

He pointed out that clear policy signals mobilize private capital and this capital will be critically needed to re-make our economy around cleaner technology. He cited Germany, Sweden and Britain as examples where clean policy has spurred investment in clean technologies.

Drawing on that insight, what kind of signal does the waste management plan presented by Metro Vancouver staff ten days ago send to investors?

The only firm, clear commitment in Metro's waste plan is to build a huge new incinerator. They even signalled the time frame: the new incinerator will be up and running in five years. The suggests that there may be more incinerators in the years to come.

Will this mobilize capital towards opportunities in organics processing, recycling, green design? The Metro plan provides no assurance that such investments will yield returns -- especially since such facilities will be operating in competition against publicly-subsidized incineration.

Zero Waste Vancouver is preparing Plan B -- a better plan for Metro Vancouver's waste. We'll take the Globe Foundation's point and build a better plan that encourages investment in waste reduction instead of waste destruction.

Yes, we can do better.

Massachusetts turns its back on incinerators

2009-12-13T10:47:00.000-08:00

Citizen action convinced the state of Massachusetts (pop. 6.5 million) to resist pressure from the incineration industry, which wanted to overturn a 15 year moratorium on new incineration facilities. Read the story in the Boston Globe & Mail.

“We are serious about managing the waste we generate in a way that saves money for cities and towns, curbs pollution, and protects the environment,’’ said Governor Deval Patrick in a statement. “There are better ways than traditional incineration.’’

The defeat of incineration was led by a powerful coalition of 25 leading Massachusetts environmental groups including MA Sierra Club, Clean Water Action and MASSPIRG.

Lynne Pledger, one of the organizers of the campaign said: "To me the key elements that make this newsworthy are that Mass has not just rejecting more incinerators or specific gasification proposals, they are rejecting gasification out right and acknowledging that incinerators are not safe."

The Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs committed to producing a state waste plan that emphasizes recycling. Part of their plan is to bring in laws like ours in British Columbia that require producers to set up programs to recycle electronic products and empty beverage containers.

Bowles said that the state will also strengthen the moratorium by tightening up rules on the incinerators that currently burn about 27% of the waste in Massachusetts.

NOTE: The Globe story mentions in the last paragraph that part of the state's recycling strategy will be to "prod communities to increase so-called single-stream recycling, which eliminates the need for households to sort recyclables." Recyclers know that single-stream recycling is bad policy because it reduces the value of the recycled materials, among other reasons. Citizens in Massachusetts will have to get active again to steer the state away from this policy.

Jackson, Hunt, Hepner seek big backyard in the sky for region's garbage

2009-12-10T08:17:00.000-08:00

BCLocal news reporter Jeff Nagel tells us that Delta Mayor Lois Jackson and Tsawwassen Chief Kim Baird are musing about their communities hosting garbage incinerators.

Any wonder we're having trouble at Copenhagen?

Jackson says: "If people find there aren't the concerns that maybe they thought there were, there may be several [cities] that come out to say 'We would like it here.'"

On Chair Jackson's watch, Metro hired a distinguished British tobacco lobbyist (scroll down to read Dr. Bridges' testimony) to reassure us that incinerators are as safe as smoking.

Bridges succeeded in convincing Metro Waste Management Committee Chair Marvin Hunt ("TRASH TALK/Surrey councillor hot for waste-to-energy proposal").

But last Friday Hunt's fellow City Councillor Linda Hepner told the Surrey Now that the garbage incinerator proposed by Hunt in downtown Surrey is "not something I would support."

Even though Councillor Hepner was one of the local politicians sent by Metro Vancouver at taxpayer expense on a junket to Sweden last summer to be wooed by the Swedish incineration industry, she seems to have come home with some qualms.

Hepner wants to ship our garbage to an "out of region" incinerator. Last Friday she insisted that Metro staff put the Gold River proposal on the table for discussion.

But she is forgetting that the atmosphere is everyone's backyard. Once we dump our garbage in the sky, there will be no hiding place.

Pic: Jules Klimaaatblog ~ check this out!

Thanks to Reimer and Steves

2009-12-09T06:58:00.000-08:00

Time to send a big shout-out to Vancouver Councillor Andrea Reimer and Richmond Councillor Harold Steves. (<clrreimer@vancouver.ca>, <hsteves@richmond.ca>. These two members of the Metro Board have begun to ask tough questions of Metro staff.

At last Friday's workshop, Steves asked why we were evaluating our disposal options (landfill/MBT vs incinerators) by how much energy they produce or how much money we can make from them.

"The objective should be GHG reduction," Steves said. He made the point out that plastic in an incinerator is a fossil fuel. (Responding to Steves question, CAO Johnny Carline repeated the fallacious $500/tonne cost of MBT.)

Then Andrea Reimer picked up on public polling results intended to reassure the Board that incinerators are politically popular (see slide 40 in the staff presentation which suggests that 63% of people following the issue are "leaning towards waste-to-energy").

Reimer asked: Did you use the term 'waste-to-energy' when you asked the question?

She went on: What would have been the public response if you had asked about 'mass-burn incineration.' (Metro's Ken Carrusca tried to insist that 'landfill' is also a euphemism -- and defended mass-burn incineration as a "proven" technology.)

Reimer also pressed staff on the validity of Metro's repeated claim (slide 36, 37, 38, 39...) that there is scientific consensus that there are no health risks from mass-burn incineration.

Scientists, she reminded the engineers, "won't prove a negative" -- the most they will say is that there is no evidence of a positive.

It turns out that Metro staff's claim rests in large part on a decision by the ironically-named British Health Protection Agency not to look for negative effects. The HPA position is that what we don't measure won't hurt us. (However, even the HPA report flagged the uncertainties around nanoparticles - see page 5 of their report).

Be sure to send your best wishes to Steves and Reimer:

<Andrea.Reimer@vancouver.ca>

<hsteves@richmond.ca>

What is MBT and why are Metro's staff so scared of it?

2009-12-08T08:12:00.000-08:00

Metro's staff are getting desperate as they keep running into roadblocks to the huge garbage incinerators they want to build.

Last Friday they pulled out all the stops. After grudgingly agreeing -- at the Board's insistence -- to let the public sit in on a "workshop" about the new solid waste management plan, the staff switched the location of the meeting at the last minute.

Nevertheless, a handful of citizens found the crowded meeting room on the Lougheed Hwy in Burnaby and saw the long slide presentation chock full of misleading information that was developed by Metro's staff to sell the plan to the Board.

The cost issue has clearly rattled Metro's staff. Two years ago, they foolishly mentioned in their trial balloon (see Figure 9, page 11) that we'd be facing over $3 billion in costs with incinerators.

But Friday's slide show presented the bizarre assertion (all "bottom line" with no explanation) that continuing to landfill our waste will bring a "$1.5 billion cost" (their emphasis) while if we build incinerators we'll enjoy "$20 million revenue."

Never mind that even after more than 20 years we are still paying down the capital cost of the Burnaby incinerator.

But the most surprising thing to me was the effort that Metro's staff put into debunking the MBT alternative.

"MBT" (mechanical biological treatment) is a simple, low-tech process for screening and stabilizing waste before putting it in a landfill. It is being practiced more and more widely in Europe as an alternative to costly incineration. It not only extends the service life of landfills by reducing the volume of the waste, but cuts the GHG emissions from landfills by 90%.

These facts were right there in Metro's AECOM report, issued last summer.

But the AECOM report based its estimate of the cost of MBT treatment on its experience with a facility in Edmonton. This huge white elephant of a plant was built by Transalta, launched with great fanfare in 2000 as a "composting plant" -- and then sold by Transalta within a year to the City of Edmonton for $97 million.

The Edmonton facility was operated by none other than Earth Tech, a company now owned by AECOM. In 2005, Tech wrote a candid account of the facility's many problems in its design and operations.

The other MBT facility that Metro drew on for cost estimates is a facility in Halifax, also built 10 years ago.

On the basis of this limited information, Metro's staff empahsized in several slides on Friday that MBT treatment "does not add value" and is not recommended.

They clearly don't want us looking around for a state-of-the-art MBT alternative that would out-compete their mass-burn incinerators.

Editor of Solid Waste & Recycling Magazine puzzled by Metro's plan

2009-12-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

Guy Crittenden is the long-time editor of Canada's premier recycling magazine, Solid Waste and Recycling, which is read by solid waste professionals all across North America.

Guy wrote to me yesterday about exciting developments in Ontario and Quebec.

Basically, the two provinces in central Canada with the largest populations and largest economies are adopting the very strategies that we pioneered here in British Columbia almost two decades ago. They are putting in place framework legislation similar to our Recycling Regulation that shifts responsibility for waste from local municipalities to the producers of products that made the products (called EPR or Extended Producer Responsibility).

Along with a firm commitment to EPR, these two governments are committing serious money ($650 million in QC alone) to help municipalities beef up their composting infrastructure.

I wrote back congratulating Guy and the citizens of Ontario and Quebec on this success -- and mentioned that here in Lotus Land our largest municipality is preparing to send our EPR programs up in smoke.

Here is what Guy wrote back to me:

Why would Metro Vancouver go the incineration route when the rest of the country is starting to (finally) embrace producer responsibility?

He went on: "BC has been the leader for some time in Zero Waste/EPR and it seems that Metro Vancouver is undermining the provincial policy.

Crittenden says that the draft Ontario waste diversion plan also makes it clear that incineration cannot be counted as 'diversion' (as VANOC is regrettably doing! -- more about that later).

The Ontario government's message is clear that large mass burn units won't contribute to a municipality's or an industry's waste diversion program.

(Metro's Draft Plan actually opens with a suggestion on page 5 that "the conventionally defined" diversion rate includes source separated material that is used as fuel being considered 'recycled.' Prudently, Metro stops short of counting burning as recycling in its plan, but it is clear from the Plan that this is the direction our regional engineers want our province to go.)

Pic: Editor's Blog, SW&R