Zero Waste Blog

Let's think about liquid waste

2019-10-30T13:09:00.002-07:00

I've been in retirement for 10 years since this blog was active, growing carrots and dancing. Now I feel the pull to join a public conversation about waste again. What's on my mind?

Liquid waste.

What got me going was a visit from the roto-rooter, who informed me that our sewer was blocked by lint from our washing machine. He cleaned it out and the drain ran free, but I could see this was not a long-term solution.

We are a household of two since our kids left home 20 years ago and the cat died in 2015. But you would be amazed how much lint comes out of our washing machine. Surely, lint is an issue for the municipal liquid waste management system.

I devised a solution that captures the lint from our house before it goes down the pipe.

I went to the thrift store yesterday and brought home a couple of sheer curtains. I cut them up and stitched up the sides to form little bags, about one square foot in size. I fastened a bag to the pipe that carries water from the machine to the laundry sink. I used a sleeve clamp.

I made a prototype several months ago and it worked great. However it got clogged with lint that blocked it from flowing through the cloth. I emptied the lint out every once in a while in order to "re-use" the bag. From now on, I'll replace the bag when it gets clogged with lint. One panel of sheer curtain material ($5.49 minus the 30% senior discount) yielded 24 bags. I was lucky to find it in a dark plum color with a fanciful pattern of falling leaves.

Now I will begin a research project on lint.

Webinar this Friday, 10:30 Pacific time

2014-05-27T13:36:00.002-07:00

Risks Associated with Waste Incineration

What the Waste to Energy Industry is Not Telling You

Webinar: Friday, May 30, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm

Please join us for this webinar where a panel of experts and public interest advocates will discuss the economic, environmental and public health risks posed by waste incineration, and the impacts felt by communities that have built them.

Metro Vancouver has a plan to build a new waste incinerator in BC. So far, three communities have been identified as potential sites (Delta, Nanaimo and Port Mellon) but six more sites are still to be announced.

There will be increasing pressure on these communities to accept the proposed incinerator, but the outcome is far from inevitable. In recent years, Powell River, Kamloops, Port Moody, Nanaimo and Christina Lake have all stopped proposals to burn waste in their communities.

Hosted by Zero Waste BC, Zero Waste Canada and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, this webinar will feature guest speakers from Detroit, San Francisco and BC, speaking about the multiple risks posed by incinerators, as well as better waste management options for communities to consider.

Webinar Panel:

Russell Brewer, Councillor, City of Powell River
Ahmina Maxey, Coordinator, Zero Waste Detroit Coalition
Bradley Angel, Director, Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice

Moderated by Jamie Kaminski, Zero Waste Canada

If you wish to join the webinar, please RSVP Jenna Ralston at jenna@spakemedia.com by Tuesday, May 27^th.
An email with webinar/call information will be sent to you, after you have responded. Also, please share this invitation with any colleagues or friends that may be interested.

MMBC says it won't burn - but Metro Vancouver will be lobbying the province to force them to

2014-04-24T20:56:00.001-07:00

Today I sat in on a meeting of the Sunshine Coast Regional District Board where MMBC's Allen Langdon was briefing the politicians about the new stewardship program for PPP (packaging and printed paper) which will be rolling out in 24 days.

The meeting was very tense, with the politicians struggling to articulate the many basic questions about the program that still have not been resolved -- like, what will it look like?

One question that came up: what is MMBC planning to do with the "residuals" -- non-recyclable materials that are collected in the program. Would they be burning those residuals in an incinerator? This was the allegation made by a well-known, award-winning local recycler, linking the MMBC program to Metro Vancouver's plan to build an incinerator, possibly right up the Sound in Port Mellon.

Langdon insisted that the recycler was "misinformed" and repeated several times that MMBC had no plan to incinerate residuals, but would be landfilling them instead.

It may be true that MMBC has no such plan at this time. However, they will be up against pressure coming from Metro Vancouver to force them to burn their residuals.

This is a component of Metro Vancouver's new solid waste management plan. Section 3.3.3 of Metro's plan, on page 26, says that the region will request the provincial government to develop "requirements for existing and future stewardship programs to use the non-recyclable portion of returned material as fuel rather than landfilling."

It may not be MMBC's plan at this time to burn residuals, but it clearly is Metro Vancouver's plan. And that plan has been approved by the province.

NOTE: In Europe, where the concept of producer responsibility for packaging was introduced in 1991, producers are obligated to achieve targets just as they are under our regulation. But the European directive was amended in 2003 so that the targets don't require recycling any more.

Since 2008, "at least 60 % by weight of packaging waste [is required] to be recovered or incinerated at waste incineration plants with energy recovery". The Directive underscores the point: [t]he incineration of waste at plants with energy recovery is regarded as contributing to the realisation of these objectives.

Is this where we're headed in BC, with Metro Vancouver's help?

This is what recycling looks like in Vancouver

2013-10-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

What is this all about?

One visitor to the blog recognized the plant in this video clip. S/he pointed out that this plant is not sorting materials collected in the City of Vancouver.

Right! If it had been a load of City materials, paper and containers would not have been mixed together on the conveyor belt. Vancouver is one of the few remaining cities in the Metro region that ask households to separate their recyclables into three streams: newsprint, mixed household paper, and containers.

The recycling plant pictured here sorts materials from the growing number of cities in our region (and across North America) that offer single stream recycling. Households put all their recyclable materials in one container, leaving it to someone else to sort them out.

If you think (as I do) that this looks like a pretty awful job, standing at a speeding conveyor for 8 hours a day, consider this: what if it was not just recyclable materials flowing by, but mixed garbage?

The garbage industry is preparing to build three mixed waste processing plants, where people at conveyor belts like this will split open garbage bags and sort through the contents looking for recyclable and compostable materials. The proposal met with resistance from existing recyclers.

The rationale for the garbage-sorting plants is that people living in apartments and condos are never going to be convinced to sort their recyclable materials out of their garbage.

Zero waste businesses in bin cleaning

2013-05-15T17:41:00.002-07:00

Today my email Inbox brought an example of how an environmental problems can stimulate economic opportunities.

The environmental problem in this morning's email was smelly food waste bins. "You already know that the City of Vancouver has rolled out changes in the frequency of garbage pickup to every other week beginning May 1st," wrote my correspondent.

"This may result in more odour, bacteria, and pests in the summer months, and can be an excuse for residents not to participate in the Green Bin Program."

So what's the solution? A new bin cleaning service provided by VIP Bin Cleaning. A customer signs up for service online and provides an address. VIP's mobile machine arrives once a month on the day of bin pickup. The bin is cleaned in 2-3 minutes. The basic subscription service works out to $8 a month.

Turns out VIP Bin Cleaning is "a global bin-cleaning franchise" that originated in the UK in 1997. The franchisor "cleans over 2 million bins across seven countries annually."

Somebody looking for an economic opportunity in bin cleaning could just get a bucket and a brush. But the benefits to getting into the business as a franchisee are spelled out on the parent company website. The VIP people have developed equipment that makes the job easier and conserves water, for instance.

Turns out there are a number of bin cleaning franchises out there, including GreenCleen (also in the UK). There's even one available on Kijiji in Guelph ON.

Surely this is the beginning of a green wave...

Waste management industry in disarray

2013-05-02T20:01:00.000-07:00

They were lined up in the Metro Vancouver Boardroom today, over a dozen speakers (one an avowed "lobbyist") waiting to tell Metro Vancouver politicians to butt out of waste management and let free enterprise solve the problem. They were members of the Waste Management Association of BC, delivering in person the message they published in the full-page ad that ran in the Vancouver Sun yesterday.

The issue on the table was a proposal by Metro to impose "flow control" on garbage. This would be a regulation, in Metro's own words, that "would require residential and commercial garbage to be delivered to Regional Facilities.

The Metro website backgrounder emphasizes that this is about the flow of garbage, not recyclable materials. It says: "Source-separated recyclable materials and materials like construction or demolition waste would be exempted."

The speakers today were all goin on about how flow control would destroy recycling.

But Metro says that regulating the flow of garbage will encourage recycling! The places haulers are taking our waste to are not as responsible as we are. They don't have disposal bans on recyclable materials the way we do. Their lower disposal charges encourage wasting.

Frances Bula approached me after the meeting and asked if I didn't think it was a good idea for Metro to cut off the flow of waste to other places.

But garbage isn't that simple.

The real intent behind Metro's proposal is to make sure that the new incinerator they're planning to build doesn't run out of fuel.

In a veiled way, the website acknowledges this: "Metro Vancouver is developing a strategy [i.e. a half-billion dollar incinerator] to manage the disposal of residential and ICI waste generated within the Region. Metro Vancouver’s proposed approach is requiring that residential and commercial waste generated in the region be disposed at Regional Facilities."

Metro should not be regulating the market in order to feed its own incinerator. Rather, as a few of the more public-minded speakers argued today, Metro should be using its regulatory authority and its resources to promote recycling. For instance, they should police their own disposal facilities and enforce their own existing regulations against throwing away recyclable materials. (Currently, Metro neither publicizes nor enforces their bans: it's like there were a law requiring us to stop at intersections but no signs and no police. One speaker noted that only 10% of the loads at regional facilities are checked for banned materials.)

Should we explore whether Metro has the authority to regulate recycling facilities? One of the speakers presented a promotional video of a "dirty MRF" (a facility that sorts raw garbage -- as opposed to a regular MRF that sorts materials that were set out for recycling). He entreated Metro politicians to give his company a chance to build a dirty MRF in Vancouver. A later speaker -- also a member of the waste association -- said history had shown dirty MRFs were a failure. Who speaks for the Waste Management Association of BC?

Maybe we don't need regulation of MRFs. The market may decide. China is certainly sending a strong signal.

FACT: The "waste management industry" includes our local governments. They have been in the garbage business for a hundred years. It's been an uneasy relationship between the public and private sectors of the waste industry. Local governments are the clients of the waste industry, and also competitors, especially in BC where disposal facilities are almost all publicly owned and many cities even have their own trucks and crews.

When our local governments try to beat the competition through the use of regulation, things get dirty and the industry gets mad. Seagulls squabbling over the garbage.

And by the way...

2013-05-01T17:52:00.003-07:00

We'll be there tomorrow when the Metro Waste Committee holds its monthly meeting (12 - 4 pm, second floor Boardroom 4330 Kingsway). We'll be holding signs that remind them that not everyone out there supports the idea of spending half a billion dollars on incinerators. The fact is, we're beginning to get organized. Zero Waste has spread beyond Vancouver... to BC... to Canada. We're part of a world-wide movement of organizations making the link between waste and social injustice.

There is another way. We won't get there by building incinerators. Or by letting the garbage industry set our public policy.

Will China drive FAKE RECYCLING off the rails? & Should waste haulers set public policy?

2013-05-01T17:44:00.004-07:00

Two important stories broke in the Vancouver Sun today.

First, we learned that China is blocking the flow of poor quality plastics from Vancouver and other communities that can't be bothered to manage them appropriately. This could spell the end of Single Stream Recycling -- maybe the end of collecting anything but paper at curbside. This is the beginning of the new China that will not need us any more - they'll have plenty of plastic of their own to recycle.

In the same edition of the Vancouver Sun, a group calling itself the Waste Management Association of BC (WMABC) ran a full page ad urging citizens to complain to their elected officials for meddling in the way waste is handled in the Metro Vancouver region. The ad warned readers that these matters are way to technical and complex for mere politicians to understand and they should mind their own business.

Now, these guys are the self-same companies that can't keep our plastics clean enough to sell to China. True, the politicians were gullible enough to hire them, but I'll defend to the death the right of my political representatives to make the rules for the garbage industry.

We're not buying it.

2013-04-10T17:41:00.004-07:00

Today the Canadian Energy From Waste Coalition came to town to schmooze our municipal engineers. Selling pollution.
Pic: Zero waste activists protest Metro Vancouver incineration plan, Richmond Review

Ignoring them doesn't help

2013-04-03T21:25:00.002-07:00

It's been 2 1/2 years since Metro Vancouver politicians let the fans down by approving a massive public expenditure on waste incinerator(s).

This was after I and several other citizens dutifully sat through hours of monthly meetings of the regional waste committee, laying out all our arguments why the regional district staff's proposal to build incinerators was a really bad idea.

The politicians listened politely. And ignored us. I stopped going to their meetings. What was the point?

But the agenda for tomorrow's meeting just crossed my desk, all 113 pages of it. Reassuring staff updates on the inexorable process, millions of dollars for each small step, of carrying out the direction they were duly given by what one former Metro staff person once referred to as "the temporary help." (Many of the pols who were around when the incinerator plan was approved were not returned to office in the last election.) Or was it "part time help" ( the politicians on Metro's board and committees were not actually elected to run the region -- their main focus, and rightly so, is managing the staffs in their own municipalities. How many have time to read 113-page regional reports every month?)

Along with the incinerator, a major focus of tomorrow's meeting is howls of righteous indignation from municipal politicians, documented in letters on official letterhead, over the proposal by Multi-Materials BC not to collect glass and plastic bags in the curbside collection system they intend to operate as our new province-wide EPR program for packaging and printed paper.

The Mayors of several regional cities are insisting that glass and plastic bags stay in the curbside collection program. Most likely because nobody on their staff was honest enough to admit that collecting glass and plastic bags in a curbside collection program is a disaster. Shards of glass destroys the paper for recycling -- and the bags get jammed in the machines that are used to sort curbside materials.

Politicians need to get out more, see for themselves how things really work. But then, they wouldn't be able to make it through those 113-page reports...

The Blue Box Conspiracy - read it now

2013-01-22T19:33:00.006-08:00

"THE BLUE BOX ON YOUR FRONT PORCH WASN'T DREAMED UP by government officials. Or inspired by grassroots environmentalists. The soft drink industry and its packaging suppliers brought in the Blue Box to serve a common corporate agenda..."

These are the opening words of an heretical article by a Canadian who knows his stuff (Guy Crittenden, editor of Solid Waste and Recycling magazine). It was published in Next City magazine in 1997. The title was The Blue Box Conspiracy. You can read it reprinted by Probe International Research Foundation.

That same year another insightful Ontario journalist, David Menzies, told the same story. He titled it Waste Blues. It was published in the Financial Post. You can read it online here.

The two stories tell how corporations vested in the proliferation of throw-away packaging successfully dismantled the remnants of a refillable bottle system. And how environmentalists didn't see it coming.

The bromide that the corporate interests were selling -- with environmentalists on board -- is that **convenience** is the motivator in recycling. It's a truism that if you don't make it easy, people won't recycle. And what could be easier than putting everything in a box and setting it on the curb?

But three decades of experience, all documented in trade magazines like Crittenden's, is that it is not working. Curbside recycling is harvesting bales of filthy contaminated garbage that is going to China.

In the 1990s, the corporate lobbyists came out here from Ontario and tried to dismantle our deposit system on beverage containers. In 1997 our ministry sent them packing -- and expanded the deposit system to include all beverages except milk. Alberta has since added milk to their system. We could have followed -- and carried on further, putting deposits on yogurt containers and detergent bottles and many other containers, creating good jobs and good recycling outcomes right here in Canada.

But in 2010, the corporate lobbyists came back and found a new team at the ministry that had short memories. MMBC was invited to submit a plan.

What MMBC is offering -- surprise, surprise! -- is traditional, convenient, multi-material curbside recycling. It will make everybody including environmentalists feel good, until they learn what they're missing.

If you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it.

Who is MMBC?

2013-01-22T18:18:00.000-08:00

MMBC is a combine of trade associations and companies who sell packaged products and are therefore obligated under the BC Recycling Regulation to take back and recycle their packaging (also obligated under the same clause of the same regulation are producers of "printed paper").

Go to MMBC's website to read how they are now consulting with the public and stakeholders on a plan they've developed.

Click the second bulleted link under Consultation in the left-hand column to find dozens of tough questions and concers that were voiced by just about everybody at the consultation session MMBC held last November.

Nobody likes this plan. It disrupts the existing system without creating the conditions for innovation and waste reduction. I was surprised (and reassured) to hear concerns coming from the producers who are going to have to bankroll this system (of course, passing the costs on through to consumers). Many producers at the November session sounded very skeptical about MMBC's plan.

The question now is: can MMBC get enough of them to sign on to the plan for the province to OK it?

Think outside the box

2013-01-21T21:22:00.000-08:00

Dear NDP,

When your government comes into office, you are going to inherit a dreadful mess.

The new (MMBC) recycling program for packaging is a bad deal for the province and it's going to happen on your watch.

You are going to eat the consequences. There will be public dismay when word eventually gets out what a failed program it is, as it has on Ontario, where the performance has been "abysmal" or was it "dismal" in the words of a former political victim. All three parties have soiled their reputations by following the path being charted for us by MMBC (see this CIELAP assessment).

What MMBC is trying to set up will be a bad deal for the economy. A bad deal for small recycling businesses and their employees in our communities, who will have to cater to the corporate monopolist (MMBC) or leave the table. Existing recycling companies in our communities will lose their independence and the scope of their freedom to innovate.

It will be a worse deal for the potential new recycling companies in the communities in our province -- potential industry leaders -- that will never be formed, because this system will not allow new entrants.

It will be a bad deal for our kids, who will have to wait longer for change, for some good new idea to come along and heal the planet.

Sadly, our current ministry of environment lacks the institutional memory to recognize MMBC and throw them out, as the ministry of the day did a generation ago when OMMRI (godfather to MMBC) came calling. Our ministry let us down. They let the infection in because they didn't have the confidence or the imagination to see that we can do it our own way and do it better -- just as we did a generation ago when OMMRI was told to take a hike.

Who will save us? Who can we collaborate with?

The beer industry? Can we activate that industry (brand owners, brewery workers, LDB, beer drinkers) to show a different way? CAMPAIGN: get the LDB to mark their shelves to indicate which beers come in refillable bottles. This will expose the buried issue of the major brewers' control of the "bottle pool" as a weapon against the craft brewing industry. It will potentially open the way for a truly local bottle pool, or even regional bottle pools. The Proximity Principle will finally be enshrined as a guiding force in marketing.

The paper industry? Can we activate that industry (brand owners, mill workers, community newspapers) to show a different way? CAMPAIGN: get a local mill or converter or retailer to market a line of made-in-BC compostable paper foodware and food scraps ware. This will provide the new generation of young locavores the sensible consumer products they need to participate in a Zero Waste food system. It will help to level the playing field between our dying paper industry (with its solutions built with current carbon) and the petrochemical industry (with its oxymoronic "biodegradable plastics").

Can these industries organize themselves in our province and pursue the truly transformational changes that will become industry standard all over the world?

Or do they need facilitation from a new government, one backed by people who are prepared to pioneer made-in-BC solutions?

Coal in stocking from Metro pols

2013-01-05T14:56:00.001-08:00

To the Editor, Vancouver Sun:

Two Metro politicians put coal in our stockings with their Christmas greeting this year (Reduce, recycle, waste-to-energy the answers for managing Metro garbage, December 24, 2012).

The week before, Jordan Batemen of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation had called out Metro politicians for “forging ahead with plans to build a $450-million waste incinerator that will reinforce our addiction to garbage, freeze out private contractors and put the Fraser Valley air shed at risk.” (Taxpayers feel pain of politicians and their perception that they are going green, Dec. 17).

To make their case that new incinerators won’t pollute and will be cheaper than landfills, Brodie and Moore cited “independent” economic and environmental analyses that were carried out three years ago by consulting firms working under contract to Metro Vancouver (see AECOM report, for instance). These studies told Metro what it wanted to hear.

Brodie and Moore may not know how much the current regional incinerator costs us. I tracked these expenditures up to 2004, relying on data provided by Metro staff at my request.

As long ago as 2004, Metro had already spent nearly $41 million dollars on upgrades to a facility whose original cost was $88 million.

Within the first 5 years of operation, the Burnaby incinerator cost us $500 thousand for a carbon injection system to treat mercury and $200 thousand for a filter to reduce particulate emissions. Three years later, we faced a $800 thousand cost for a system to treat nitrous oxide another $700 thousand for a flyash stabilization system.

Speaking of flyash, the company Metro currently contracts with to operate the Burnaby incinerator is under investigation by the provincial government for losing track of 18,000 tonnes of toxic cadmium-laced flyash (Cadmium contamination in Cache Creek dump appears worse than previously thought, Vancouver Sun, November 2, 2012)

And then, the engineering firm Metro retained (HDR) to manage the planning for the new incinerator recently had to quit because it had its own agenda (Waste-to-energy consultant quits Metro Vancouver project after ‘perception of bias’ in email, Vancouver Sun, December 7, 2012). But over half of the $1.9 million consulting money had already been spent.

The northern European countries that Moore and Brodie like to cite for their “internationally accepted waste management practices” are now experiencing a new crisis. They built too much incineration capacity and are competing to import waste from other countries (see, for example, this report from Public Radio International). Already Metro’s 2008 projections of waste volumes have had to be revised downwards several times, due to the economic slowdown and new programs to divert large volumes of organic waste. Incinerators have to operate at full capacity 24/7 or the pollution control systems don’t work. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put the incinerator on hold until we decide if we need it?

Good reporting by Jeff Nagel

2012-10-25T17:10:00.001-07:00

Hats off to Jeff Nagel of Black Press who continues to dog Metro Vancouver's waste activities, including this embarrassing disclosure that the new operator of the Burnaby incinerator (Covanta) let cadmium levels go way up and never bothered to report them to Metro Vancouver.

Paul Henderson, who moved from landfill duties at the City of Vancouver to incinerator duties at Metro, sounded shocked:

"Solid waste manager Paul Henderson said there was a range of sample results, but the highest cadmium readings were more than double the provincial limit.... "It wasn't marginally over the limit, they were substantially over the limit," he said.

Bitter irony that Wastech, which has fought Metro's new incinerator plan, had to take the toxic fly ash at their Cache Creek landfill.

I wonder if any cadmium got in the carrots in my backyard....

Are producers going to join MMBC's plan?

2012-10-24T17:06:00.003-07:00

The clock is ticking down towards the deadline (November 19) when thousands of companies that produce packaged products and printed materials sold in British Columbia have to submit their plan to the government for recycling their waste. It's our bold new step in producer responsibility.

But these companies have been strangely silent.

Instead, an organization called MMBC has been presenting itself as the appointed body chosen by these companies to put together a "stewardship plan" for them.

MMBC has now issued its plan. They will unveil it at a public consultation next Monday. No matter what the public thinks -- will the producers themselves sign on to MMBC's plan?

It's hard to see why.

For one thing there are some pretty significant industries that aren't going to get any service under this plan -- even though they are being asked to pay for it. Toothpaste tubes, for instance, are not going to be collected when the plan rolls out in 2014.

Crest and Colgate-Palmolive and Tom's of Maine and all the rest of these big players are going to have to pay MMBC "fees" even though they are not getting any service. Sort of like a tax. Except that nobody elected MMBC. Least of all you and me.

The MMBC board is not very representative of the companies obligated under BC legislation. There's nobody there from the Printed Paper industry. Maybe the newspaper industry are still thinking of backing after all, as they threatened to do last April.

The consultation is open to the public in person and as a webinar. Register online and see what happens.

Dual stream not a solution

2012-09-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

I'm already hearing people say we can solve the PackagingAndPrintedPaper problem by collecting paper one week and packaging the next. This is what they do in Ottawa.

The rationale for this pickup schedule is that it keeps the materials separate, while also maintaining some sort of economies of scale by making use of the same fleet of trucks.

But this economy of scale benefits packaging unfairly: the containers continue to be collected at a loss, while the paper pays more than its way.

Let's take care of paper, and let packaging figure out a system of its own... like, for instance, joining the deposit/refund system?

Let's start with paper

2012-09-17T16:56:00.002-07:00

OK, MMBC has asked for an extension of the deadline for submitting its recycling plan for PackagingandPrintedPaper. While they dither, let's get going with a new plan a plan for PrintedPaper. Let's get the Paper Chain together in this province and craft a stewardship program that:

gives right of first refusal to municipalities and social enterprises for collection of all grades of paper from single family and multi-family residences in the province -- with the condition that the paper must be collected separately from containers (eat that, MMBC!)
establishes a BC Grade of recovered paper and has a design competition for industries that can do something with it (e.g. how about somebody to manufacture a compost-grade paper (100% recycled content sourced in BC) and somebody to convert it into handy countertop bags for folks to collect food scraps in before dumping them in with their yard waste (100,000 new consumers of this product were just created by Mayor Robertson's announcement of City food scraps collection service)

Any takers, BC newspaper publishers? Way simpler than a refinery in Kitimat....

Mumble BC webinar a snoozer -- except question period

2012-02-14T17:46:00.000-08:00

Except for question period -- which turned out to be live -- the MMBC webinar was a total waste of time. Who wants to listen to a patronizing Ontario voice read PPT slides summarizing stacks of meaningless data?

But as soon as she sat down the members of the audience let her have it -- but politely (this is Canada).

Local government reps bit the hand that they hoped was going to feed them, finding fault with data that they said Mumble BC should have seen was glaringly inconsistent.

MRF operators raised an obvious practical question : is Mumble BC shooting for an aggregate target of 75% recycling -- or 75% of each different material. (This question, of course, belongs to the Ministry. It will be a central point of public concern: aggregate targets reward the laggards.)

MRF operators in BC like Cascades Recovery and Urban Impact and Emterra have been spending a fortune tooling up their plants with Rube Goldberg machines to sort ketchup bottles out of newspapers -- they don't want to spend a fortune if Mumble BC isn't going to give them part of the action. Cascades CEO Al Metauro jumped up three times and tried to pin MMBC down on how the pie was going to be divvied up.

Recycling advocates, we are about to lose EPR -- our Ministry is giving it away. Designating PackagingAndPrintedPaper as a single product category under the regulation is sending us down the road to single-stream recycling. And Mumble BC is quite open about intending to direct "non recyclable packaging" to incinerators.

Will we Occupy EPR -- or let the Retail Council take it away from us?

Mumble BC -- lets fight them with Ottawa's approach

2012-02-13T18:22:00.000-08:00

MMBC is a front organization for producers of throw-away packaging. It is angling for permission from our provincial government to take over monopolistic control of recycling in this province by becoming the "steward" of packaging and printed paper under our newest EPR program.

MMBC is hosting a webinar tomorrow for "stakeholders" to discuss two background papers. The papers are being distributed to a select group of participants (if you want to read them, I can forward the pdfs). During the webinar participants will not hear each others questions or comments.

All this is an effort by producers of throwaway packaging to dumb down EPR. It is likely to succeed unless the public wakes up.

Ontario is just starting to climb out of the hole that MMBC's sister organization (OMMRI) dug for them a generation ago. OMMRI convinced the ON government of the day to authorize producer-subsidized curbside recycling for packaging and printed paper, rather than using the successful deposit/return program like the one we have for beverage containers. The results were so abysmal that Ontario has recently announced that big changes are needed (more about that soon).

As part of this effort, Ontario cities are being duped, like half of BC cities have, into adopting "single stream" curbside recycling. But the City of Ottawa resisted the pressure to dump everything in one cart. They asked The People and heard that separate collection was what was wanted.

Read about Ottawa's new plan here.

Occupy Recycling!

2011-12-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

The 1% are trying to steal recycling from the rest of us. We can't let them have it.

First, they took the word. The 1% are pushing for a legal definition that would include burning (using throw-away products and packaging as fuel) rather than turning them into new products and packaging. We in the 99% know that recycling is really all about slowing down entropic flow, not speeding it up.

Next, they are taking the community economic development and the consciousness raising opportunities. The 1% are pushing our communities to adopt single stream recycling, where consumers don't have to think and machines do the work instead of people, and the materials are suited only to nourish dirty industry in China instead of potential clean industries right here in our communities.

But the 99% are fighting back. Wastepickers of Colombia, we celebrate your victory! We will work with you to take back our vision of recycling.

We demand access to the resources that the 1% of Big Garbage, Big Oil and Big Brands have stolen from the earth. We will not stand by as they try to blow them up into the atmosphere in the name of "recycling" and "Extended Producer Responsibility."

Pic: Global Alliance of Waste Pickers

Pele-Mele -- fast and sloppy

2011-12-20T16:02:00.000-08:00

After 6 weeks of intensive French language training here in Montreal, I'm now spending my days reading in French about the way waste is done here.

The bad news is that I can't recycle. The municipal collection system serving this city is a Single-Stream recycling program. They market it as "collecte selective pele-mele." This certainly captures the sanctioned carelessness of it all.

Green boxes sit in the slush, overflowing with everything that somebody thinks "ought" to be able to be recycled. It gets pitched into the back of a packer truck. You can hear the glass shattering.

I have not put out our box yet. I am returning glass beer bottles to the Depanneur where we buy them. Meanwhile, I'm saving up paper. I'm stuffing it into the paper bags that my flour comes in. My hope is that when I eventually have to put the box out to be hauled away, the paper will stay bundled when it lands on the tipping floor at the centre de tri and end up in a paper bale. They claim to have a market for milk cartons, so I put them in there too.

However the two daily French language free papers (24 Heures and Metro) are stacked in the pantry. I tear out sheets to wrap the compostable food scraps from the kitchen that I have no choice but to set out in a mandatory black plastic bag on the curb.

Let's give our recyclers resources instead of garbage

2011-10-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

Last week I joined a small group of Port Moody citizens on a tour of Emterra, a local company that sorts the materials collected in single-stream" recycling programs. It was a very sad experience.

The people at Emterra were really nice.

Nevil and Mohamed took us through the entire process, from the "tipping floor" to the bales of plastic and paper that the plant ships off to manufacturers. They let us take photos (very unusual!). They answered all our questions.

They are proud of what they do. They freely admit there are challenges, but they are working hard and "thinking innovatively" to find solutions.

But I think they've been dealt an impossible hand.

Emterra's problem is that they have two customers they have to please, and the needs of these customers are totally contradictory.

One customer is cities. The Mayors of cities like Port Moody, Surrey, Langley and Port Coquitlam -- and hosts of others across Canada and the US -- are insisting that recycling must be "convenient." They tell their citizens not to bother to recycle materials -- and demand that Emterra transform their waste into resources.

The other customer is manufacturers. Paper mills don't have much latitude when it comes to the quality of materials they can use. They can tolerate very small percentages of "out-throws" (the wrong kind of paper) and only a tiny percentage of "prohibitives" (like plastic bags and lettuce boxes) in the paper they use. Paper making equipment is expensive. Downtime to fix it is expensive. Our paper mills are already suffering because of the recession. That's why most of Emterra's dirty paper is going overseas.

Where is the fix? Manufacturers have very little latitude. How hard is it for us to recycle paper and containers separately?

The most successful recycling program in North America is the beverage container deposit program that keeps containers separate. Despite the hassle of separating containers, deposits recycle twice as many containers as curbside recycling programs -- and keep the materials in good condition.

A cash refund trumps "convenience" every time. If we're serious about building a strong recycling industry, let's give the industry resources instead of waste.

The Campaign for Real Recycling - let's start with milk containers

2011-10-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we launched phase one of a Campaign for Real Recycling.

We're fighting back against companies that are trying to hijack recycling by passing off dumbed-down recycling as the real thing.

Worse, they're calling it EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility).

We've been tracking the spread of dumbed-down recycling on this blog (read these past posts from the bottom up).

The issue is urgent right now in British Columbia because producers of throw-away packaging have organized themselves into a lobby group that is proposing "EPR for packaging" that is classic dumbed-down recycling.

"Multi-Materials BC" is seeking the provincial government's approval to set up a single, province-wide dumbed-down recycling program that they will control. A growing number of us who are paying attention are really worried.

The first local meeting to "consult with the public" about all this is at 10:00 am on Thursday, October 13th.

Multi-Materials BC is proposing a "multi-material" recycling program that allows you to mix different kinds of materials together. Once the materials have left your curb (and been counted as "recycled"), they are crushed together in a truck, dumped on a cement floor, shoved around with a front-end-loader and dumped on a moving conveyor belt. Workers grab things that might be recognizable as recyclable commodities (though they are degraded by being mixed with other materials) and what they don't grab (amounting to as much as 40% of the mix) falls off the conveyor into the garbage.

This approach is favoured by producers of stuff that is hard to recycle, because their stuff gets credit for being recycled even though it ends up in the landfill or incinerator.

It is favoured by producers of stuff that is easy to recycle, because most of these companies are more interested in selling new stuff than taking care of their old stuff.

It is favoured by garbage companies, because it allows them to do what they've always done: haul large loads of worthless stuff and get paid for it.

It is even favoured by many of our well-intentioned local governments, because they are trying to save up-front municipal costs and simplify things for citizens.

It is based on the demeaning view that people are lazy and won't bother to do recycling right so you have to give them a program that is all about "convenience" rather than doing things right.

But we have one program here in BC that proves them wrong. The deposit system for beverage containers contradicts all the rules of dumbed down recycling.

It keeps materials separate, so they can be recycled into the highest-value markets. It exposes the hard-to-recycle materials and puts pressure on producers to improve their products (remember the old HDPE base cups on 2-litre PET pop bottles? Gone, because they made it hard to recycle.)

It proves that *incentives* work better than convenience to motivate people to recycle.

Deposits get up to 95% of targeted containers back -- double or triple the rate of "convenient" dumbed-down recycling services.

That's why we're calling for refundable deposits on milk containers.

Not only will putting milk in the deposit system get back more containers, in better condition, than any dumbed down recycling program.

It will deprive dumbed-down recycling of a victory. One hundred and forty million milk containers that are sold each year in BC wil create jobs, provide income supplements, and offer kids fundraising opportunities in our communities before going to high-value recycling markets -- all at no expense to the taxpayer.

Who could be against that? Sign on and lend your voice to the campaign against dumbed-down recycling.

Pic: The Campaign for Real Recycling,
Read about our launch on News1130.

Arab Spring and Wastepickers

2011-09-21T19:31:00.000-07:00

This amazing story is making the rounds among incinerator fighters world-wide.

Photo: Goldman Fund