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What are we going to do with our garbage? Metro Vancouver struggles to find the way

August 3rd, 2010 · 7 Comments

It doesn’t take much research to discover that hundreds of cities are wrassling with the problem of what to do about their garbage in the future. More landfills in more remote communities doesn’t seem to be the optimal way.

So lots of places are trying to figure out what they can do instead. Can they learn to recycle enough so that existing facilities can handle the little bit that’s left over? If that doesn’t work, are modern-day incinerators that use new technology to reduce pollution and toxic chemical formation the answer? Is there anything else?

Green types prefer the recycling/alternative options. But they’re not the only ones. Incinerators are tough political sells, even though all kinds of science says they’re light-years safer than they used to be.

Metro Vancouver’s directors clearly had a hard time answering those questions Friday and essentially opted for: let’s explore both incineration and alternatives in more detail.

Some saw it as a pro-incineration vote. But Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart (a former Liberal MLA and not someone prone to extremes) saw it as more of an anti-incineration vote, since his motion (the one eventually passed) called for staff to ask for bids on alternatives and also called for an independent reviewer to assess them. More verbiage on this in my story here.

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  • MB

    Garbage is not a pretty topic, but we all produce it and it’s something we have to address collectively.

    It’s obvious that recycling alone isn’t going to save the world. We just simply need to use less stuff, and to demand that the manufacturers of our consumer goods need to do it with less material and energy.

    No matter how good modern incinceration technolgy may be, that doesn’t molify my wife who has severe asthsma and who is only too aware of how very fine particulates never leave one’s lungs once inhaled.

    Granted, most of the particulate pollution in the Lower Mainland comes from cars and trucks, and the traffic is increasing thanks to our love of the car and the freeway-building policies of our so-called green premier, but the question has to be asked: Why add yet another dimension to atmospheric pollution in this, the second decade of a century that will see a lot of environmental repercussions directly related to the consumer-driven economies made possible only by burning several trillion barrels / tonnes of fossil fuels in less than a century?

    This leads directly to the issue of carbon dioxide emissions, which, unless there’s some kind of voodoo tech out there, will increase with the advent of incinerators just when the world needs to come to grips with leveling off and reducing emissions at the local scale.

    Big questions, eh?

  • Bill Lee

    We did have a long lockout in the City of Vancover recently. How was garbage handled then?

    Could we disassemble garbage and short at source and let retailers work it out (and put push-back pressure on manufacturers) as they do in shops in Germany, for one example.

    Or be charged by the kilo/week, so we could put in work-garbage, the neighbours empty bin, or just have less to put out.

    I still say we should have gone to clear plastic bags so all the neighbours can see how bad-bad-bad some garbage is.

  • Bill Smolick

    You know, for several years I’ve wondered why the provincial or federal government doesn’t limit the transportation of garbage. Limit it to 100km or something.

    I say “I’ve wondered why” in a rhetorical way because I *know* why, I just think it would be rational public policy.

    If the residents of the City of Vancouver had to actually DEAL with their garbage instead of trucking it thousands of km, we might actually see a reduction in waste.

    As long as we hide from this problem, we’re just going to keep throwing crap out.

  • Dan Cooper

    Driving up Highway 1 beyond Hope (I love saying that!), I saw a couple homemade signs thanking Metro Vancouver for its decision. That suggests to me that it was viewed there, anyway, as an anti-incineration plan.

  • Doug Gray

    “”””They””””” say that incinerators are light years cleaner today …. the problem is “they” have no credibility. When we have public access to daily .. hourly monitoring of PM 2.5 particles in our cities in BC – then we can consider incinerators if they do not spew out these most harmful toxins.

  • Bill Lee

    Seattle : Would less trash service lead to less trash, or more smells?
    http://www.seattlepi.com/local/424718_solidwaste09.html

    The online-only paper, (getting awards for cleverness if nothing else) talks about that smelly city’s plan for Zero-waste.
    ” In advancing its “zero waste” goals, Seattle Public Utilities is considering a six-month experiment on roughly 800 of its 150,000 customers.
    The study: Reduce garbage pick-up to every other week, while keeping weekly food and yard waste collection. Then watch how behavior changes: Do people upsize their cans? Do they recycle and compost more? Can they deal with smellier trash that sits around longer?”

    See http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~public/meetingrecords/2010/spunc20100810_4.pdf

  • Dan Cooper

    Portland has had a monthly garbage-pickup option for at least a decade now, and I never heard anyone express concern about it.

    http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/index.cfm?c=41476&