FRANCES BULA, Globe and Mail, Jul. 25, 2011
A controversial garbage incinerator in Metro Vancouver has been pushed one big step closer to reality after the provincial government approved the region’s new waste and recycling plan.
The announcement Monday prompted surprise and outrage from politicians and opponents of the plan in both the Vancouver region and the Fraser Valley. Residents there fear that an incinerator in the Lower Mainland will inevitably spew toxic chemicals into the already pollution-prone valley.
“I’m very frustrated and very angry,” said Chilliwack Mayor Sharon Gaetz. “We feel sabotaged.”
But other Metro Vancouver politicians said the decision from Environment Minister Terry Lake will allow the region to move ahead with a plan for garbage after a year-long wait.
“This is a bit of a red-letter day,” said Metro chair Lois Jackson, who is also the mayor of Delta. “This is a plan that protects the environment and generates revenue.”
The region’s plan, arrived at last July after several years of agonized thrashing over how to handle the 500,000 tonnes of garbage that are now sent by truck to the Interior town of Cache Creek, does include a target for more recycling – up to 70 per cent by 2015 from the current 55 per cent.
But the most controversial part of the plan is the decision to include a “waste-to-energy” incinerator that would burn anything that is not recyclable and, ideally, channel the heat produced into a revenue-producing district energy system. That would be in addition to an existing incinerator in Burnaby that burns 280,000 tonnes of garbage a year and a landfill in Delta that accommodates the other 500,000 tonnes of the region’s 1.3 million tonnes of garbage each year.
The plan was developed after years of debate over the impending closure of the Cache Creek landfill and the province’s refusal to allow garbage to be shipped to the United States, as Toronto did at one point.
Two companies have publicly pitched plans for energy-generating incinerators, which would likely cost almost $500-million to build.
One is from a company in the empire of the Aquilini family, which also owns the Canucks, at a site on the Tsawwassen First Nations reserve. The other is from Covanta Energy Corp., a New Jersey-based company that is proposing a plant at the abandoned mill in Gold River on Vancouver Island.
Metro Vancouver officials say other companies and sites are also contenders.
The province has set several conditions for its approval of the Metro Vancouver plan specifically to address the fears about air quality in the valley. They include requirements that Metro Vancouver set up a working group with its neighbouring regional district on emission standards and environmental monitoring.
Ms. Gaetz said that doesn’t give local politicians or residents any comfort at all, since all it does is create a working committee to decide on standards for an incinerator, with no power to block it.
But Vancouver Councillor Andrea Reimer, whose Vision Vancouver party is also opposed to a mass-burn incinerator, said the battle is not over. She said it’s a positive step that the province gave the go-ahead to all of the alternative technologies and diversion goals in the plan. Now her focus will be to make sure that Metro Vancouver continues to pursue those options, as the region’s politicians decide this fall on exactly what to include in the bidding process for companies in competition for different parts of the garbage and recycling plan.
Ms. Reimer said the amount of garbage Metro Vancouver generates has also dropped by 25 per cent since the plan was formulated a year ago, which may yet be a factor in building an incinerator.
“The whole case for waste-to-energy is that, since it’s expensive to build, it has to have a lot of volume, especially of paper and plastic,” she said. If that’s not there because garbage volumes are going down and increasing amounts of paper and plastic are being recycled, the case for the incinerator might disappear.
