Ban on garbage exports will thwart Metro's plans
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Updated: August 28, 2009 3:04 PM
Metro Vancouver’s plan to send up to 600,000 tonnes of garbage south on trash trains to the U.S. for the next few years will likely be blocked.
The provincial government’s throne speech delivered Tuesday says Victoria will “outlaw the international export of British Columbia’s garbage and landfill waste.”
The mayors and city councillors comprising the Metro board voted in April to seek Victoria’s permission to export waste on the basis there is insufficient time left to replace Metro’s nearly full Cache Creek landfill, set to close in late 2010.
Metro Vancouver’s stated aim is to build new waste-to-energy plants within the region to turn garbage into power, although there are still rival proposals afoot to expand the Cache Creek dump or to send the waste for incineration on Vancouver Island.
Metro waste management committee chair Marvin Hunt said he’s frustrated Victoria won’t agree to a new solid waste management plan allowing exports.
“It leaves us in a bit of a lurch,” Hunt said. “Nobody likes any of the solutions we have right now. But we have to find some solutions somewhere – unless you plan on putting it on the legislature’s lawn.”
Hunt said the only currently approved destination that could handle Metro’s garbage glut is the Vancouver Landfill in Delta, on the edge of Burns Bog.
The dump there would have to accept double the current incoming volume of waste over the next five years to handle the loads that are now trucked to Cache Creek.
Hunt said it might be possible that Metro could cut a deal with the City of Vancouver, which owns the landfill, to make more use of the site for the next five years – until new waste-fired plants can be built – and then dramatically reduce loads going to the dump.
But intensifying use of the landfill in Delta, even for a short period, would spark loud local protests.
New incinerators or other waste-fired energy plants are to be built in Metro Vancouver by 2015, and the regional district plans public consultations in the months ahead on what technology should be used, and eventually, where plants should be located.
Sending waste south would have been a stop-gap measure.
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