Missed the point
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Updated: June 22, 2009 3:19 PM
There have been several articles recently regarding Metro Vancouver’s plans to build waste incinerators, since they released their study June 12.
The report is almost 300 pages long, so it will require time for me to evaluate it and be able to comment on in detail, which I am eager to do, but for now I must at least respond to the articles promoting their recent trip to Sweden, talking about success there, assuming one can translate that to acceptance here.
But I’m afraid they’ve entirely missed the whole point of people’s concerns. Sweden does not have the challenges our airshed does, so what works there is not relevant to us here. As with SE2, it was not that we opposed natural gas power generation, but that this was the wrong location for it.
Metro Vancouver is essentially proposing to build power plants in our already stressed airshed, something our provincial government promised they would never allow. This is also a position Metro Vancouver, then called GVRD, supported and our airshed has gotten no better. In addition, there is no airshed in Europe that I am aware of that has more than one or two incinerators, whereas Metro Vancouver has said for two years their plan is for three large or six small, in addition to the one they already have.
It makes no sense to add that many polluting incinerators in one of the most sensitive airsheds in the world. It is interesting to note that they calculate the same amount of pollution from just one waste incinerator that SE2 would have emitted.
Why has Metro Vancouver only chosen to go to Europe to visit incinerators and their promoters? Incineration is not as successful in Europe as they would have you believe. Where are the visits to areas where waste incinerators were decommissioned due to not living up to promises?
Where are the visits to areas where they went a different route, such as resource parks (collection, recycling, composting, repair and resell, research; all in one location) where they can achieve 90 per cent diversion without incinerators? Searching for justification is not the same as searching for answers.
Patricia Ross
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