Five days in Sweden
It was a beautiful day in Vancouver when Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan caught a flight last September that took him over the Canadian Arctic to Sweden. The deputy chair of Metro Vancouver’s Zero Waste Committee was on a working trip to learn more about incineration in a country that wrote the book on turning garbage into energy. It was also a trip that cost taxpayers more than $7,500 in flights, registration fees and food.
According to reports in local media, Corrigan admitted there were differences in the European and Canadian approach to incinerators.
"We want limited incineration, not dependence on it -- it's a real distinction in the way we approach it," he said.
That distinction, however, hadn't deterred other Metro Vancouver politicians from boarding planes for Europe.
In 2008, then Waste Management Committee chair Marvin Hunt, a Surrey councillor and current MLA, was invited to view two incinerators in Paris. According to a January 11, 2008 memofrom Johnny Carline, Metro Vancouver's Chief Administrative Officer at the time, the trip was organized by “leading waste-management company, Suez Environnement”. Suez, a multi-billion dollar French water and waste management giant, along with its partner Burnaby engineering consulting firm AECOM, is also a bidder for Metro Vancouver's proposed new incinerator.
The following year, Metro Vancouver received a comprehensive reportfrom Suez partner AECOM on what should be done about an avalanche of garbage that had to be dealt with by the year 2035. Two of the preferred options pointed toward incineration. So when Metro Vancouver staff proposed a trip to Sweden to view incineration technology, the board jumped at the chance to go.
Four Metro Vancouver directors from the Zero Waste Committee spent more than $30,000 taxpayer dollars to visit Sweden to view that country’s waste-to-energy incineration plants in action. Sweden was a leading proponent of waste-to-energy, burning enough garbage to power 250,000 homes.
Waste to energy conversion
Former Metro Vancouver waste management committee chair Marvin Hunt was so impressed by the tour of incinerators in Europe that he wrote a testimonial for Philipp Schmidt-Pathmann, a Seattle-based waste management consultant and founder of the Zero Landfill Initiative.
"Over the past few years, Philipp has demonstrated the wealth of his knowledge of waste conversion technologies throughout the Pacific Northwest ... he has also arranged meeting for me with experts when I have travelled to various European cities," Hunt wrote. "When I want answers, I look to Philipp.”
Hunt spoke about Metro Vancouver's plans to emphasize incineration as part of its overall waste management plan at a waste-to-energyconference in Yorkville, Ontario in 2009. Along with Surrey councillor Linda Hepner, he later pointed to North Surrey as an ideal place to build a new incinerator.
Hunt and other North American councillors who were invited to the Europe tour came back with vivid testimonials about how waste-to-energy was a good solution to deal with non-recyclable waste. In Washington, King Country councillor Kathy Lambert started evangelizing for "thermal reclamation" (incineration) not long after she toured trash facilities in Germany and "fell in love" with an incinerator in Hamburg.
"It's always very interesting to see, when you ask people first before they get on to an airplane, how they look at this, what their assumptions are, what their expectations are," Schmidt-Pathmann said at an April 2010 waste conference in Seattle, which was also attended by Johnny Carline.
"When they come back later on, they come back with a very changed mind. They have a very different perspective...they see, 'Oh, really, that works' and see how organized and strategized this whole concept is," he said. Pathmann's consulting company helped produce a short film, which promotes incineration as part of an overall waste-management plan.
"This wasn't about selling a technology -- it's completely unbiased," Schmidt-Pathmann told the Vancouver Observer. He said guides on his tour (which are different from the ones in the Sustainable Sweden tour) are local city staff, as well as members of the European Environmental Protection Agency and local Green Party members.
Video from Confederation of Europe Waste to Energy Plants
Schmidt-Pathmann said Hunt was impressed by the lack of pollution from Germany's incinerators.
"Marvin toured the Frankfurt waste-to-energy facility, which is a bit older. What was striking to him was that a pair of hawks had been nesting on the smokestacks for years, a very long time. It was impressive to him that the same pair (of birds) comes back year after year," Schmidt-Pathmann said, about Hunt's recent trip to visit the facilities. Schmidt-Pathmann said Hunt had called him up, asking him to set up meetings with local city officials who guided him around the city.
"(Hunt) already knew how the technology worked. I was able to get a statement for the Environment Minister of Switzerland for the Metro Vancouver team, talking about the emissions of the waste-to-energy plants in Switzerland. They're all right in the middle of town."
It's an opinion echoed by Metro Vancouver zero Waste committee chair Malcolm Brodie, who said:
"The amount of emissions is less than 1 per cent of the emissions in the region when you take all the emissions...You go out to the Fraser Valley, the emissions from diesel engine and vehicles are far greater concern than the Burnaby incinerator is."
Vancouver Councillor Andrea Reimer, who is staunchly opposed to the $480 million waste-to-energy incinerator plan, thinks waste-to-energy tours might have convinced people at a time when Metro Vancouver was facing huge pressure to come up with an incinerator alternative.
"(Metro Vancouver directors) were doggedly pursuing landfills, when the environment minister ruled shipping waste to a Washington landfill illegal. My impression -- it's just an impression -- is that waste-to-energy was like finding God. It was an a-ha moment. Knowing all the battles, protests, and watching the landfill proposals fail, someone said, 'I have a solution' and people bought into it."
She added that people like Carline were "very bright" and "skeptical" and not easy to win over. "But someone convinced them."
Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) campaign director Ananda Tan expressed some bewilderment that Europe's incinerators were being held up as a model for Metro Vancouver, given that it was not new.
"When the original waste incineration boom started in the U.S. (around the 1980s), a lot of big companies came to Canada, and that had sparked some of the first anti-toxin campaigns here," Tan said.
He said incinerators were largely unsuccessful in Canada back in the daydue to community opposition, but that companies reinvented themselves as waste-to-energy and came back to win over the public.
"And now, 30 years later, they've come back. The industry's fighting back, and in some ways fighting for survival. Incinerator companies have posited themselves as a clean energy and they've done it very successful, calling themselves waste-to-energy, calling themselves alternatives to landfills. They're competing for huge public funding contracts," he said.
He said the waste-to-energy strategically worked to convince politicians to get on their side, to become "champions" for the waste-to-energy incineration, since it was easier than convincing local communities.
Schmidt-Pathmann, however, insisted that incinerators today were vastly different from those in the 70s and 80s.
"The incineration technology has changed so dramatically. It's like comparing the Commodore 64 to superconductor computers," Schmidt-Pathmann said. "What's changed is the flue-gas treatment, and what materials can be recovered."
He said the technology improvement has convinced experts to incorporate incineration as part an overall waste management policy.
"We have Dr. Helmut L. Schnurer (who also made a presentation to Metro Vancouver), who was with the German ministry for environment. He was the one who talked to the German Green Party in the 90s, and that's when Green Party switched over from not liking incinerators...all that changed."
He said his consulting company would gladly provide trips to any public officials who wanted to get a closer view of Europe's technology. The cost, including air fare and accommodation, would range around $5,000 for five days.
Champion recyclers and starved incinerators
Today, though, the Swedish waste management model has a major problem. It’s run out of garbage to burn and material that could be recycled is feeding the fire. The problem is, Sweden doesn't have enough non recyclable garbage to keep its incinerators functioning. And so now Sweden has gone from trying to get rid of its waste to importing garbage from Denmark to feed its incinerators. But that's not enough to keep the fires burning. Sweden views the garbage of countries outside Scandinavia, including Italy, Romanic or the Baltic countries as incinerator fodder.
Despite this predicament, Sweden is the European Union's recycling star, with only four per cent of its garbage mouldering in landfills. The country mandates the separation of recyclables from garbage while it relies on waste-to-energy incineration to heat 250,000 homes. The reason Swedes are so starved for stuff to burn is because they are so good at recycling.
As Sweden has learned the hard way, incineration is the nemesis of recycling.
"Sweden, the European Union, national and local governments are all discovering that incineration was really the wrong direction and recycling is the way to go," Monica Wilson, the Canada and US Program Director for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, told the Vancouver Observer. Wilson has spent the last seven years helping communities around the world battle incinerator proposals.
Monica Wilson, pictured below in an image by Zack Embree, of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
"You're locked in for the first 20-30 years by a long term contract where there is very little ability to change how much garbage you’re sending the incinerator. (This is called the 'put or pay' clause. More on that coming in a later article in this series.) Cities have a tough time actually increasing their recycling under a situation like that."
Metro Vancouver continues to move ahead with a plan to build a half billion dollar incinerator, or more new incinerators. It’s a controversial plan with some Metro Vancouver directors, the zero waste community, and health groups publicly opposed.
Why Sweden and not San Francisco?
The Metro Vancouver directors' trip to Sweden raised eyebrows in the local waste industry community.
“What surprised me was that our politicians were not given the option to see new, progressive and sustainable alternatives to burning waste and recyclables. This illustrates the power of the incineration lobby," Russ Black, vice president of waste handling company Belkorp, told VO.
"They travelled so far just to see incinerators, and we have one right here." Burnaby's "Waste to Energy" incinerator handles more than 25 per cent of Metro Vancouver's garbage.
Another waste industry source who spoke to the Vancouver Observeron condition of anonymity said:
“I recall thinking, what does waste management in Sweden possibly have in common with Vancouver? The cost and price of electricity here is completely different. And land filling options aren't comparable." Then he added, "It’s a lot more fun going to Sweden and Paris to view a half billion-dollar dinosaurs than it is to travel to the industrial areas of San Jose to look at MRF’s."
More fun and more expensive. A return flight on Air Canada from Vancouver to San Francisco today costs $643 with flights departing every day, almost one third of what it cost to fly to Sweden in 2010.
Meanwhile, south of the border, two major cities have cutting edge waste management programs. Citizens have fought and defeated almost every incinerator project proposed in California since the "Garbage Wars" of the seventies. San Francisco trashed Vancouverfor the "Greenest City in the North America" title due to its cutting edge recycling program. The art of garbage landed San Francisco a 100 per cent score in Waste Management from Siemen’s Green City Index. San Francisco recycles 80 percent of its garbage and sends the rest to landfill. The Golden Gate city is committed to 100 per cent recycling by 2020.
San Francisco's commitment to recycling has gone gone hand in hand with a citywide ban on plastic bags and Styrofoam cups.
Jack Macy, the city's zero waste manager, said that even in dense, multi-cultural San Francisco, mandatory recycling works very well. Strong public policy, education, and convenience have led to massive public buy-in. Recycling has also created a thousand new jobs for the city.
Jack Macy, San Francisco's Zero Waste Manager, is pictured below in an image by Zack Embree
A thousand new jobs and a system that uses no tax dollars to pay for their costs which are instead shouldered proportionally by users, like electricity and water.
"People like the idea of zero waste, of recyclables, of feeding the economy, being sustainable," Macy said. "They like food scraps from businesses and residences being made into high value compost going into producing high value food and wine coming back into the city. People recognize there are benefits and feel good about it."
But that same path isn't being pursued by Metro Vancouver. Just last month, Metro Vancouver Zero Waste Committee deputy chair Derek Corrigan told his committee that an 80 per cent recycling goal is "an unrealistic figure."
"We set an 'aspirational' goal," he said, adding that "we are going to need all the help we can get to reach even 70 per cent."
Macy can't believe Vancouver is even considering incineration.
It's not 'Waste to Energy', it's a waste of energy," he said, adding that Vancouver will never make its Greenest City goal if Metro Vancouver continues on what former Fraser Valley Regional District Chair Patricia Ross called its "mind-boggling"path to burning waste.
San Francisco's Recology handles its waste management. Image by Zack Embree
Neglecting the recycling option
For the past few years, Belkorp Industriesand Northwest Waste Solutionscompany executives have been asking tough questions about Metro Vancouver’s incineration plan. They accuse Metro Vancouver of neglecting its own waste priorities which list recycling and material recovery ahead of incineration.
Northwest Waste Solutions built a multi-million dollar facility on Kent Street in south Vancouver where machines rip open garbage bags and remove anything of value. But without a steady flow of garbage, the building usually sits empty. According to Russ Black, modern sorting facilities like this can recycle a huge amount of garbage. Belkorp recently announceda new $30 million sorting facility for Coquitlam and is now waiting for a permit from Metro Vancouver.
Since the solid waste plan was approved in 2010, there have been advances in technology. The decision to move forward with a waste-to-energy incinerator was based on a major 2009 report by engineering consultants AECOM that looked at the future waste problems facing the region.
But Black points out that technology has moved faster than Metro Vancouver and by the time an incinerator would get built, it would have advanced even further. The problem is, if Metro Vancouver's plan goes through, Greater Vancouver will be locked in for a 20-year or more contract to burn garbage, as Monica Wilson, of GAIA noted. Meanwhile, Black said, recycling technology will continue to progress to the point where pretty much everything can be re-purposed.
Black doesn't get why Metro Vancouver officials haven't looked to San Francisco as a model. "To our knowledge, there has been no official learning trip for anything but incineration. Compared to the amount of information Metro Vancouver has generated to promote incineration, there has been no equivalent measure of effort invested in providing information about cleaner technologies that would maximize recycling and material recovery before disposal.”
Former Metro Vancouver board member Hal Weinberg told VO, "There was never really any discussion at all about alternative technologies that I can remember."
Current New Westminster councillor Lorrie Williams served on the Metro Van board at the time of the Sweden tour. “The only options were burn it, or bury it,” she said. “We were doing our damnedest to bring our garbage down to minimal, but what do you do with things that just don’t break down into recyclable or compostable parts?”
A small-scale answer in Gibsons
In Gibsons, B.C., an entrepreneur has aggressively promoted recycling and material recovery. Gibsons Recycling Depotfounder Buddy Boyd said trash needs to be treated as a resource. But he's concerned about what's coming, not least because the powerful Aquilini Renewable Group has submitted a proposal for an incinerator on Squamish First Nations land in Port Mellon, close to Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast.
Nestled in the community, Boyd's facility recycles newspapers, bottles and plastics, styrofoam and old light bulbs. Over the years, Boyd said he has tried to convince the Metro Vancouverregional authority to allow private businesses to recycle, rather than looking to a giant publicly funded incinerator to deal with the region's future waste. He's one of many voices making a case to Metro Vancouver to abandon the incineration plan.
For now, at least, they don't seem to be listening.
With files from Linda Solomon Wood
In San Francisco, recycling has created 1,000 jobs, city officials told the Vancouver Observer. Image below courtesy of Recology.
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