The plan comes in lieu of a majority vote that took place between Metro Vancouver’s board of directors who voted in favour of the plan. The overall goal highlighted throughout the 500 page document includes increasing diversion rate of garbage going to the Vancouver Landfill by 2015.

“We presented over 500 pages of documentation and I requested that he get back to us as soon as he has his staff digest and make recommendations to him, to allow a basket of options for us as regional government,” Jackson was quoted telling the Delta Optimist following the meeting in Victoria.

Proposed waste reduction initiatives include the highly discussed region-wide composting and the highly recommended waste-to-energy alternative which could be built within the proposed region or in outlining province areas. The most sustainable option for waste disposal, the waste-to-energy technologic alternative is proven to be the most financial and green alternative to the growing problem and an obvious winner among supporting studies.

Original article can be found here

Orginal Article:

Long before Metro Vancouver submitted a waste management plan to the provincial government earlier this month, the owners of a landfill near Cache Creek were making sure ministers were hearing the case against incinerating garbage.

“Waste-to-energy (WTE) incineration of one tonne of municipal waste recovers the energy value of one barrel of oil; but recycling a tonne of municipal waste saves the energy value of four barrels of oil,” wrote Belkorp Environmental Services Inc. president Ted Rattray in a Dec. 23, 2009 letter to Blair Lekstrom, then energy, mines and petroleum resources minister.

Belkorp has a strong interest in garbage continuing to the dump, rather than being used to produce energy. The company owns and operates the landfill at Cache Creek, which at the time of Rattray’s letter was getting full and was slated to close.

Former finance minister Gary Collins is a senior vice president at parent company Belkorp Industries Inc., and Premier Gordon Campbell’s former deputy premier, Ken Dobell, is registered to lobby for the company on solid waste management.

(It should be pointed out that waste-to-energy proponents reportedly include Francesco Aquilini, whose companies have made significant donations to the BC Liberals.)

As recently as August, according to a summary from the registrar of lobbyists, Dobell was lobbying the office of the premier and three ministries on Belkorp’s behalf “to encourage the development of a policy to guarantee the continued operation of Cache Creek Landfill as a major regional disposal facility.”

The government has already approved expanding the landfill, giving it enough space to keep taking Metro Vancouver’s garbage for 25 more years, but Belkorp’s strategy appears to also involve sidelining Vancouver’s other options.

Landfill owner against incineration

“Metro Vancouver is pursuing (waste-to-energy) on an aggressive timeline, without fully addressing significant community concerns, economic and technical concerns,” Rattray wrote in his letter to Lekstrom last December, released to The Tyee in response to a freedom of information request.

In particular, he said, there needed to be a discussion of the risk posed to air quality in the region. “We would like to note that there is increasing concern about the health impacts of ultra fine particles, sometimes referred to as nanoparticles, an air pollutant emitted in significant volumes from incinerators,” he said.

Rattray wrote that his letter was in response to comments Lekstrom had made to the Zero Waste B.C. website. “We are… most concerned about your statement with respect to the ‘benefits’ of WTE relative to landfills. You cite the requirement for less land, a reduced potential for water contamination, and lower production of greenhouse gases (GHG).”

He addressed each of those issues separately. Landfills are subject to provincial regulation to control emissions and water contamination, he said. “Despite extensive investigation, water contamination has not been identified at the Cache Creek landfill.”

As for greenhouse gases, he wrote, “A well-operated landfill will produce less GHG than waste-to-energy if the storage of carbon in a landfill is accounted for, as is best practice.”

Burning garbage releases more of the gases that contribute to global warming, Rattray wrote. “Along with eliminating valuable materials from the production cycles, WTE converts materials to carbon emissions immediately, at a time when the province’s objective is to reduce GHG emissions.”

He also noted that keeping the Cache Creek landfill operating would keep needed employment in the Interior town.

Two weeks after Rattray sent his letter, Environment Minister Barry Penner announced he’d approved adding 42 hectares to the dump, extending its life for up to 25 more years.

Province OK with both options

A month later, on Feb. 9, 2010, Lekstrom sent a letter responding to Rattray. While he supported the landfill, he also said well-regulated incinerators were an option.

In April 2009, the province had passed new standards limiting small particulates and “these air quality targets will be taken into account in the consideration of waste discharge permit applications for any new WTE facilities,” he wrote.

Lekstrom also countered Rattray’s claim that landfills were better for limiting greenhouse gas emissions from municipal solid waste. “The GHG emission impacts from WTE treatment of MSW, compared to disposal in landfills, is a complicated issue,” he wrote. “There are a number of analyses of the issue with a wide range of results.”

So far, neither appeared to have an advantage, he said. “As work on this issue progresses, it has become apparent that WTE likely does not realize a large GHG emissions advantage over landfills.” Any new incinerator would be required to produce zero net GHG emissions, he said.

In the end, he stated support for both incinerators and the Cache Creek landfill.

“The Province’s approval on Jan. 6, 2010 of a further extension of the Cache Creek Landfill makes the long-term disposal of Metro Vancouver’s waste in a well-designed and extensively monitored landfill a viable alternative to the construction of additional WTE facilities,” he wrote.

But his government was also open to incinerators. “The Province considers WTE to be a viable waste disposal option for MSW.” Both incinerators and landfills are subject to “appropriate environmental safeguards and monitoring,” he noted.

Metro Vancouver has a $30-million-a-year contract to send garbage to Cache Creek until 2016.

On September 1, it submitted a solid waste management plan to the province that found “some kind of waste-to-energy technology was the clear winner and most sustainable option for waste disposal.”

Penner has said a decision will take a while so ministry officials can go through the 5,000 pages Metro Vancouver submitted.

Continuing their commitment to sustainability, Arizona State University (ASU) has come out on top of The Princeton Review’s list of 15 colleges  ”2010 Green Rating Honor Roll.” This is the second annual rating of environmentally-friendly institutions and the second year in a row that ASU has made the list.14 other colleges were honored on the list including Harvard College, University of California (Berkley), University of Washington and Yale University, to name a few.

The publication rated 697 institutions based on their previous year (2008-2009) environmentally related policies, practices, and academic offerings to determine the standings.  The publication worked alongside a nonprofit environmental organization (ecoAmerica) to develop and assess the provided criteria, which included three areas of focus. These included whether the school’s student have a campus quality of life that is healthy and sustainable, how well the school is preparing its students for employment and citizenship in a world defined by environmental challenges, and the school’s overall commitment to environmental issues.

Understanding the vast importance of attending a “green” institute for many current and prospective students, ASU has worked to satisfy the needs of the students and community alike by providing immense resources in their practices and programs, including energy use, food recycling programs, buildings, transportation alternatives, and individual academic offerings. In addition, the institute has implemented action plans and goals concerning greenhouse gas emissions and reductions.

The following is a quote from Rob Melnick as seen in the original posted aricle.

“Arizona State University is honored by this recognition,” says Rob Melnick, the executive dean of the Global Institute of Sustainability. “We are thrilled to be among the leaders of the nation’s growing number of higher education institutions that understand the critically important responsibility colleges and universities have in addressing the local and global challenges of sustainability. The Global Institute of Sustainability and School of Sustainabilityexemplify ASU’s commitment to education, discovery and innovation that will rise to these challenges. Being named to the Princeton Review’s Green Honor Roll is very gratifying recognition of the efforts of ASU students, faculty and staff and ASU’s Board of Trustees for Sustainability.”

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made the announcement in late August that the city achieved “77 percent landfill diversion rates, surpassing the goal of 75 percent landfill diversion by 2010 and setting national recycling rate records, the highest of any city in the United States.” This new statistic surpasses the landfill diversion rate of 72% achieved just one year earlier.

In total, the city diverted over 1.6 million tons of material, in perspective, that is double the weight of the Golden Gate Bridge. These accolades were achieved through recycling, composting and re-use. Landfills received only 560,000 tons, the lowest disposal on record.

Newsom says “San Francisco is showing once again that doing good for our environment also means doing right by our economy and local job creation. For a growing number of people, recycling provides the dignity of a pay check in tough economic times. The recycling industry trains and employs men and women in local environmental work that can’t be outsourced and sent overseas, creating ten times as many jobs as sending material to landfills.”

View original press release: http://bit.ly/c2oqdu

Construction has began on a new $80 million dollar plant in Edmonton that will allow all garbage collected from the city to be produced into bio-fuel. The company responsible for the development is Montreal based Enerkem.

The city and developing company are committed to saving 90 percent of waste from the cities landfill. City waste will still be collected from the landfill, with remaining articles post composting and recycling being converted into ethanol and methanol.

Upon completion, the plant will be able to convert 100,000 tonnes of city garbage into 36 million litres of ethanol per year. Implementing the new development has the capability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking 42,000 cars off the road each year; in comparison, it will generate enough fuel to power 400,000 vehicles per year.

The development is set to be completed by the end of 2011.

Original article

Authour:  Richard Harris

January 26, 2010

Carbon dioxide is the gas we most associate with global warming, but methane gas also plays an important role. For reasons that are not well understood, methane gas stopped increasing in the atmosphere in the 1990s. But now it appears to be once again on the rise. Scientists are trying to understand why — and what to do about it.

Methane gas comes from all sorts of sources including wetlands, rice paddies, cow tummies, coal mines, garbage dumps and even termites. Drew Shindell, at NASA’s Goddard Institute in New York, says, “It’s gone up by 150 percent since the pre-industrial period. So that’s an enormous increase. CO2, by contrast, has gone up by something like 30 percent.”

Molecule for molecule, methane is much more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. And that’s just part of the trouble.

“Methane is much more complicated once it gets into the atmosphere than something like carbon dioxide is,” Shindell says, “and that’s because it reacts with a lot of different important chemicals.”

Bad For Climate And Health

For example, methane in the atmosphere also creates ground-level ozone. And ozone isn’t only bad for human health; it also contributes to global warming. Shindell recently totaled up all the effects of methane emissions and realized that the heating effect is more than 60 percent that of carbon dioxide’s.

“So that tells you that methane is a pretty big player.”

Methane in the atmosphere leveled off in the 1990s, so it seemed that efforts to control industrial emissions were keeping this problem gas in check. But since 2007, methane levels have been on the rise again.

Wetlands Cause Vicious Cycle

A study published last week in Science magazine suggests that at least part of this increase is coming from the vast wetlands in Canada, Russia and the Arctic. The methane in wetlands comes from naturally occurring bacteria. But study author Paul Palmer at the University of Edinburgh says the bacteria are producing more methane because the temperature is rising.

“The higher the temperature, the more efficient they are at producing methane,” he says. So global warming is causing these wetlands to produce more methane. And the methane is causing more global warming.

“This really does demonstrate the fact that we are having this vicious cycle in the climate system. And we’re seeing it now.”

It’s not yet to the stage where it’s a runaway warming effect, Palmer says. But climate scientists are worried that we could hit that tipping point.

There’s no obvious way to control methane from natural wetlands other than to keep them from overheating. But at least half of methane emissions are from human activities, ranging from cattle-rearing and natural gas exploration to coal mining.

Capturing Methane Cost-Effective

Since methane is the main ingredient of natural gas, efforts to capture it can actually pay for themselves. You use the gas for energy. And Shindell says there are other benefits of controlling methane. Methane contributes to ozone, which costs society real money because of its human health effects, and ozone also damages crops.

“So if you account for all the economics, all the gains that you get through the benefits of controlling methane that aren’t even related to climate, you find that many of the reductions you could make actually pay for themselves,” Shindell says.

Even so, there’s relatively little effort now to control methane. Mohamed El-Ashry at the United Nations Foundation says part of the reason has been a fear by governments and advocates that attacking methane would be a dangerous distraction.

“People are worried about diverting attention away from carbon dioxide,” he says. “But that shouldn’t really be the case at all.”

Restart Methane Projects

Both problems need to be solved sooner or later. But global methane projects practically ground to a halt last year.

El-Ashry says that was partly because of uncertainty over the outcome of the global warming talks in Copenhagen, and partly because of the global financial crisis. Credit wasn’t available to finance methane projects, even though they were ready to go.

El-Ashry is part of a group advocating for a new $200 million fund to help jump-start these methane programs again.

“Here is an opportunity to have an immediate effect in terms of impacts, particularly on the Arctic, and secondary impacts, like on health,” he says.

And the good thing about methane is that it stays in the air for only about a decade, so if you can reduce emissions, you can see quick results.

Original Link

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122638800