The short-sighted vision of turning mountains of garbage into cash by creating energy never works out that way

Everybody knows that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. This is definitely the case when it comes to the sales pitch behind waste incineration.

Some local politicians on the Metro Vancouver board are trying to convince the public that burning garbage is good for the environment and the economy. There is a mountain of health and climate studies that you can read at the ZeroWasteBC.org website explaining why incineration is a bad idea. Even without doing this reading, however, most people don’t need much convincing that this garbage scheme doesn’t pass the sniff test.

I think we all instinctively know that burning garbage is fundamentally unsustainable. Mayor Gregor Robertson and the proudly green city of Vancouver have led the fight against burning garbage, and all of the major environmental organizations in the province have expressed their opposition to this plan in a letter to the BC Climate Action Secretariat. The group Prevent Cancer Now has an international campaign against waste incineration.

So why are we even talking about this plan?

For many of those pitching incineration, this is all about money. This short sighted-perspective comes from politicians seeing the cost associated with landfills and imagining a scenario where they can turn “garbage into gold” by making money producing energy. However, so-called waste-to-energy incineration is, in fact, a waste of energy, when you take into account the energy that is used to make the products that are being burned instead of being reused or recycled.

The way I see it burning our discarded materials is a waste of both resources and money.

Waste incineration is basically a subsidy to big companies that make poorly designed products. There is no good reason why virtually everything couldn’t be made reusable, recyclable or compostable. This is the baseline of sustainability on a planet with finite resources. It is simply ridiculous to burn up at least half a billion dollars of our hard-earned tax dollars to create pollution.

In fact, the Vancouver Board of Trade and the Fraser Valley Chamber of Commerce wrote to our regional district politicians and asked them to reconsider this incineration proposal, stressing concerns about the costs involved.

Paul Levelton from the auditing firm KPMG stated in a presentation to the board of trade that Metro Vancouver’s cost projections were too low and their revenue projections were too high. It would be advisable for them to pay attention to this analysis.

For some folks, regardless of the economic issues involved, this is simply an alternative to landfilling, a practice nobody likes.

The problem is that burning garbage isn’t even an alternative to landfills as some pro-burning politicians would have you believe.

You can’t just make garbage disappear. It either goes out of a smoke stack as pollution to what we call the “landfill in the sky,” or it gets captured by filters as ash. That ash is a mix of all the nasty stuff that is in our garbage.

To make things worse, dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known to man, is created by burning PVC plastics.

This toxic ash then needs to be treated as hazardous waste and stored in special landfills.

If we are serious about shutting down landfills, the solution is simple: We need to set higher targets for waste diversion.

Right now about 55 per cent of the stuff we throw out is recycled or composted.

Still half of what is being sent to landfills is recyclable or compostable with the existing infrastructure. The regional district has set targets of 70-per-cent diversion by 2015. The provincial government has told the region that they can’t even consider building an incinerator until this target has been reached.

The regional government has an aspirational target of 80-per-cent diversion by 2020. Why then are they not setting targets for 2025 and 2030? If we got to 90-per-cent diversion in this time frame, we could shut down most of our landfills. Clearly this would be better for the environment and the economy.

The responsible thing would be to focus on reaching these goals first and foremost, and stop wasting our time and energy debating a project that ultimately nobody is going to want in their backyard.

Ben West is the healthy communities campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, whose mission is to protect Canada’s biodiversity through strategic research and grassroots public education.

Photo: Incineration falls far short of the dream of turning ‘garbage into gold’ that some politicians would like to believe.