Upcoming film screening: Recycled Life

Projecting Change, Vancouver's environmental film festival at the Ridge Theatre this weekend, sounds very tasty indeed, featuring buzzworthy films like King Corn and Tableland.

Of particular interest to Zero Waste supporters will be the documentary "Recycled Life", which offers a glimpse into the informal diversion of waste in Guatemala City. The film documents the "beauty, humour and remarkable contrast" in the lives of generations of entrepreneurs who work in the Guatemala City Garbage Dump harvesting anything of value for recycling and reuse. View the trailer here.

Annie Leonard's wonderful short film "The Story of Stuff," which takes a smart, often humourous look at the cycle of production and consumption, will be paired with "Recycled Life" at the same showing. If you can't make it into Vancouver to the Projecting Change festival, "The Story of Stuff" is also available to watch free online at http://www.storyofstuff.com/ .

Recycled Life and The Story of Stuff play this Saturday, May 11 at 5pm at the Ridge Theatre, at 16th Avenue and Arbutus, in Vancouver.

Is this Zero Waste?

This picture will be of historic interest someday.

It will show how we managed recycling before we became a Zero Waste society.



People will look at this picture and laugh ruefully. Weren't people clueless then! Those were the days when recycling was just an extension of your public garbage service. No wonder people treated that paper like garbage.

In the Zero Waste Communities that are yet to come, "recycling" will be liberated from the Garbage & Recycling Department and integrated into the commercial core of the community.

Recycling shops will occupy cozy storefronts and clean indoor premises rather than being relegated to a derelict corner of a parking lot.

Discards will be "goods." They will be handled carefully, sorted, traded, upgraded. Specialized shops will be able to give you top dollar for your discards, or lose business. Recyclers will entice customers with daily specials.

There will be Designer Recycler outlets specialize in Name Brand products to be returned, repaired or replaced. There will be unique outlets specializing in a particular line of goods: paper products? plastic products? electronics? hardware? athletic equipment? sewing notions? used books? kitchen gadgets? office supplies? bike or auto accessories?

There will be Discard Malls where a whole range of recycling centres will be clustered, one-stop-shopping for cleaning out the garage or the basement ~ or finding that item you need.

This will happen when cities and towns stop competing against private recycling services, but instead use their zoning and economic development powers to encourage the emergence of stores like Urban Ore in Berkeley (closer to home visit Jack's in Burnaby), consignment stores, second hand shops, bottle depots, used book stores...

The evolution to a Zero Waste society will happen when we get our Engineering Services departments working on food waste composting and hand over the recycling file to the Community Planning department.

Planners will help us make recycling part of the fabric of our community, a way to grow the tax base and create jobs, a way to attract tourists, a way to tap into local assets and express the community's unique style and character. And a way to eliminate landfills.

pic: Gibson Park Plaza Recycling Depot, operated by the Sunshine Coast Regional District

Garbage industry fights for control of your waste

There's a battle raging across North America.

On one side is an unholy alliance of companies and interests that profit from waste. On the other is a small but growing army of citizens and public servants who are determined to eradicate waste.

The waste profiteers are pushing an agenda of single-stream recycling and waste-to-energy. All designed to make wasting more convenient and efficient. All designed to take our minds off the root cause of waste. All designed to prevent a shift from a Throw-Away Society to a Conserver Society.

The waste profiteers have history on their side. A hundred years of ingrained habit have made us take wasting for granted. An inevitable fact of life, a hallmark of our prosperity.

We also take for granted that our waste services will be convenient, and provided at very low cost. In Canada, they're a service of our local government. And a close relationship has grown up between the garbage industry and our local governments. Their interests are aligned. They both want people to feel good about the services they provide. The mayor doesn't want angry phone calls from voters complaining their garbage wasn't taken away.

It disrupted the status quo both for local governments and the garbage industry when the public demanded recycling in the 1980s and 1990s. This added a lot of complexity and extra costs. Inconvenience. Hassle. Phone calls.

Recycling also put an uncomfortable new spotlight on the producers of throw-away products and packaging. They were at risk of being recognized as the cause of the surging growth of waste.

And so quietly, behind the scenes, the garbage industry and the makers of throw-away products and packaging are working together to preserve public confidence in the wasting system that has served them so well.

They are focussing their effort especially on places like British Columbia. Why? Because in 1970 BC became the first place in North America to require beer and soft drink companies to take back their empties and recycle them ~ a recycling program that long pre-dated the Blue Box. And then in the 1990s, BC pushed the idea further, requiring producers of a whole range of hazardous products to take them back.

Left unchecked, this "extended producer responsibility" policy could threaten both the garbage industry and the producers themselves.

Thus the full-court-press to convince the public and their Mayors that dumbing down recycling and burning waste is a better solution.

So which way will we go? Will we build a bigger, better waste system, enriching the garbage industry and and letting the producers off the hook? Or will we build composting plants, and insist that producers be required to take back their products and packaging at stores or other outlets.

Pic: http://articles.citypages.com/2001-03-21/books/junk-bond/

Ashcroft all over again?

On Saturday I spent a couple of hours at the Earth Day celebration at Jericho Park.

I spoke to several dozen people about the plan to build waste incinerators in our region. Not a single person had heard that Metro Vancouver was intending to do this.

Interestingly, two people had seen the ads for the public meetings about waste management, but they had not understood that the meetings were about a plan to build incinerators.

Some of the people I spoke to were worried about possible health impacts. More were worried, as I am, about the climate change effects from burning plastics that will emit CO2. Most of all, people wondered why we would be spending money to burn all those throw-away products that shouldn't be sold in the first place. What better way to lock in the Throw-Away Society?

In 2000, without any public discussion, the GVRD Board agreed to spend $4.5 million on Ashcroft Ranch. Another $5.5 million were subsequently spent trying to get approval for a 100-year landfill there.

That mistake will pale in comparison to the blunder we are about to commit with the staff's new so-called waste solution. The Metro Vancouver Board agreed on Friday to authorize a quarter of a billion dollars in new debt to build incinerators.

A challenge

The provincial government just announced that two more product categories are going to come under the recycling regulation.

Producers of mercury containing products, notably the CFL lamps that are now flooding the market, are going to have to present a business plan for taking back burned out bulbs from consumers. (Major retailers are already taking back CFLs.)

And a broader range of electronic equipment is going to be collected back through programs provided by their producers, like the program for TVs and computer recycling system launched last August. We'll be able to dispose of defunct stereos, cellphones and other hand-held devices in programs paid for by producers and scrutinized by the government.

These programs are the envy of other jurisdictions. In most places, programs for taking back and recycling throw-away products and packaging are provided at public expense.

The purpose of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is to stimulate better product design and marketing systems by shifting the cost of waste back onto those with control over product design.

BC is one of the world leaders in EPR. During the 1990s those of us who were involved in pushing for it had a lot of hope that we had found a way to turn the waste tide.

Throw-away products and packaging comprise three-quarters of everything we throw away. Biodegradable materials like food and yard waste the remaining quarter. We thought we had found the formula for Zero Waste. Zero Waste = EPR + composting.

It makes good sense to make producers take back toxic products. But how about EPR for the high-volume trash that has filled our landfills prematurely? Those huge detergent bottles, for instance. Carpeting. Unrepairable furniture?

If we didn't create such huge haysacks of garbage, the needles would be easier to find.

Something in common

That's me in the second bed on the right. I hope I didn't breathe on any of you out there and expose you to the pestilence that has struck me down. If you get it, cancel all your meetings and go to bed.

While I wasn't sitting in the Alice McKay room last night listening to Metro Vancouver staff talk about incinerators, I was thinking about our region.

I was thinking about the dairy farmers in the Fraser Valley. The fishboats in Steveston and False Creek. The people handing out home cooked food at the Baisakhi festival. Our Chinese Greengrocer. All the coffee shops. The community gardens. The cranberry bogs in Richmond. The artisanal bakeries. The neighbourhood Tim Hortons wherever we go.

What if we just started by getting these people together to offer their pungent wastes as a community resource?

San Francisco sells compost to California vineyards. We've got vineyards. Why can't we do that?

Pic: 1918 Spanish Flu

Provincial government slips in a surprise

The provincial government introduced a bill last week that appears to make incineration a form of recycling.

Bill 29 contains amendments to the Environmental Management Act that would include:




"... requiring the owner or operator of a waste management facility to recycle certain wastes or classes of wastes, and to recover certain reusable resources, including energy potential from wastes or classes of wastes..."




If you, dear visitor to this blog, have expertise in this area, we'd all welcome your interpretation of where the government seems to be headed with this. There has been a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war over the "4th R" for years. It will be too bad if it is legislated to have equivalency to the 3rd R.


Pic: 10000birds.com