Nobody likes to be thought of as a garbage factory but — like it or not — that is what cities have always been and will continue to be, despite our sense of sophisticated entitlement. While only the most narrow-minded would dismiss the enormous cultural, social and economic contribution of the city to human development, there is a sobering reminder of the cost in the fact that we are also perceived as perpetual-motion refuse machines in the surrounding hinterlands to which we increasingly export our rubbish while importing their resources and young people.

In Vancouver, for example, just over 600,000 inhabitants generated 557,334 tonnes of waste last year. Sort that into commercial, demolition and residential waste and it turns out that the average citizen produces about half a tonne of garbage a year. Put another way — because fooling around with dimensional statistics is always fun — some amusing calculations for converting residential waste to volume that were developed in California show Vancouverites produce roughly enough garbage to bury Library Square to the depth of a 37 storey building, which is about four times higher than the present library. Our garbage tower would rank as the 22nd tallest building in the city. That’s just for 2013. Add another one, likely taller, each year.

Statistics Canada reports that between 2001 and 2006, population growth in the country’s 33 main metropolitan areas grew at a rate which was seven times that for small towns and rural areas. Most Canadians now live in just six of those metropolitan areas — 10 million of us in the regions surrounding Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. And even though there have been dramatic improvements in recapturing both materials for recycling and for energy from the urban garbage stream, the actual volume is obviously going to continue to be a problem with which we must wrestle.

If we are living examples of American writer Mason Cooley’s aphorism that human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage, it behooves us all to stop thinking about garbage simply as something useless to throw away. Start thinking about it instead as a resource we can exploit for all kinds of added value. In fairness, municipal waste managers, particularly across the Metro Vancouver region but in many other cities, too, have been among the most progressive thinkers in this. They have launched campaigns urging us to reuse, recycle and repurpose while developing practical and pragmatic ways to extract genuine economic value from the garbage stream.

As a result, we have effective programs for diverting organic waste — from kitchen scraps to lawn cuttings into compost — which can be reinvested in the natural landscape. Across Canada, more than 60 facilities — including here — now recover methane gas from landfills. Not only is gas used to generate energy, the extraction process reduces greenhouse emissions from urban landfills equivalent to almost seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. In Edmonton, a new plant converts municipal garbage to cleaner-burning biofuels to further reduce carbon footprints. Others mine discarded computer and electronic parts. And so on.

The success of these strategies has been remarkable. In Vancouver, for example, per capita waste generation has been trending downward with satisfying consistency since 2007. Overall, the diversion rate for municipal waste has improved from 37 per cent in 1994 to almost 60 per cent in 2014.

Residents have less than a week left to file formal comments with a state agency overseeing plans for a controversial rail development project at a local waste incineration facility.

The timeframe offered by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the agency’s handling of the announcement have angered several opponents of the project which would allow Covanta Niagara to ship hundreds of thousands of tons of waste, via rail, to Niagara Falls from New York City each year.

“I’m very disappointed with the DEC’s relationship with the public,” said Shirley Hamilton, a Falls resident who was part of a group that protested plans for the rail expansion last year. “I thought the DEC was created to ensure that people, residents, us, were going to be protected.”

Covanta Niagara has been converting waste into clean renewable energy since 1980. The waste-to-energy facility incinerates municipal garbage. The electricity and steam produced at the facility supplies surrounding businesses and the regional electrical grid.

The company’s current permit application proposes the renovation of an inactive, 15-acre rail yard adjacent to the existing facility’s property. According to the DEC’s website listing for the application, the expansion will “more efficiently deliver up to 500,000 tons per year of waste by train in place of delivering the waste by truck.”

The DEC outlined procedures for public comment on the project in an Environmental Notice Bulletin on Sept. 24 and in the Niagara Gazette’s classified section a day later. The deadline to submit comments is Oct. 10.

DEC spokesman Peter Constantakes noted that copies of the application documents are available for review in two repositories in Niagara Falls, including the Doris Jones Family Resource Center on 9th Street and the Earl Brydges Library on Main Street. The documents are also available at the DEC Region 9 office on Michigan Avenue in Buffalo and on the region’s website.

Hamilton and other project critics aren’t pleased with what they have described as a lack of adequate, advanced public notice about the start of the comment period. They argue that 15 days is not enough for residents to digest voluminous materials tied to the proposed expansion plan.

“DEC ought to respond officially as to why they think it’s appropriate to give the community 15 days notice to start shipping New York City garbage to Niagara Falls for 30 years,” said Amy Witryol, a Lewiston resident who has questioned several aspects of the Covanta proposal and raised concerns about its potential impact on the surrounding community. “Why is that a question that deserves 15 days of comment, no hearing, and not even a press release?”

A CHEMICAL firm has said it will not be dishing out an energy cash bonanza to Runcorn residents after the company pledged to share 6% of its shale gas revenues with households in ‘fracking’ zones.

Ineos said an environmental fund is already in place whereby Halton Borough Council receives 60p of public project cash per ton of fuel burned in the incinerator – something that could be worth about £500,000 a year.

A company spokesman commented after the Weekly News asked it whether the inhabitants of Weston Point and further afield could expect a windfall funded by the energy-from-waste plant.

Last week Ineos announced a ‘£2.5bn shale gas giveaway’ to residents living in 100 sqkm areas where the company fracks.

Jim Ratcliffe, Ineos chairman, said the payments would give neighbourhoods ‘a real stake’ in the project.

Backers of fracking say the process could drive down energy prices, boost the economy and slash reliance on supplies from unstable regions of the worlds.

Critics say it will damage the environment, cause earthquakes, accelerate climate change and benefit a tiny few.

Incinerator waste has been promoted as a renewable source of power and a means to secure the future of the Runcorn chemical works while slashing the amount of waste going to landfill, but it too has sparked controversy from those who claim the Weston Point plant is too big, causes too much pollution, noise and bad smells.

An Ineos spokesman said: “There is already an environmental fund in place for the Runcorn EfW facility, which was agreed as part of the planning process.

“Ineos’s approach on shale gas applies to individuals and communities that would be situated directly above horizontal gas wells.

“It would not be appropriate to apply this to all projects, including Ineos’s share of the Runcorn EfW facility.”

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, green waste is very much on the political agenda. According to Tulsa World, the city’s trash board voted this week to pursue a plan to collect and incinerate it rather than invest in an active composting facility. Proponents of the composting plan are deeply disappointed by the vote.

City Councilor Karen Gilbert says, “That [vote] sets us further back from the original plan of having an active composting, mulching facility,” Gilbert said. “It’s frustrating that we start off with an investment, but then we don’t follow through with the priority of that investment.”

Those in favor of the incinerator approach complain that the city can’t afford the cost of the proposed composting facility and that is costs too much money to separate out the green waste from the rest of the city’s trash. Doesn’t it seem as though the situation in Tulsa is a microcosm of the entire “global warming/climate change” debate going on around the globe?

Green waste consists of two components: yard waste, such as leaves and grass clippings, and food waste. Disposing of them requires different strategies but taken together, they account for a significant proportion of all the waste going into US landfills every year.

According to GreenWaste.com, about 75% of solid waste is recyclable, but at present only about 30% actually gets recycled. 21.5 million pounds of food waste gets sent to our landfills every year. If that food waste were composted, the reduction in harmful emissions into the atmosphere – mostly methane – would be equivalent to taking 2,000,000 cars off the roads in America.

In Washington State, a local prison is vermicomposting all its food waste and saving about $8,000 a year in disposal costs. The compost then gets spread on the prison gardens to help grow food for the kitchen. At North Carolina State University, an ambitious program to collect and compost empty pizza boxes is on track to process more than 370 tons of the containers in its first year. And in Massachusetts and Seattle, new laws mandate composting of food wastes.

In Sweden, 99% of all trash is recycled, composted or burned. Sweden does not have the amount of open available land needed for large landfills. It also does not have the abundance of natural resources that the United States does. So it operates a number of large incinerators that provide electricity and heat for government buildings. Critics say that burning only adds pollutants to the atmosphere, but that nation’s political leaders maintain that modern technology removes virtually all of the harmful emissions and the electricity generated goes a long way towards meeting Sweden’s power requirements.

The best conclusion to draw from all this is that local needs will govern how trash – particularly green waste – gets handled by various communities. There is no “one size fits all” solution. One could argue that Tulsa is taking the easiest way out and looking only at short term costs versus long term benefit. But the real answer is provided by Göran Skoglund, an official with the municipal power facility in Helsingborg, a city in southwest Sweden. He says he hopes the supply of waste to keep the city’s incinerator going will disappear. “This sounds strange…[but] that would be great for this planet. It’s not sustainable producing the amounts of garbage that we do.”

And that’s the take away from this story. Ultimately, it is not about burning vs. composting vs. recycling. In the end, it is about reducing the amount of waste that people generate. That’s where the focus of the political debate about waste products should be.

Concerns that an industrial scale garbage incinerator might be built in Duke Point persuaded organizers of an international environmental conference to come to Nanaimo.

The Alternatives to Incinerators Landfills; Zero Waste International Alliance Conference and Dialogue started Thursday at the Coast Bastion Hotel. The annual conference attracts environmentalists from around the world, with an emphasis on science to reduce the carbon footprint of humans on the global environment.

“One of the issues our international committee was very concerned about (is) British Columbia seems to be the battlefield for zero-waste right now,” said Barb Hetherington, conference chairwoman and Gibsons resident.

Zero waste supporters have a global goal to end all disposal of solid waste in landfills or incinerators, through a combination of diversion, through the so-called three Rs — reducing, re-using and recycling items humans has buried or burned for centuries.

Reducing requires a long-term process of public education to change behaviours that led to waste of limited resources and pollution. Recycling is an incremental process that each community takes on.

Nanaimo residents already divert almost 70 per cent of their household waste from the regional landfill in Cedar, through recycling and composting.

But as communities get closer to 90 per cent diversion, it becomes increasingly difficult. Many products, such as running shoes and certain other manmade materials are not easily reused or recycled.

When incineration proponents suggest burning garbage to extract energy, the international Zero Waste community worries about what Hetherington calls “green-washing” of the brand of zero waste.

“B.C. is a very green province. We have an incinerator industry that’s really targeted British Columbia, so selling incineration as zero-waste and this is a Band-aid solution. It is a polluting solution. It has nothing to do with zero waste — it’s a disposal option.”

The three-day conference covers a range of topics around the theme of how to get closer to the zero waste target. Organizers acknowledge getting there won’t be easy, but say it’s achievable.