By the end of next year, if you live in a house in Metro Vancouver, your kitchen scraps will be banned from the trash.

That means everything from apples cores to chicken bones, bread crusts, eggshells, coffee grounds, tea bags, paper towels and pizza boxes must be in your green bin instead of the garbage can.

Port Coquitlam, which started its kitchen scraps program in 2007, has been followed by Burnaby, Coquitlam, New Westminster, Port Moody, Richmond and Vancouver, which signed on last year. The North Shore will start programs this spring, while the other municipalities will be on board by the end of the year.

Once the plans are in place, most Metro Vancouver cities will reduce garbage collection to every two weeks and pick up the organics weekly.

“We’re all in this together,” said Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore, chairman of Metro’s waste management committee. “We’re seeing lots of success around the region.”

The push is part of Metro Vancouver’s Zero Waste challenge, an ambitious goal to recycle 70 per cent of the region’s waste by 2015 — up from 55 per cent now — and 80 per cent by 2020.

To get there, Metro Vancouver must compost 265,000 tonnes of organics — roughly enough to fill a quarter of BC Place Stadium with compact garbage — each year. Metro residents dump about 3.4 million tonnes of garbage annually.

Moore maintains it can be done. His city, which increased its recycling rate for kitchen scraps from 50 per cent to 62 per cent in the past year, uses Facebook, its solid waste calendar and newsletters sent with tax notices to remind residents to recycle.

“This has to be ingrained in everything you do,” Moore said. “We know that about 40 per cent of all garbage is from the kitchen so why wouldn’t we try to divert that to a more environmental and cheaper way of doing things?”

The cost of collecting organics and kitchen scraps from the curb, is about $60 a tonne, compared with $97 a tonne in tipping fees for trash. The waste is taken to Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre, which is contracted to collect up to 50,000 tonnes annually and turn it into compost.

Within the next 18 months, Metro Vancouver expects to see more kitchen scraps being diverted to compost as more municipalities come on board and the region slaps a ban on kitchen scraps in transfer stations. The region is also calling for more disposal ban inspections and increased fines for infractions.

Violators — who could be garbage contractors, residents or city workers — caught at the transfer station dumping kitchen scraps in with garbage face a fine that’s twice the price of the $97-a-tonne garbage tipping fee.

Toivo Allas, Metro’s manager of policy and planning, estimates hundreds of fines were issued last year, but said more inspectors are needed and “the penalties have to be more severe.

“You have to make throwing waste away to disposal very expensive,” he said.

Meanwhile, Metro plans to focus this year on boosting recycling in multi-family housing and businesses, which will face a similar disposal ban in 2015.

Few multi-family homes and businesses compost organics because of a lack of space, limited access for recycling collections, and few processing facilities that can accept large amounts of food scraps. Metro plans to issue a request for proposals this year for more processing plants in the region.

Multi-family residents have a recycling rate of 16 per cent compared with 46 per cent for single-family residents, 44 per cent for business and institutions and 76 per cent for construction and demolition.

Metro plans to urge municipalities to enact bylaws to ensure buildings have room for recycling. But Allas said that’s a challenge, noting in Vancouver, small four-storey apartment buildings had to sacrifice parking spaces for a green bin.

And even then, there’s no incentive to ensure everyone is recycling. “That’s the whole dilemma we have with recycling,” Allas said. “Regardless of all the rules and regulations, the success depends on the voluntary participation of residents and businesses.”

Metro Vancouver is in discussions to start similar food scraps program with supermarkets, restaurants and the hospitality industry.

ksinoski@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

The new waste management mind-set is still the same Waste = Cost and that has to change.

While I appreciate this Metro initiative to launch programs to recycle our organics, I’m dismayed there is no consideration of the “value” of the stuff we are throwing away. Indeed, our waste holds so much residual valuable that our City’s engineers and managers should be scouring the globe for integrated systems and technologies that will put our organics and other trash resources to work for us. Doing so would provide opportunities for that waste to start providing cash flows into our city treasuries not out of them. If they don’t, and we let their old mindset of “waste = cost”, then we’ll continue to pay. We’ll continue to dispose our “organic gold” into landfills, and now as this article tells, into compost heaps our latest disposal trend.

So, before you begin cheering for Metro’s revolutionary recycling initiatives, realize not much has really changed. Mere composting, while admirable, is short sighted and still far too expensive. So, what’s the better way?

An Integrated Approach to Resource Management is a much better way.

There is currently a significant study Metro commissioned to be done with the municipalities of the North Shore that looked at “best uses” of our waste “resources”. This study is now completed and the report in the private hands of Metro. If Metro decides to make it public (still not imminent), it is going to show that our waste, if treated using a truly Integrated Resource Recovery or Integrated Resource Management approach (IRR or IRM), it will provide you and me — taxpayers — $1000’s of millions of dollars. That’s correct billions of dollars in REVENUES.

Private Companies know our waste is a cash cow, why can’t our city managers?

The implications for our governments (and we the taxpayers) who keep raising our property taxes to pay for the host of services it offers (like garbage pickup and disposal, sewage treatment and water delivery) is enormous. A city the size of Abbotsford, applying an IRM/IRR model, has the potential to recover a billion dollars or more in revenue over the next 30 years. Alarmingly, many of our city’s municipal engineers and city managers won’t look at the IRR model in any depth. What that means to you and me is we and our children will keep paying. And, the most galling thing of all, if we continue the direction most our city planners and engineers are taking us, we continue to “pay” private companies for the opportunity to make two levels of profits from our resource. First for “tipping fees,” which is a fee for the privilege of dropping our waste at their sites. Then, once tipped, they can now use our to gain more profits from it. Is it any wonder there is a mad scramble today among waste management companies to get access to municipal waste, they know it’s a cash cow. Why can’t our city managers see the folly in this approach?

Write to your mayor and tell him to stop paying to dispose of our waste resource.

If you want your city to look for ways to not just lower the “cost” of disposing our waste, but to find ways to create revenue from it, contact your mayor and tell him it’s time to get serious about IRM/IRR. Oh, and don’t let him get away with telling you they are already doing it. Chances are his engineers have told him they are, but he’s mis-informed. Ask him how much “revenue” the city is projecting get from the waste management program’s they are looking at. Pretty good bet you won’t be satisfied with his answer to that.

As Point Nexus increases its engagement with a variety of renewable energy clients, it becomes increasingly clear this is the way of the future for industry… soon to be the new world order for business. Point Nexus recognizes this is not only good world stewardship, but also excellent business strategy. 

While this is not one of our clients, we have a number of investment opportunities for projects such as this representing several waste-related industries. If you’d like to know more, go to www.pointnexus.ca or call us at 866 213 5825.

October 23, 2010

Written by: Jacob Kushner, The Associated Press

ST. MARC, Haiti – An outbreak of cholera has spread outside a rural valley in central Haiti, intensifying worries the disease could reach squalid tarp camps that house hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors in the capital.

By early Saturday, nearly 200 people were confirmed dead in the poor Caribbean country’s worst health crisis since the Jan. 12 quake, and authorities said more than 2,000 people were sick.

The first two cholera cases outside the central Artibonite region were confirmed Friday in Arcahaie, a town closer to the quake-devastated capital, Port-au-Prince. Experts also were investigating possible cases in Croix-des-Bouquet, a suburb of the capital, and radio reports said there were two dozen cases of diarrhea on Gonave island.

Health officials are fearful about the outbreak spreading into the capital, where thousands and thousands of people are living in unsanitary conditions in refugee camps.

“It will be very, very dangerous,” said Claude Surena, president of the Haitian Medical Association. “Port-au-Prince already has more than 2.4 million people, and the way they are living is dangerous enough already.” clearly a lot more needs to be done.”

Canada has offered up to $1 million in emergency aid to Haiti.

Aid groups and the government were rushing in medical and relief supplies, including 10,000 boxes of water purification, according to the World Health Organization.

The Ministry of Health has confirmed 194 deaths and a total of 2,364 cases of cholera, said Imogen Wall, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“It’s concentrated in Artibonite right now and we’re doing our best to keep it that way,” Wall said.

Dozens of patients lay on the floor awaiting treatment at the St. Nicholas hospital in the seaside city of St. Marc on Friday, some of them brushing away flies on mattresses stained with human feces.

One, 55-year-old Jille Sanatus, was brought in by his son Jordany the night before. A doctor was struggling to stick a needle into his arm.

“He’s completely dehydrated, so it’s difficult. It’s hard to find the vein,” said Dr. Roasana Casimir, who had been working nearly without rest since the outbreak became apparent Wednesday.

Casimir finally penetrated the vein and fluid from an IV bag began to trickle in, but half an hour later the father of 10 was dead. Two hospital employees carried the body to the morgue behind the hospital and placed it on the ground for the family to reclaim for a funeral.

Sanatus’ son said the family had been drinking water from a river running down from the central plateau region. Health Minister Alex Larsen said Friday that the river tested positive for cholera.

Wall said the sick patients and the contagious remains of the dead were insufficiently quarantined.

“Part of the problem has been people are moving around a lot, and there hasn’t been proper isolation in place at the clinics,” she said.

The sick come from across the desolate Artibonite Valley, a region that received thousands of refugees following the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed as many as 300,000 people and destroyed the capital, 70 kilometres south of St. Marc. Most of the new arrivals have been taken in by host families.

Cholera was not present in Haiti before the earthquake, but experts had warned that conditions were ripe for disease to strike in areas with limited access to clean water.

“You cannot say it is because of the earthquake, but because of the earthquake the situation here requires a high level of attention in case the epidemic extends,” said Michel Thieren, a program officer for the Pan-American Health Organization.

Cholera is a bacterial infection spread through contaminated water. It causes severe diarrhea and vomiting that can lead to dehydration and death within hours.

Larsen, the health minister, urged anyone suffering diarrhea to make their own rehydration serum out of salt, sugar and water to drink on the way to a hospital.

The number of cases will continue to grow because Haitians do not have any built-up immunity to cholera, said Jon Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization’s Regional Office for the Americas, which is sending medical teams to the neighbouring Dominican Republic as a preventive measure.

“We have all the things in place for something we know will get bigger,” Andrus said.

With files from The Canadian Press.