Opinion

The Best Way to 'Zero Waste'

We need to rethink our recycling policies and adopt a better approach.

By Ken McFarlane, 3 Sep 2010, TheTyee.ca

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A box of opportunity for new industries.

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It is far too easy to become critical, cynical or even amused by the words and actions of Metro Vancouver officials as they grapple with the need to reform solid waste management practices in the Lower Mainland. The fact remains that theirs is a daunting and important challenge. However, clarity around what the real issues are, let alone the solutions, continues to elude the decision-makers.

One of the key points that most Metro politicians and bureaucrats appear to agree on is that, aside from striving for less garbage in the first place, recycling is preferable to incineration or landfills. The goal is zero waste. Fair enough. But do they fully understand what this means? Recycling involves both challenges and opportunities that have never been completely reconciled in North America and particularly Canada. A little history might assist.

What's wrong with today's recycling

The recycling movement, as a mainstream cri de coeur, began to gain steam about 30 years ago. It involved a veritable mish-mash of public, commercial and non-profit efforts which were highly uncoordinated. One result was that solid waste that was not permanently disposed of became a saleable commodity rather than a public good. Therefore the cost of the raw material for the nascent remanufacturing industry became a serious disincentive to the development of technologies that would lead to reliable, durable new products that did not utilize virgin resources. Products that are produced from recycled materials often end up costing more than those made from primary materials where the processes involved are less challenging at least from the standpoint of traditional accounting. Plenty of small scale niche operations exist but their impact on reducing un-utilized waste is close to negligible.

In the end, there is an underdeveloped remanufacturing industry in North America in terms of anything close to large scale production that utilizes significant amounts of solid waste. So where do the diverted materials end up? It is no exaggeration to say that recycling is as much about "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" as land-filling or incineration, but with more fanfare and middle people each taking a cut along the way with no significant economic or environmental gains close to home.

In western Canada and the United States, materials are collected, sorted and "first stage" processed, which generally means some sort of basic modification and bundling. They are then, very often, shipped overseas where they may or may not be converted to products that are sold back to us. There has long been speculation that if the brokers involved cannot make a market for the materials then they simply dispose of them in ways that are anything but environmentally sound. The carbon footprint involved in shipping our discarded stuff thousands of miles away is huge. And countries that do remanufacture often make up for the inherent economic challenges of doing so by utilizing sweatshop arrangements that injure and even kill the workers.

A better way to go

The alternative is perhaps obvious. We must rethink and reboot the basic economics of recycling and remanufacturing such that we can utilize materials to create value-added products in our own communities. To start with, make solid waste of all kinds available to clean-tech remanufacturing operations at a price as close to zero as possible. This one step alone would go a long way towards making Metro Vancouver an attractive location for a range of manufacturers and product developers. The City of Vancouver is the most likely lead candidate for this, given that it controls both its transfer station and its landfill site and has unused industrial land close to major sources of valuable solid waste.

Beyond that, the various levels of government must develop regulations and land use policies that encourage diversion of materials to local manufacturing and discourage shipping the materials elsewhere or, worse still, dumping anything more than the completely unusable in landfills or incinerators. The benefits of this would be significant in terms of green jobs, research and development, technology transfer, an increased tax base, economic diversification and sound environmental stewardship. These are the priorities that all governments say they care about.

But will it happen? One wonders. Oxen will be gored unless they are quick to adapt which many surely will resist. And governments tend not to mess with well-entrenched entities that pay their taxes and make all the right moves and donations. In Metro Vancouver what I fear is that established waste haulers, landfill operators and incinerators will meet the zero waste and diversion challenges by simply jumping on the current recycling bandwagon to a much greater extent than they have to this point. Materials handling facilities will become larger and more numerous. In short, feed stock for what could conceivably be an entirely new industrial base for the area will simply be sent away.

Downside to making manufacturers responsible

The provincial government's new push to make original manufacturers and retailers responsible for taking back waste created by their product sales will, ironically, encourage this regressive trend. The path of least resistance for the solid waste management industry and assorted subcontractors will be to position themselves much more so than they have already as the parties who collect and then ship materials back to manufacturers regardless of whether they are down the road or, more likely, on the other side of the continent or world.

They will receive a hefty fee, of course, for this service, while burning literally tonnes of fuel along the way with the well-known effects. And all this will be rationalized as being better than the current situation when nothing could be further from the truth.

It must also be recognized that municipalities themselves are part of the industry and therefore a factor in the overall conundrum. Many British Columbia communities receive healthy landfill fees and themselves sell diverted materials in the so-called recycling market.

Can Metro Vancouver municipalities see their way clear to give up this easy money for something more speculative and challenging but, in the long run, much more productive economically, socially and environmentally?

Chance to create new industries

This is a classic example in which free market ventures must be molded and directed by intelligent public policy and rigorous regulation. Metro Vancouver, in coordination with the provincial government, has the opportunity to create an entirely new industrial base for itself but this will not happen unless it focuses the efforts of the private sector and itself through a combination of crisp incentives and disincentives.

The waste management industry will adapt, and make money from this new industrial base, if it is pointed in the optimal direction. Bleeding edge will become leading edge. Otherwise it is only rational for the industry to continue to take the path of least resistance and push on with its current profitable ventures while simply adding more "faux diversion" to its list of activities in an effort to placate public officials who may not be paying close enough attention.

In a more general sense, what is required is that traditional notions of accounting and cost-benefit analysis be modified to accommodate evolving environmental and social realities. It is vogue to speak of notions such as the "triple bottom line" but rarely do these principles get adhered to in any sort of practical manner. Metro Vancouver has the opportunity to do just that in the context of its solid waste management policies. At the same time, it has an equally important opportunity to turn back the clock a generation or more and get right what was done so very wrong in North America with regard to recycling.

The weeks and months ahead will determine whether or not our leaders will seize the moment or squander it through short term thinking and lack of vision. I wish them well. [Tyee]

Ken McFarlane is the managing partner of Regeneration Group, LLP. Regeneration's companies have developed a number of recycling technologies both in Canada and abroad.

17 Comments:

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  • Fiat lux

    1 year ago

    Much of the garbage is

    Much of the garbage is caused by "globalized" imports of "cheap?" junk that eliminated the repair shops, forcing people to throw away things that could easily be repaired.

    The GDP, which encourages waste, accounted as "growth" by braindead economists and politicians.

    Planned obsolescence that increases profits and raises the GDP.

    Forced urbanization, eliminating any degree of self sufficiency.

    Specialization that causes incompetence, but increases "economic efficiency" otherwise known as profits.

    Our local dump has a special area for metals. A large mountain of it that never goes anywhere, nobody picks it up.

    Years ago people hardly had any garbage. The Kerr road dump in Vancouver was going for years and years.

    Do our politicians and so called "economists" every look for the real causes, instead of looking for more dump sites?

    Ed Deak.

  • RickW

    1 year ago

    Why Not Demand Uniformity in Packaging?

    So far, nearly all the onus is on the consumer to deal with packaging.

  • j

    1 year ago

    stop buying stuff

    I think people and the Environment would be better served if we slowed our spending habits. Shop at your thrift store, buy stuff that has been used, take the time to fix things.

    Try not buying anything new for a month or two, see how it feels? Why not? When Christmas rolls along, ignore the shopping and spend the your free time with family and friends you might fell better about yourself.

  • freebear

    1 year ago

    Zero waste in a consumption based system

    predicated on increased consumption!

    And all that Ed said!

  • alive

    1 year ago

    make it convenient and safe to recycle

    Recycling depends on how convenient it is for us to recycle stuff we no longer need.
    I found that the local "Habitat for humanity" is staffed with very friendly, helpful people who will help you unload etc., while the "Salvation Army" treats you with suspiscion thinking you are trying to dump garbage.
    Places like Gold River had a "Free store" next to the dump, so you could leave things there for others to pick up.
    In other places they prosecute you if you search the dump for a piece of plywood.
    Scrap metal dealers generally have disorganized yards where your car may get damaged, and they seem to resent smaller loads.
    We pay fees on tires and see used tires stacked up sky-high waiting for a convenient fire to consume them all.

  • rangergord

    1 year ago

    zero waste

    Good analysis of the issues involved in recycling. I agree with the author that the current direction of the eco legislators is wrong. They fail to place responsibility on the manufacturing sector and instead want to tax and fee consumers to death. The private sector should have to compete in the free market to develop the solutions that will lead to less waste (zero waste is an unlikely reality) Vancouver, the province and Canada itself cannot expect to solve an issue that involves the entire world and as Ed points out the very economic and monetary system itself. Our economic system promotes waste and outsourcing of manufacturing. No laws, regulations, taxes or fees will reform the debt based monetary system that requires ever higher production and consumption to pay the interest on the loans that support the elite.

  • KD Brown

    1 year ago

    Problem deeper than words...

    It's been created by the psychology and history of how we use things and view garbage.

    Leading to 2 very basic misconceptions that we must get over in order to move on.

    The first is that there is a place called Away where we can throw things.

    The second is that garbage is filthy waste that must be removed and thrown Away.

    There is no place called away. At the very best, what we are doing in our communities, towns, cities is tossing trash over our neighbour's fence. It is now on our neighbour's land. Away, but no place that is removed in the way that we imagine when we throw things away.

    Garbage is wealth.

    What makes it hard to deal with is the sheer volume of the trash that we have to move through our homes, in order to live the way that we do.

    Then we make sure that trash is harder to use again by mixing it all together. We mix junior's disposable diapers with the slightly wilted head of lettuce that we are too lazy to wash with the almost dried can of paint that still has some in the bottom but which is too far from the toxics drop-off. All get crushed together, where the brew of different materials becomes a bio and chemical hazard. All this is truly garbage, and it will pollute no matter what the municipal authorities and dump liner sales force will tell you, for they all leak, they don't break down, they are poison.

    Solutions? Start with this:

    Trash is wealth. All this stuff in Away is wealth, materials that we can use to develop business and opportunity in our communities.

    We need to make sure that materials that we don't want to stay here don't come here in the first place. I do not want them to put lead in the gas that they bring into the community, because once it is in the air and the soil it pollutes and threatens the health of the people and animals who live here, and it is hard to get rid of. This is not wealth but a liability, a long-term liability. We had the good sense to ban lead in gas. We can also take steps to rid our tax base of such senseless long term liabilities, and no one has the right to foist them on us.

    If we remind ourselves that there actually is no place called Away, and that garbage is all potential wealth that we are squandering, we might start to behave differently.

    And we won't have to dodge contact with our neighbours, guilty that we sent that gum wrapper flying over the fence with the lawn mower, to say nothing of our diapers, old paint and that cursed head of lettuce.

  • realisticman

    1 year ago

    EDITED FOR DEMEANING REFERENCE TO ANOTHER COMMENTER

    "Why Not Demand Uniformity in Packaging?

    So far, nearly all the onus is on the consumer to deal with packaging."

    Brilliant Rickie. What do you suggest, everything should come in a can? Cans rust out eventually. Eggs, milk, tv dinners, computers, socks, oranges, all in cans. Or maybe all in glass bottles. Pizza, shoes, paper towels, hod-dog buns, pencils; we demand all in glass bottles. What do you think Rickie?

    Remind us, where is the onus not on the consumer. Thanks!

    Ed Deak has hit the nail on the head. Either the price of everything has to go way up or the price of labour has to come way down. It's just not worth having a $200 tv repaired unless the cost of labour is around $5 an hour.

  • dorothy

    1 year ago

    BULK and attitudes

    Some years ago, there were a lot of 'bulk' stores in Vancouver, where you could buy any amount of, say, ketchup or honey or jam in your own re-used container. This was great. But then there were super-bugs, leading to paranoid fear of getting 'mixed up' with other people's food habits, so now we are back to everything in well-sealed glass or plastic. Maybe we should try to go the education way, train everybody in how to deal with easy-access food containers without spreading bacteria around? I am serious. Why is it not part of training for new Canadians, along with how to fill the income tax return and how to buy bus tickets, etc.? It should also be taught in schools. Food-safe should be a required part of the curriculum. This would cut down of stupid cases of food poisoning as well.

    As far as Pizza goes, I have once tried to show up with a clean, but used-before box and request that my new pizza be put in there. This was met with gobsmacked horror and absolute refusal, simply did not compute. I heard undertones of calling the cops or the funny wagon., so backed off rather than start a riot. This is how far down the line of rigid paranoia we have come!

  • Max Power

    1 year ago

    Check out this video

    If this machine works, it could be a game-changer. Very interesting.

    It's about converting plastic bottles and garbage into oil. Check it out....

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGGabrorRS8

  • dorothy

    1 year ago

    I have it on the best authority

    ("All this stuff in Away is wealth") that companies are now seeking licenses to mine the plastic islands in the Pacific for recyclable materials, as the amassed amounts makes it possibly profitable to do so.

    So.Brown, it was YOU - and here I've been railing at my kids for those gum wrappers!!!

  • edoherty

    1 year ago

    Reduce and reuse first!

    Start by bringing back the stubby, or a new type of standard size long-lasting reusable beer bottle.

    But that would not make the author any money, no patents on the tried and true.

  • margot

    1 year ago

    I think it's time to do what

    I think it's time to do what has been done before and really shake some chain. Ten(?) years ago, people followed trucks allegedly taking stuff like plastic from transfer stations to "recycling" facilities, which proved to be places they could dump it.

    More recently, I read where people in Victoria were carefully washing off their extruded polystyrene meat trays, and dropping them off every two weeks at some park parking lot. When I contacted the men taking it away (in exchange for a suitable donation or something), they swore it really would be recycled.

    I asked where. Mississauga.

    The only "recycled" product I know of using extruded or expanded polystyrene is ugly. It's grade three bunny science to dissolve it in acetone, add gas, and hey gang, it's napalm. Shouldn't this make the trays and containers illegal? I thought we had to take extraordinary steps to fight the war on terror.

    (Just rewatched a bit of Bowling, and there's a young man bragging he made a drum of home made napalm.)

    A terribly sweet little Chinese boy has a bags of styro into a dogdish of acetone video on youtube. There at least used to be gollygee lesson plans online about dissolving your meat trays. These items didn't include the gas step, but zillions of kids know it.

    Munis can now buy grinding machines and reduce the styro volume hugely, but then what? You can't use this for food items. It's energy intensive. I don't want it making less soil look like more in a flower pot.

    Apart from plastics, I just saw a photo of what looks like the ceiling above my head, textured, sometimes called a "popcorn" effect. The photo was part of a collection showing places you may have asbestos in your home. Apparently even the 70s textured paint on walls is suspect. I've often wanted to take a sander to it. Good thing I didn't. Not knowing about asbestos content, I hate to think what we might have inhaled, or dumped out somewhere as "harmless" white dust. Electricians must be exposed to this in older homes a lot. Also people doing reno.

    Reduce and re-use have been snowed by recycling claims. And just because something can be "recycled" in some cumbersome, energy intensive process producing what?, doesn't mean it will be. Doesn't mean it is.

    And I shudder to think of our electronics in China, or wherever the game has now moved on to.

  • margot

    1 year ago

    "Ending is better than mending"

    "Ending is better than mending" has arrived, chez moi. I regret the task of having to seek out two tracksuits to replace my favourites, now in rakish shreds with thread falling out of the seams. The thread all gave out at once, mysteriously, but the little holes that now gape were gradual, and quite funny at first. I mentally darn, and sigh at a sewing machine I haven't used for decades, and sigh at thread that's been in a box for at least a generation. And I have to admit, what I'm really putting off is replacement.

    I used to make all my own clothes, and re-make, and mend. I've become the sort of hapless slug I used to giggle at. Rather like everyone else.

    I found clothing in dumpsters, almost 20 years ago, that I still wear. The thread hasn't disintegrated, little holes didn't stretch into big ones. I have the top of a dress I brought home from Mexico in '66 that is still a favourite, though a bit frayed around the neck. It's older than some of your mothers.

    Disintegrating thread is nothing compared with what most people are currently listening to music with. I run my computer through an old stereo with glorious big speakers. I was perfectly OK with the sound CDs in the radio/cassette/CD disaster in the dining room. Until I ordered online some CDs of the international jukebox of my wandering youth, and a favourite Mosalini tango record from the 80s.

    As I listened to my old "treasures", one by one, I kept thinking I'd outgrown them, particularly the tango one. When La Bordona fell down inside the player in the dining room, I went to a lot of trouble to extricate it. Took the back off, took the top off, undid screws on the sides, nada, the CD seemed to have vapourized. Finally, I found it and ran down the hall to try it in the computer, which I consider too energy hog to play CDs in frivolously.

    I wept. The sound, coming out my speakers and the old stereo, was powerful, visceral, almost why I used to listen to music. CDs and the trash are bad enough, now it's MP3s, even worse.

    We're losing music, and those glorious old stereos are mainly in the landfill.

    We've got thousands of songs in MP3, and coming soon to a dealership near you we've got "Welcome to United States Autosound Competition International, or USACi, the LOUDEST sport on earth!" The low notes are so low and loud they put a body into emergency, and people who have the red button for the boom box get addicted to this as a high.

    I fought a USACI (ripoff, but bad enough, same idea and equipment) event here, and seemed to lose. Council and the business people thought it a great idea for the grand finale of the summer festival. Someone did apply a wrench and it didn't happen. Coming soon near you. Argue liability and pregnant women.

  • margot

    1 year ago

    Jug wine

    Back to packaging, where did jug wine go in BC? Late 80s there was a BC winery (Mission Hill?)outlet (in south Van or Burnaby) with no advertising. You or a hotel could take your own bottles, get them cleaned there and fill up for 40-50 cents less per bottle. Great idea, great deal, why aren't these in every liquor store!

    Around the same time the "news" showed depraved Russians staggering up to a neighbourhood beer spigot, which they filled their fruit jars from, after putting in a coin and pushing a button. Totally sensible, except for the staggering.

    Smart supermarkets could print up durable, easy to clean, hard plastic containers for so many products, with standardized containers fast at the checkout.

    But then we wouldn't have the illusion of choice, would we.

  • rantnic

    1 year ago

    OUR CHOICES LIMITED BY MARKETING

    Once a long long time ago I thought I could save the planet (or at least a part of it) by reducing the amount of pop bottles sold every day in north America. Something as simple as a counter top soda water generator, combined with the syrup of your favorite soda pop would mean you would take home 1 instead of 7 liters of pop.
    The marketing people know, that even though shelf space in the market is expensive, the eye level contact with the consumer will the sell more product. Marketing drives the bus and the bus is not headed to conservitive town. Help me here, what do the three R's stand for?

  • margot

    1 year ago

    Back when it was called soda water

    My grandfather had a large, fancy soda water bottle with a silver thing on top. I remember being allowed to press the handle, so that soda water fizzed into fruit juice or syrup. I think they were fairly common in the 40s 50s.

    Reduce, re-use and.

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