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Feature - Wasted in Whistler

Centralized composting facility is one step in the move from a linear to a cyclical approach to waste

The private detective hired by your ex-wife/Revenue Canada/( insert random enemy here ) to get the dirt on you is going to start in one place. And it’s not delving into your credit card records or your computer’s hard drive. It’s your trash, where all your secrets are easily decrypted. Take a look through the plastic bag and like a tracker, chart your path through the day – grinds from the morning coffee, flayed-wide skin of banana, crusty evidence of last night’s pizza that made for a satisfying breakfast, sweeping of dog hair, envelopes and paid bills and Visa statements, a roach or two, the tissues that reveal the ongoing dregs of a cold.… You can tell a lot about a person from their waste. And you’d be surprised at who’s going through yours. Scavengers and secret hunters and students of refuse.

It’s 11 p.m. Under cover of darkness, I pull into the Alpine Waste Centre. Slide towards the compactor in neutral. Flush up against it, lights glow from the cab of an RV. Housing is desperate, I think, if fifth wheels are squatting next to the dumpster. I rummage through my trash, a last minute sorting: glass, plastic, paper. The RV’s owner emerges with a wave and asks if I have a jumper cable. Helps me unload my trash, sidelines the bottles and empties – he says he’s going to take them for the refund. My trash, his treasure – it’s all relative.

Down in Squamish, eight hours later, six staff are at their stations in the recycling centre, hand-sorting the igloos’ loads. All recyclables in Whistler go to the Whistler transfer station at the landfill and are packaged down to Squamish or Vancouver to market. In Squamish, the recyclables go into a sorting chain and are resorted by staff, who, according to Owen Carney, proprietor of Carney’s Waste Systems, "maybe remove less than 5 per cent, as trash, as not recyclable. Maybe it’s contaminated, or half full of food waste. But it’s really not very much."

I’ve wondered, diligently sorting my life’s by-products, what actually happens once I wipe my hands clean. Is it a great conspiracy, as Michael Moore has suggested, to lull consumers into a sense of righteous complacency, to free their consciences to shop a little more, when the "recyclables" are in fact simply diverted back into landfill?

Carney, who has operated waste disposal services in the corridor since 1965 and in Whistler since 1970, reassures me. "The sorted recyclables are packaged and exported: pulp mills use all the paper products, plastics go to Merlins plastics or are baled to ship to the Orient, tin and aluminium go locally to Squamish Scrap Metals, the glass is crushed in Whistler and goes to contractors who use it under slabs and houses," he says. "The depositables go back to Oncor. Four-hundred tonnes a month of recyclables are collected at the Squamish plant from throughout the corridor. Whistler, the whole corridor actually, is very good at recycling.

"Recycling didn’t come in until 1990. It was a good initiative of the government of the day and we all got on board."

Carney is referring to a 1989 amendment to the B.C. Waste Management Act which required regional districts to establish a "solid waste management plan" within five years, with the aim of reducing landfill waste by 50 per cent by 2000. The SLRD developed its plan and through education, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rethink initiatives and backyard composting, saw district waste reduced by 45 per cent between 1990 and 2000.

Still, Whistler’s waste is incriminating. You can tell a lot about a place from its waste. Last season's skis. An A-frame cabin. A couple of hundred Aussie workers per year. An unused kitchen because a real estate agent advised that it’s just not "a million dollar facility." Entire buildings discarded as tear-downs because land value is so hyper-inflated. This is Whistler’s junk. The discarded. The remnant. The unvalued.

Six-hundred and eighty kilograms of waste per person per year. Over 10 times my body weight. Into a landfill that is ending its life. An exponential ripple effect.

The major culprits unnecessarily clogging up the landfill are organic matter from households and businesses, and construction and demolition (C&D) debris. Whistler has a disproportionately high amount of C&D waste owing to number of "tear-downs" and start-from-scratch renovations that are demolished instead of deconstructed or salvaged.

Household and commercial organic matter also could be diverted from the landfill. The SLRD provides highly subsidized backyard composters and worm farms to residents from Lillooet to Furry Creek. The SLRD office in Pemberton has its own compost garden. Wendy Horan, Waste Reduction Co-ordinator and Compost Evangelist, commends Starbucks for their nationwide scheme revealed to the media last week, to make their coffee-grinds available for patrons to take home and inject into compost. Horan recalls her barista days, dumping 700 kg of coffee grinds every week into the trash, and contends that you can’t have too much coffee in your compost.

"The SLRD’s compost garden in Pemberton is all office waste and that’s probably 50 per cent coffee grinds. The worms might be peaking on caffeine, but the compost is in great shape."

However, composting is not available to everyone. A Whistler bylaw prohibits attracting wildlife, which dissuades most people from bothering with a backyard composter. This is where Carney’s Centralised Composting program comes in.

Carney’s have made an application to develop a facility, using the aptly named, Wright Technology, to deal with organic material from the corridor on an industrial scale. The Wright Technology heats the waste to levels that exceed government standards and kills pathogens. The facility is planned for the Squamish Industrial Park.

"Each tunnel is 230 feet long leading to the receiving building. We will be able to take 50 tonnes a day. The waste spends 15 days in the tunnel; 45 days in total before it is ready to be reused," advises Carney.

The recommendations of the South Plan Monitoring Committee went to the SLRD board for review this past Monday. Some due diligence must still be completed to satisfy the Squamish council, and a zoning and development permit for the proposed site needs to be granted. However, Carney hopes to have the facility running by late fall.

This means that the 20 annual tonnes of organic waste, which includes food waste produced by Whistler’s restaurants and hotels, clean wood from C&D waste and soiled paper products (coffee cups and donut boxes from Tim Hortons alone would take a dent out), will no longer be languishing in the landfill, but will be jet-streamed through a composting facility that morphs them into high-nutrient topsoil within 45 days.

Waste generated during construction, renovation and demolition, Whistler’s hottest summer economy, accounts for approximately 30 per cent of landfill. And it doesn’t need to be. It is estimated that 90 per cent of a building is salvageable or recyclable material. Provided it is deconstructed, rather than demolished.

"Deconstruction" is not a post-modern school of literary criticism. It is, in fact, a new wave in the construction industry. Its practical application has recently been demonstrated at the Signal Hill elementary school in Pemberton.

"It was a phenomenon," says Alex Kleinman, the Co-ordinator of Capital Projects for the Howe Sound School Board. "The demolition and salvage company was incredibly impressed, because in the city, 90 per cent of the building would have gone directly into the landfill. But it was a requirement in our contract for the project that as much as possible of the old school had to be recycled.

"The SLRD had also contacted the contractor and offered to work with him to reduce the waste stream into the landfill, so he had a lot of resources at his disposal. The contractor had to look at what he was taking out of the building and consider the costs of preparation and transportation to the nearest used building supplies facility. You’re in a farming community, and I think what you have is a tradition in the area of making the best of what is given to you, a tradition of taking buildings apart and reusing them. There’s a long time commitment to the three Rs. I would say 65 per cent of that building never left the valley, and it was recycled in Pemberton/Whistler/D’Arcy."

I’m enjoying summer drinks on the deck of my neighbour. The decking surface is new, but the joists were salvaged from the Signal Hill site. Despite a recent growth spurt, Pemberton’s roots are still rural in nature, and community is still a big focus, despite the new faces. Renovations keep the air humming with power tools, and construction materials circulate. Neighbours lend tools and moral support. An old fence is torn down and a farmer up the road trucks away a load of lumber. Leftover slate from a garden project forms a decorative pathway at someone else’s bungalow.

This frugal mentality isn’t exhibited as commonly in Whistler. Kleinman suggests it’s because Whistler hasn’t had the same salvage opportunities that Pemberton has just seen.

Local builder, Rod Nadeau, of Nadeau and Associates, addresses two of the real practical concerns that impact on why Whistler sees over one-third of its landfill waste as C&D debris: "The biggest issue with environmentally responsible salvage is that you need time and space. You need the space to spread out the materials so you can sort them, and you need the time to do that. If your construction time frame is such that you need it down in two days, then you basically rip it down and send it off to landfill."

Nadeau is currently working on the deconstruction of six old houses on Alta Lake on a single property title which will be replaced by one home.

"Essentially, you strip out what can’t be used, like the fibreglass insulation and the drywall. The drywall is already recycled – it’s sorted separately at the waste station and sent to the manufacturers who reuse it, because in the landfill it gets wet and leaches. Then whatever can be salvaged and taken is reused. The doors and windows are all pretty much spoken for. Then we sort the rest and make arrangements to dispose of it. So, the wood waste will need to be dealt with. The concrete and stone will be crushed by our excavator on site, and that will be used as fill around the foundations."

For Nadeau, who is also finishing an EnviroHome in Nordic, the environmentally friendly disposal is a motivating factor. But the bottom line is that it’s cheaper to deconstruct a building than to demolish it.

"We’ve got the time and space with this project, so it’s an obvious choice. It saves money."

It’s not just money that is saved. The planet needs some CPR too. The Natural Step framework recognizes that the "take, make, waste" mentality is typical linear thinking that has gotten us to a somewhat messy state of affairs. (Traces of PCBs and toxic chemicals in the breast milk of Inuit women are just one warning light blinking on the dashboard of this little spaceship.) This way of thinking needs to be replaced with a paradigm that is cyclical. Web-like. In which we are entrenched and acknowledge our participation. After all, as Natural Step founder and oncologist, Dr Karl-Henrik Robèrt, suggests, there is a limit to what a living cell can take. There are limits to what we can do to the planet without it coming back at us with teeth bared and dripping poison.

Though it may be one of the first phrases we learn as infants, there actually is no such thing as "all gone." Some regional districts in B.C. have ambitiously set Zero Waste targets, based on the principle that waste is just a "resource in the wrong place."

It’s just a question of how you look at it.



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