British Columbia a ae. We've got a first-class garbage collec- tion crisis in our city and the whole Greater Vancouver region. It’s growing by the hour. Garbage collected in Van- couver in 1987 amounted to 360,000 tonnes and it’s going up every year. The Greater Vancouver Regional District estimates that in two years, garbage col- lection in the region will reach the whop- ping figure of 1,040,000 tonnes. It’s all going into one place — the Burns Bog landfill. That will soon be filled. What will we do then? That question needs to be tackled right now. So far we're getting all talk and little action from Vancouver city council, which should be taking the lead in finding a solution. In my view the solution lies in recy- cling. All garbage collected in| Van- couver, whether from houses, apartments, commercial businesses or industries, should be separated. Paper, glass and metals should be collected separately for recycling. Boy Scouts and other groups collect some now and that’s commenda- ble but it’s only a fraction of what needs to be done. Three years ago when the Committee of Progressive Electors and its allies had a majority on council, we voted $300,000 to establish a pilot project to separate garbage collection. When the Non Parti- san Association secured a majority two years ago, it promptly cancelled that pro- ject. Right now nothing is being done by the city to separate or recycle garbage. We are wasting precious resources. Council has before it a proposal from the city engineer to build a recycling plant (to be called the Downtown Resource Recovery Plant) right in the heart of the city, on Station Street near Main and Terminal streets. Privatization of this facility is also being discussed. I think it’s a bad idea for several reasons. First of all, it’s a piecemeal approach. It won’t solve our garbage problem. It would only recycle five per cent of our garbage; the rest would still go to Burns Bog. Information available to city coun- cil indicates that wherever waste recovery plants have been built, they have been expensive failures. Burnaby’s municipal engineer advised his council last September that, “this Garbage crisis needs immediate attention CITY GARBAGE COLLECTION ... separation at source the best way. type of resource recovery plant proved to be uneconomical and unworkable as a stand-alone method of recycling mate- rial, requiring complicated mechanical and pneumatic means to separate the recyclable from the refuse.” We've got better ways of spending taxpayers’ dollars than subsidizing such a limited-use plant. That’s aside from the fact that a recycling plant right in the heart of the city would cause a great increase in truck traffic further clogging our already overburdened downtown streets. And if the plant were privatized, that would be a real disaster. The incentive to separate garbage and reduce what would go into Burns Bog would be eliminated. A privately-owned plant would be inter- ested in getting as much garbage as pos- sible. The more it gets the more profit it makes. This proposed recovery plant is no solution. What we should be doing is | making it mandatory that all garbage collected be separated, with papers, glass Rankin and metals to be picked up separately. This should apply to all garbage — res- idential, commercial and _ industrial. Curbside newspaper collection alone could reduce the amount of refuse going to Burns Bog by 10 per cent. Separating other recyclable waste would reduce it even more. Equally important is the fact that this resource would not be wasted; it would be used over again. Toronto is success- fully implementing a curbside recycling program, as are other Ontario cities. Our job as a city would then be to find a market for these recycling products. One for paper is already available. The whole undertaking should be under city control and not allowed to fall into pri- vate hands. To sum up, the city should: ® Immediately start a garbage separa- tion program. ®@ Put the Downtown Resource Rec- overy Plant on hold. ® Co-operate with the GVRD to work out a comprehensive garbage dis- posal program for the whole region. ® Develop an education program to make every citizen a conserver and recycler of our resources. 2 e Pacific Tribune, February 6, 1989 Residents demand mills end dioxin dumping in Howe Sound area By DAN GIDORA Several hundred angry people jammed the auditorium at Presentation House in North Vancouver Jan. 25 to hear speakers call for an end to pulp mill pollution causing the ecological crisis in Howe Sound. Pop singer turned environmental activist Terry Jacks, who lives in the Howe Sound area, was the keynote speaker in this open forum titled “Killing Howe Sound,” organ- ized by the North Shore New Democratic Education Committee. Jacks and others called for the immediate closure of all the pulp mills on Howe Sound, with full wages and compensation to be paid to the mill workers until such time that the mills can be re-tooled 100-per- cent environmentally safe. And last Tuesday, Vancouver Green- peace called the pulp and paper industry’s recently announced solution to the crisis a Band Aid approach that will not eliminate toxic emissions. The indefinite closure of all fishing in the waters off Howe Sound, as well as revela- tions of high cancer levels in the area, have focused the public’s awareness.on the issue. Dangerously high levels of extremely toxic dioxins have been found in the area’s fish and shell fish, as well as in the air and water. The North Vancouver meeting heard several speakers, including two pulp workers, a crab fisherman, a shrimp fisher- man, a bio-chemist and a professor of cri- minology at the University of B.C. specializing in crimes against the environ- ment. Jacks gave an impassioned plea to save the sound which he said he has “watched die” over the last 10 years. He outlined his four year, full-time campaign against the polluting pulp mills at Port Mellon and Wood Fiber, which have consistently failed to meet minimum government environ- mental standards, and the Social Credit government’s refusal to enforce its own environmental laws. “It’s a sad irony that when dioxins at dangerously high levels were discovered in Howe Sound sea food, the fishermen were victimized with the total loss of their liveli- hood while the pulp mills continue to pol- lute unabated, in violation of government standards,” Jacks said. To compound the problem, the pulp companies are now expected to police themselves as part of the provincial government’s privatization of the scil and tissue labs at UBC, he noted. Jacks said the alarming fact that the Howe Sound area and Bowen Island have the highest level of lung cancer in B.C. is further evidence of the toxic contamination. The pulp mills at Port Mellon and Wood Fiber use chlorine in the bleaching process of the pulp. This produces a variety of tox- ins, including dioxins, causing cancer at lev- els as small as one part per trillion, the meeting was told. Jacks pointed to the record profits the pulp companies have made over the last three years, plus the new technology in non- chlorine pulp processing now available, as proof that only “corporate greed” stands in the way of solving this crucial problem. In Vancouver last week, Greenpeace official Brian Killeen charged that the industry “after two years of record profits offers a half-hearted approach with little investment in true pollution abatement.” He was commenting on a recently announced $220-million plan to reduce toxin and furan emissions by substituting chlorine dioxide in the pulp bleaching pro- cess. Greenpeace charged that this would increase emissions of other pollutants. “We want a real cleanup, not just a shift from one problem to a new problem,” Kil- leen said. Teachers make major gains Continued from page 1 Certain long-held rights were lost when Bill 20 removed teachers from the old School Act. But the right to a “union: shop” — whereby all teachers must belong and pay dues to the local teacher association — has been regained in every case. In some districts the clause does not kick in until the end of the current contract, such as in the recently settled Terrace strike, and in Victoria and Delta. Sick leave was also lost with Bill 20, but districts have been successful in winning back such provisions, North reported. Teachers have also won recognition of the BCTF, along with the local association, as their union. This was a key sticking point in several districts, particularly where boards employed outside negotiators. Wage settlements have averaged 14 per cent over a two year contract in most dis- tricts, North said. ; In all districts where strike votes have been taken, the local association has observed the B.C. Federation of Labour’s boycott of the Industrial Relations Council, and hired a “credible” person or group to supervise the strike vote, he related. Routinely, the local board has applied to the IRC for a hearing, in which the vote has been declared invalid. The association then is granted an exemption by the B.C. Fed, and conducts.a second vote supervised by the council. In all such cases the second vote has pro- duced a stronger mandate, North said. He pointed to Terrace, where 79 per cent of the ballots favoured a strike in the first vote, while the IRC supervised vote saw 92 per cent backing the strike option. Current “hot spots’’ include Langley, where negotiations “‘are at a snail’s pace” and teachers have served a 72-hour strike notice after an IRC vote and have been withdrawing from activities such as filing reports. Calling the district ‘ta hotbed of conservatism,” North said the board ‘is hell-bent on preventing their teachers from getting what others have got.” Other areas poised for job action are five districts in the Okanagan, including Shus- wap, where teachers are set to strike, Pentic- ton and Central Okanagan. Teachers in Chilliwack have voted strongly in favour of strike action. Negotiations with mediators are ongoing in Vancouver and Nanaimo, and were set to resume in Abbotsford on Friday and Sat- urday. 5 Nanaimo board chairperson June Harri- son said talks were going very well and were down to important issues, on which she declined to elaborate. The Nanaimo board has decided to invoke the BCSTA’s “satisfaction guaran- teed”’ policy and ask for the return of dele- gates’ fees to a recent convention in Vancouver. Nanaimo trustees walked out of a workshop on negotiations after object- ing to comments by the key speaker, Van- couver board negotiator Vaughn Bowser. Harrison would not discuss the substance of Bowser’s comments, but called them “cynical” and said that the BCSTA “should be careful about who it asks” to lead semin- ars.