This Week April 11, 1990. Page M3

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TOP STORY

he throw-away society has
butted up against one basic
fact of science: nothing, so
far, eliminates mass. And the
Capital Regional District has an over-
flowing Hartland Road Landfill in
Saanich to prove that out-of-sight,
out-of-mind only works for so long.

But times are changing. “There are
a lot of catch-phrases,” says CRD
environment committee chairman
Frank Leonard. “One of them is that
we're in the Turn Around ’90s.”

Although it’s too late to stop the
expanding mountain of trash at the
end of Hartland Avenue from peaking
and the region’s garbage from gob-
bling up Heal Lake, there is reason to
believe a landfill of its size will never
be needed again, say officials with the
CRD’s 14-month old curbside blue box
program.

“You never really throw anything

away,” says Leonard, a Saanich alder-
man. “You just throw it somewhere
else.”
What society has tossed is keeping
the CRD busy. Leonard’s committee
brings together 10 of 19 CRD direct-
ors twice a month. Most committees
meet only once a month, with three or
four directors, but Leonard has had to
form subcommittees to handle the
expanding workload.

Its vision goes beyond blue boxes.
The CRD has an “after curbside”
scheme for recy-

BEYOND THE
BLUE BOXES

MOUNTAIN OF car bodies ‘and white goods — suchas washing - machines
and water heaters — collected by Budget Steel_-instead of going to the
landfill. White goods and tires are a major problem in dumps. Tires float up
through the ground, and can collect pools of gas.

cling. It’s looking
at regional com-
posting, at grind-
ing and chipping
of yard waste, col-
lecting cardboard,
tires and white
goods in an effort
to remove even
more from the
waste stream.
It’s looking at
the mining of
Hartland landfill,
a practice starting
to take place in
the U.S. Compa-
nies actually buy
the rights to sift
through trash for
the resources of
recyclable goods
landfills contain.
And a private
Alberta business,
Environmental
Technology Inc., is
test drilling for
methane gas at
Hartland dump.
The gas would be
cleaned to become

landfills.

On the lower
tech end, the blue
boxes are doing
their job. Roz Mel-
lander, regional
recycling co-
ordinator, says
many people are
choosing the blue
box as a way to
turn much of their
garbage into a re-
source. An Octo-
ber survey found
that during a
four-week period,
the region had a
68-per-cent par-
ticipation rate. On
a weekly basis,
participation was
35 to 37 per cent.

“This equates
extremely favora-
bly with Ontario,
where the rate is
30 to 35 per cent,”
says Mellander.
“That's very, very
good. So were
very happy with

part of the natu-
ral gas flow. If the company likes what

it finds, the CRD will sell Envirotech

rights.

“That solves an old problem for us
and creates new energy at the same
time,” Leonard says. And it’s not
far-fetched. The methane recovery
technology is actually in practical
operation at twe Lower Mainland

what's happening
in Victoria.” 5

With 77,000 blue boxes in service,
the CRD operates “still the largest
regional program in the west,” Mel-
lander says.

Nonetheless, the actual loads of
recyclable goods collected are having,
by Some measures, a minimal impact.
“The blue box program itself, right

FRONT PAGE: Recycling boxes stacked up against the enemy — garbage

lan Bloedel, the two largest pulp-and-
paper companies, have spoken for the
recycled pulp once it comes on stream.

And the prospect of a de-inking
plant in the Fraser Valley makes that
all the more likely. The Greater Van-
couver Regional District system will
market its recyclable goods from a
central plant, and the province is
looking for a de-inking plant site.
De-inking is necessary when turning
paper back to pulp.

Leonard believes other opportuni-
ties for B.C.-based recovery industry
will follow the when the GVRD sys-
tem starts work.

For now, the two CRD collection
contractors send recycleable newspa-
per to Smurfitts, outside of Oregon
City, Ore., where it’s turned into new
newspaper.

Tin cans go to MRI outside of
Seattle, the major de-tinning plant on
the west coast of North America.
Steel, the major component of tin
cans, is separated by a chemical pro-
cess. Tin is removed by electrolysis,
then reformed into a metal that’s
replated.

Glass recycling has been in place in
B.C. for years. But Victoria core mu-
nicipalities’ glass, nonetheless, goes to
Ball-Inco of Seattle. Glass from the
outlying areas goes to New West
Glass, which ships it to Consumer
Glass of Vernon after contaminants

such as plastic

now, is only di-
verting 3.5 per
cent of the total
waste stream,”
says Mellander.
“Residential gar-
bage only makes
up 45 per cent of
the waste stream.
So we have a long
way to go yet.”
Looked at an-
other way, the im-
pact of recycling is
more impressive
— despite how lit-
tle of the bulk it
removes. Recy-
cling tin cans
saved a quarter of
a million litres of
oil last year which
would have been
needed to make
new cans. Capital
Region residents
also saved 70,000
trees in the first
year of recycling.
That's one Mount
Douglas Park, or
four Witty’s La-

and metal are re-
moved. Consumer
Glass melts the
glass and reforms
it.

But perhaps
more important
than the amount
of waste turned
into resource or
where it goes is
the change in atti-
tudes the blue box
program is foster-
ing. “It’s making
us into a conserv-
ing society, which
is really, really
important,” Mel-
lander says.

The conserving
society is keeping
the CRD’s recy-
cling hotline busy.
It fielded more
than 16,000 calls
last year. Com-
pare that with the
much larger me-
tropolitan area of
Greater Vancouv-

- er, where the hot-

goons.

Unfortunately, the trees weren't

saved in B.C. Right now, the volume
of goods recycled in most cases isn’t
enough to prompt B.C. businesses to
cash in.

Twenty-eight pulp mills are at work
in B.C. “Not one of them accepts
recycled pulp,” Mellander says. But
both Fletcher Challenge and MacMil-

that ends up at the Capital Regional District’s Harland Road Landifill.

Although curbside recycling is only reducing the waste stream by 3:5 per

cent, changes in attitudes are taking place to create a conserving society.

Story and photos by George Lee

line attracted just
20,000 calls. :

The hotline doesn’t just answer
questions about blue boxes. It refers
calls, giving people the names of com-
panies that will take their waste. And
it answers all kinds of recyling ques-
tions.

There’s more to the recycling pro-

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