Recycling

Just think of the stuff we cast out: newspapers, fax paper, cardboard boxes, car tires, batteries, half-empty paint cans, plastic bags and bottles, old mattresses, glass bottles, the plastic frog that croaked on Christmas morning, the VCR that never worked. The list is endless. (It’s reckoned, by the way, that the average North American will throw away 600 times his own weight in garbage in a lifetime.)

In 1993, according to the GVRD, we generated over two million tonnes of solid waste�enough to fill B.C. Place Stadium twice over. Planners figured, if this trend wasn’t changed, by the year 2000 we’d be generating more than three million tonnes of garbage a year. Landfill sites, where solid waste has traditionally been dumped, wouldn’t cope (we’re already sending much of our garbage to the Cache Creek landfill site, 300 kilometres away). Both cost and environmental impact would be enormous.

Alarmed by this trend, the provincial government set a goal requiring a 50 per cent per capita reduction in waste disposal by the end of the century. If we’re to achieve this goal, we must generate much less waste and we must recycle all that we can.

Waste management is complicated by all the rain Vancouver gets. This increases the chance of contaminants leaching into lakes and streams�unless waste is stored indoors. Also the scarcity of natural clay-bearing soil in the region means there are few potential landfill sites.

In 1991 about 23 per cent of municipal solid waste generated within the GVRD was recovered for recycling. Based on a population of 1.7 million residents at that time the per capita waste generation rate for all GVRD residents was about 860 kilograms per year and the recycling rate was almost 200 kilograms per year.

Between 1988 and 1991 municipal solid waste recycling increased significantly. During that time the quantity of waste generated increased by more than 22 per cent but the amount recovered for recycling increased by almost 300 per cent.

It is estimated that 49 per cent of what is called DCL waste (mostly concrete and asphalt) was recycled in 1991. The remaining 51 per cent was landfilled, mainly in private sites in Delta and Richmond.

More than 210,000 tonnes a year of Greater Vancouver’s solid waste is incinerated at the GVRD’s state-of-the-art plant in Burnaby. Here steam energy is recovered from the waste burning process and sold to the adjacent paper mill, Paperboard Industries. The facility also recovers about 7,000 tonnes a year of ferrous metal for recycling.

What happens to the materials we put out for recycling? Newsprint Newsprint is truly recyclable material. After they are collected, newspapers are screened for contaminants like plastic or cardboard. They are then sent to newsprint de-inking plants, one of which is in Coquitlam. This plant essentially adds water to the newspapers, turning them into a slurry of paper fibres from which the ink is then removed. The wet paper, or pulp, is pressed into thick sheets of pure paper pulp. This pulp is sent to local paper manufacturers who then blend the recycled pulp with virgin paper pulp and turn it into new sheets of recycled newsprint. Almost all of this recycled newsprint produced locally is sent to California, where state law requires that newspaper publishers must use newsprint with a minimum of 40 per cent recycled content. Recycled newsprint is also used to produce cat litter or take-out trays. Plastics When plastics were invented, they weren’t designed to be recyclable. Each time plastics are remelted and reshaped, they get weaker and the overall quality declines. There are many different types of plastics with different characteristics. You can’t recycle a plastic shampoo bottle into a clear pop bottle, for example. You can’t remove color from plastic. Once it’s colored, an item can be remade only into the same color of plastic or colored black.

There’s another problem: because used plastics can’t be completely cleaned and sterilized, they can’t be turned into food or drink packages. This greatly limits their secondary use. That’s why municipal collection programs limit the types of plastic homeowners can discard (usually to milk jugs, which are remelted and made into motor oil jugs or grocery bags, and pop bottles, which are turned into carpets or clothing insulation materials). In 1994 about 60 tonnes of plastic collected in the City of Vancouver was turned into plastic lumber by Eco-Superwood on Annacis Island. (It’s great for park benches.) Aluminum Cans These are remelted and made into new aluminum cans. Tin Cans They’re actually made of steel with an interior tin coating. The tin and steel are separated and are used to make new tin-coated cans, and any other items normally made from tin or steel. Glass Bottles and Jars They are remelted to make new bottles and jars. They are also used as a gravel substitute in road and building construction and in the manufacture of fibreglass. Motor Oil It’s been estimated that about five million litres of waste oil is disposed of annually by “do-it-yourselfers’’ in Greater Vancouver. In 1990 the GVRD and its member municipalities decided to buy only recycled motor oil.

Mohawk Lubricants began operating a used oil re-refining plant in North Vancouver in 1980. Mohawk’s used oil division can collect more than 33 million litres a year of used lubricating oil. This equates to 30,000 tonnes of potentially hazardous waste material being removed from the Western Canadian environment every year. Mohawk has a fleet of collection trucks specially designed to retrieve used oil from mines, logging camps, mills, ferries, auto repair shops and gas stations. The company produces a high quality base oil from used oil by distilling and hydrotreating. The re-refined oil is then blended into lubricants which meet or exceed manufacturer’s specifications. In 1995 Mohawk was increasing its collection and re-refining capacity. Scrap Tires Each year the region generates about one million scrap tires (10,000 tons), which are incinerated to produce energy for cement making. Lead-Acid Batteries About 400,000 spent lead-acid batteries are disposed of in the GVRD each year. These are recycled into new batteries. Gypsum Wallboard About 50,000 tonnes of gypsum wallboard is recycled into new material each year. CFC Recovery Project The GVRD administers a program to recover CFC (chlorofluorocarbon)�an ozone-depleting chemical�from used appliances. CFC is removed by Pierre CFC Recycling and sent to Dupont Chemicals in Ontario, where it is cleaned for re-use. In 1994, 125 kilograms of CFC was removed from more than 1,250 appliances at Vancouver City depots. Old Refrigerators B.C. Hydro operates a Power Smart Refrigerator Recovery program. Hydro arranges for the removal of up to two operating fridges free-of-charge, removes the CFC and then delivers the fridges to a scrap metal recycler. Composting Several municipalities supply residents with subsidized compost bins so organic waste (otherwise destined for landfills) can be recycled into a usable soil conditioner. The City of Vancouver began the program in 1990. Five years later it had distributed more than 15,000 compost bins ($25 each) to householders, thus diverting about 3,800 tonnes of organic material annually.

The majority of materials recovered from the municipal waste stream are shipped overseas to satisfy the demands of Asian industries for raw resources. Local industries have traditionally used the province’s abundant virgin materials to feed their processing and manufacturing facilities.

Much of the success of recycling programs depends on the economics of supply and demand. When world prices for recycled materials are low, municipalities are obliged to give the materials away to companies that arrange for their disposal. When demand is high during an upbeat economic cycle, municipalities negotiate lucrative contracts. (The market price for plastic milk jugs, for example, increased from $230 a tonne to $750 a ton over a two to three year period; old newspapers jumped in value from $50 to $250 a metric tonne in one year in the mid-1990s.)

Apart from its environmental attractiveness, recycling also makes good economic sense. In the mid-1990s the North Shore Recycling Program, jointly funded by the three municipalities there, was collecting 10,000 tonnes of recyclable materials a year and selling them for about $1 million. But that’s not the end of it, Since it then cost $69 a tonne to tip materials into landfills (ignoring transportation charges), the municipalities were also saving taxpayers an additional $690,000 a year by diverting recyclable materials.

For more information about recycling in Greater Vancouver, call the Recycling Hotline (732-9253),.The GVRD also operates a Compost Hotline (736-2250).