The facilities Metro Vancouver ships garbage to are in Washington and Oregon, and they received 85,000 tonnes in 2017 and 59,000 in 2018.
Jennifer Saltman April 3, 2019
Metro Vancouver has sent almost 150,000 tonnes of municipal trash to landfills in Washington and Oregon over the past two years. The waste is beyond what can be handled by the region’s two waste-disposal facilities in Metro Vancouver — the Vancouver Landfill in Delta, and an incinerator in Burnaby that burns garbage to produce electricity.
The Vancouver Landfill is authorized to accept up to 750,000 tonnes of solid waste each year. Last year, it took 631,243 tonnes of municipal waste and 86,663 tonnes of demolition waste. The waste-to-energy facility burns about 260,000 tonnes of trash each year.
Last year, Metro Vancouver generated 918,000 tonnes of waste, after recycling and other diversion efforts, for disposal. That is slightly up from the 903,000 tonnes produced in 2017.
Historically, Metro Vancouver sent its extra waste to a landfill in Cache Creek, and at the peak in 2007 sent 500,000 tonnes of trash to that facility, an amount that dwindled to 200,000 tonnes in 2015. The contract for “contingency disposal” with Cache Creek ended in 2016 and went out for procurement.
In 2017, Metro signed three-year contracts with Republic Services and Waste Management Inc., the only two respondents, which use the Roosevelt Regional Landfill in Washington and Columbia Ridge Landfill in Oregon, respectively. “The whole goal was to have as much redundancy and resilience as we could in the system so in the event of fluctuating waste flows or any system disruption we would have multiple facilities to manage waste available to us,” said Paul Henderson, Metro Vancouver’s general manager of solid waste services.
According to a contract award report for contingency disposal, the deals with Republic and Waste Management are worth up to $21 million and $25 million over three years, respectively. Metro can send up to 50,000 tonnes of trash per year to each company.
“The total values included are based on maximum annual contract tonnage and include contingency and inflation — actual annual amount depends on contingency disposal quantities,” said Henderson.
Republic Services has four municipal contracts in B.C. — Metro Vancouver, Cowichan Valley Regional District, Whistler and the qathet Regional District, which includes Powell River and surrounding areas.
Janet Prichard, the municipal manager, post collection, for Republic Services, said the 75,060 tonnes processed from B.C. contracts last year — 34,591 of which came from Metro — accounted for 3.4 per cent of the total waste it accepted.
A spokesperson for Waste Management’s Columbia Ridge facility did not respond to a request for information. Metro sent just under 25,000 tonnes to Columbia Ridge last year. In 2017, Metro sent 85,000 tonnes of waste to the two facilities. The amount was smaller in 2018. Private transfer stations in the Fraser Valley and some B.C. First Nations also send waste to Washington state.
When asked if there are any concerns about sending trash out of country, Henderson said there are always uncertainties when disposing of waste. He said some other jurisdictions have had issues with the border, and although that has not been Metro’s experience, “it’s definitely a consideration.”
He said there is also potential for disruptions because the trash is transported by container truck and rail. “Every option has its benefits and downsides,” Henderson said, noting one benefit is that the scale of the landfill operations in the U.S. allows for flexible pricing.
Henderson said Metro Vancouver will always need contingency disposal sites to back up the local ones, and there are no plans at the moment to build more landfills or incinerators. Metro had intended to build a second incinerator somewhere in the region to burn 250,000 tonnes of trash, but that idea was abandoned in 2015 because of uncertainty around waste volumes. It intends to re-examine its waste-to-energy options this year.
Henderson said there is no specific objective in the region’s solid waste management plan to deal with all waste locally, but “transporting waste to a facility in another jurisdiction creates risks, so there’s a lot of benefits to managing it locally.” He said the amount of trash going to outside facilities each year depends on how much is produced in the region.
The amount of waste that is disposed of in the region has declined for the last decade or so, despite the growing population, largely because the recycling rate has improved. Metro has a goal of 80 per cent waste diversion by next year, but with a diversion rate of 63 per cent last year, it has a long way to go before it can meet that goal.
