Whistler lawmakers this week asked municipal staff to pursue a three-year contract to ship the community's waste to a regional landfill in Washington State while assisting the District of Squamish (DOS) in its efforts to establish a regional facility in the corridor.
Council also asked Brian Barnett, the RMOW's general manager of engineering and public works, to redouble the community's efforts to reduce the amount of waste the community produces.
Monday's direction from Council came after Barnett and Owen Carney of Carney's Waste Systems visited the Rabanco landfill in south central Washington for an on-the-ground inspection of the prospective landfill receiver for Whistler waste. Barnett said his findings confirmed the site was an ideal match for Whistler.
"It exceeded my expectations," Barnett said. "It is a very clean site. Employees have a great deal of pride in terms of running the facility. It is well managed and no leachate is discharged from the site It's a professionally run, orderly facility that meets the standards Whistler is looking for."
In the spring, Whistler decided to close its landfill by this fall to make way for the Olympic and Paralympic athletes' village in the Lower Cheakamus. Initially, Council decided to ship the waste to a facility in Cache Creek - but that was before the provincial government put the environmental approval process for an alternate facility near Ashcroft on hold indefinitely.
During his presentation to Council, Barnett said Ministry of Environment (MOE) officials had recently told him the RMOW could consider shipping its waste to Squamish in the short term, even without the sort of environmental safeguards usually found at regional landfills.
Barnett said that while shipping the waste south of the border would be more expensive, it would come at a lower environmental cost because the Rabanco site has proper controls in place to prevent the leaching of potentially toxic liquids into the soil.
Mayor Hugh O'Reilly said that even with the increased emissions from trucks and trains associated with the Rabanco option, a 400 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is realized because Rabanco officials use their landfill gas to produce electricity, preventing it from entering the atmosphere.
Councillor Gordon McKeever said he would be comfortable sending Whistler's waste to Squamish once that landfill has leachate controls and landfill-gas collection systems in place.
Barnett said that at Rabanco, methane gas from garbage is collected and fed into an energy station that generates enough energy to power 7,000 homes.
Another nuance that stood out in Barnett's mind from the trip was the incredible network of trains, which directly link to the landfill's waste deposit system.
He said the landfill is set up at the crossroads of a major railway system where waste is transported from Western Canada as well as the southern and eastern states in the U.S.
"It was really quite remarkable," he said of the train system. "They would bring in trains 6,000 feet long and unload in four hours."
Barnett said rail transportation leads to both cost-effective transportation and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions when compared to trucking away waste.
While a comment from Coquitlam's mayor in a recent Vancouver Sun article suggested that a B.C. community trucking waste to the U.S. would give B.C. "an environmental black eye during the 2010 Winter Games," Barnett said decisions on behalf of Whistler are being made on the grounds of sustainability."We've screened options through a natural philosophy," he said. "We've looked at it from a sustainable perspective."
