When Mayor Anton and Premier Robertson Waste Nothing

Helen Spiegelman, Coordinator, Zero Waste Vancouver: It's 2020. Communities all over the world, including here in Metro Vancouver, are reinventing themselves after the global economic crash of 2015.

In retrospect, people laugh ruefully about the notion of Vancouver being a "hub for Asia-Pacific trade," and congratulate themselves that at least they were successful in blocking Falcon's Folly back in 2008.

Nowadays, the Chinese are too busy rebuilding cities destroyed by typhoons and developing desalination plants to supply their citizens with drinking water to supply North America with low-priced consumer goods. Climate-change-driven ecological collapse hit the Chinese early, but they cashed the bonds they'd invested in the US and recovered enough to finance the reconstruction before the US economy collapsed.

Because the container terminals are idle and there's less stuff to stock the shelves of big-box stores, there's a lot less garbage. Instead, there is a flourishing and diversified local trade in used goods. Retro is cool.

There's also a renaissance in guild-scale manufacturing. 

Vancouver's fashion designers are selling clothing made with surplus textiles (like the drapes from the vacant convention centres and hotels near the RAV line). Free Geek is supplying homes, schools and businesses with re-assembled computers running innovative Linux-based software to support, among other things, the active Craig's list exchange.

Our local manufacturers are part of a global trading system where ideas, rather than material goods, travel across the globe from one community to another, allowing a modest international exchange of currency and a huge explosion of local commerce when the ideas are applied in new communities to generate economic activity.

People laugh, too, about the notion of Metro Vancouver building a 100-year landfill in the Interior - to say nothing of the jumbo trash incinerator that was pitched by Metro Vancouver staff at the end of 2007.

Even before the Crash of 2015, British Columbia's legislation requiring producers to take back their products and recycle them had become a model for laws in California and Quebec. This was a tipping point that saw a sudden drop in the sale of "disposable" products.

The Cache Creek landfill never did fill up. Even if there'd been trash to send there, rising diesel prices made it unthinkable for 40 trucks to make the four-hour up-hill drive each day, logging almost eight million kilometres each year, the way they did in the days when crude was selling for only $80/barrel.

The towers and townhouses in Coal Harbour and UBC are now housing co-ops and they have all adopted Brian Burke's innovative system for recycling 100 per cent of their waste. The Vancouver School Board is using a purchasing contract drafted by teachers and students specifying that vendors sell only recycled products and take them back for recycling when they're used up.

But what really did in the Cache Creek landfill, as well as the one that blighted the Burns Bog National Ecological Site for decades, was the introduction of recycling for left-over food.

A decade ago, a bizarre political alliance that included Vancouver Mayor Suzanne Anton, MetroVancouver Chair Peter Ladner, the new BC Premier Gregor Robertson and his Minister of Finance Raymond Louie, backed by the Cambie Merchants' Association and the BC Federation of Labour (its numbers swelled by the membership of the newly restructured United Farm and Food Workers) took action on the now-desperate food security problem.

Fuel shortages had cut off supplies of imported food. Responding rapidly to the emergency, the Lower Mainland developed a fully-integrated cradle-to-cradle food industry. The region's golf courses, parking lots and public right-of-ways reverted to food production and now they supply produce to local food processing companies (juice makers, flour mills, breweries, bakeries, etc.) that in turn supply neighbourhood markets.

Closing the cycle, food scraps are picked up from households and restaurants, cafes and food markets in bicycle-drawn carts and delivered to a decentralized network of mid-scale composting plants modelled after the successful prototype at UBC. These mini-plants supply soil amendment to backyard gardeners, community gardens and parks, while the large goretex-covered compost system that was piloted at the Burns Bog landfill in 2008 – when the 2007 civic strike finally ended – nourishes larger plots of farmland along the Fraser River.