Metro Vancouver's board of directors passed a waste management plan Friday, approving a new garbage incinerator, but where exactly it will be remains to be seen.

The plan aims to reduce garbage, reuse and recycle as much as possible, burn the leftover waste and put the remains in a landfill.

The plan includes targets to reduce the amount of waste created and dumped in landfills to 70 per cent by 2015 and 80 per cent by 2020. The plan also includes measures that will ban all wood and compostable waste from disposal, increase recycling in multi-family residences and on-job sites, and enhance existing recycling and reuse programs.

Metro Vancouver has to wait for the provincial government to approve the plan before soliciting proposals to have the incinerator built.

Burnaby's garbage incinerator, which has been around for roughly 20 years, generates $10 million in annual energy sales from electricity and steam.

Burnaby councillor Colleen Jordan was at the Metro Vancouver meeting Friday, which ran for more than six hours.

Jordan said some representatives wanted the incinerator out of Metro Vancouver, while others, like those from Burnaby, thought it should be in the region, so the resulting vote was somewhat of a compromise.

Burnaby's position is that the garbage should be dealt with here and to keep the incinerator within Metro Vancouver, she added.

The next step is for Environment Minister Barry Penner to review the plan. Jordan said Penner may oppose an incinerator in the region because he comes from the Fraser Valley, where people have been opposed to burning waste, concerned that resulting air pollution will affect the valley.

Jordan said science supports the incineration option.

"It's science versus people who are just afraid of everything," she said. "This is the least harmful of a bunch of bad alternatives."

Even after reducing and recycling garbage, there will still be 500,000 tonnes of annual waste that has to go somewhere, Jordan said.

"The only thing that's ironic about all of this is Burnaby's had an incinerator going for 20 years, and most of the population of our city doesn't even know it's there," she said.

Ben West of the Wilderness Committee has been a vocal opponent of incineration, saying burning waste is a "carbon intensive" process that can create a "toxic soup effect."

"There's toxins in our garbage, and when you burn this stuff, you create a whole new slew of toxins," West said. That gets buried in a landfill as ash and can leach into the groundwater or the atmosphere, he added.

"There's nothing about incineration that shuts down landfills. You're dumping all the highly toxic ash instead of garbage," he said, adding for every four barrels of garbage, you get one barrel of toxic ash. West would like to see more waste reduction and recycling instead of incinerating.