Dear Editor:
Re: No real alternative to incineration: Mayor, Burnaby NOW, April 17.
The alternative to incineration and landfills is remanufacturing our recycled materials locally.
This prepares us for the failure of distant markets as "the eighteen-wheeler of globalization is thrown into reverse" - Jeff Rubin - by peak oil.
The global corporate incinerator lobby has promoted their fiction for decades: that their "magic machine" can do away with landfills. In reality, incineration perpetuates landfills, since one quarter of our garbage remains as ash.
Toxic ash, because everything we make is burned together.
To avoid the landfill issue, Metro Vancouver has used bottom ash for road base - a slow-motion toxic disaster for future generations. Flyash - the microscopic toxins in the stack, only some of which are captured by scrubbers - is buried in clay-lined pits at Cache Creek.
Burning 1.2 million tons of recoverable resources a year (only 500,000 tons was approved) is a climate crime that leaves us with 300,000 tons of toxic ash a year and a "landfill in the sky" and in the groundwater for our kids.
We can have our resources instead of the ashes of our resources.
It's too soon to say we can't recycle more than 70 to 80 per cent by 2020. Surrey already recycles 70 per cent.
Metro Vancouver is proceeding without public approval of this expansion. Without investigating sustainable alternatives. Our elected representatives need our input.
Hilda Bechler, via email
