Metro Vancouver is considering a plan to transform an old mill in Gold River into the site of a garbage incinerator that could help the region deal with the growing pile of trash in city landfills.
The proposed plan will have the region ship garbage from Vancouver to Gold River, located in central Vancouver Island, where it would be converted into sellable energy.
"There will be electricity sold into the BC Hydro grid as well as steam to certain industrial users that we're in discussions with at the moment," Thomas Lyons of Covanta Energy, which hopes to redevelop the Gold River mill, told CTV News.
But there are concerns the new garbage incinerator may be harmful to the environment.
"I see this in a uniformly negative way," said Douw Steyn, Professor of Atmospheric Science at UBC. "We are then treating the atmosphere like a sewer."
Steyn said the Gold River proposal provides no incentive for reducing the amount of garbage the city produces.
If Metro Vancouver signs on to the new plan, it will have to fulfill a garbage quota, "and if we don't provide that garbage we would have to pay them. What that means is that it will be a tremendous break against reducing our garbage," Steyn said.
But Lyons said, "That's just flat-out not true."
"If you look statistically in the United States, communities with waste energy have a higher recycling rate than those that don't."
The new incinerator could provide a boost for Gold River, which was hurt when the mill closed 12 years ago. Metro Vancouver will decide on the fate of the Gold River mill proposal sometime this year.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Shannon Paterson
