The Dominion - Ben Amundson

Garbage Mining

hillarybain — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:19:33 +0000

Tapping into the waste revenue stream

GIBSONS,BC—Buddy Boyd is a garbage miner. But he doesn't need a pick axe or a thick latex onesie to do the job. Nor does he smell the way one might imagine. Boyd and his crew of seven are mostly clean and casually dressed, because they sort garbage before it goes to the landfill - keeping it out of the landfill altogether.

Boyd sees garbage differently than most. He describes what he does as “reclaiming garbage and putting it back into the community, not the ground.”

Boyd started Gibsons Recycling Depot 10 years ago in Gibsons, British Columbia. Resource recovery centres are a model gaining popularity around the world, and slowly being recognized by governments in British Columbia.

Gibsons Recycling Depot is British Columbia's first and largest non-government funded resource recovery park. “To date, we have never received a penny of taxpayers money to operate,” says Boyd.

The Depot accepts 21 different types of items from local residents. They then transport recyclables to processors that can smelt metals and recycle electronics, plastics and paper.

“We generate revenue from the sale of clean recyclables,” Boyd explains. “We scavenge or pick through mixed loads and segregate co-mingled loads into specific categories (wood, metal recyclables, textiles, etc) and generate revenue this way.”

A $34,000 Styrofoam compactor makes Gibsons the only retailer of recycled styrofoam planting pots in BC.

“We generate revenue from styrofoam and are now looking at glass as well,” says Boyd. “There are no government programs we have found where we can go to get funding to purchase the innovative equipment needed to keep materials out of the landfill.”

Gibsons Recyclying Depot is an important model at a time when Metro Vancouver is embarking on a Zero Waste Challenge. Glenn Bohn, Communications Specialist for Metro Vancouver, explains the challenge: “The goal is to divert 70 per cent of the Metro Vancouver region's waste through recycling, composting and other programs by 2015, increasing to 80 per cent by 2020.”

One of the tactics being considered by Metro Vancouver to keep garbage out of the landfill is a new waste incinerator. Metro Vancouver currently burns waste at the incinerator in Burnaby.

Ben West is adamantly opposed to burning trash in Metro Vancouver. West is the Healthy Communities Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee and has been fighting the plan to purchase a new incinerator for years. “Instead of spending billions of dollars on a waste incinerator we should not settle for anything less than aggressive waste diversion targets.”

Boyd advocates for “a consumer pay model also known as 'pay-as-you-throw' for non-traditional recyclables." According to Boyd, there needs to be a cost associated with waste disposal, especially for things that are hard to recycle. It should not be a free service, because it detaches people from responsibility for the things that they buy. As it stands now, he says, "good behavior is punished for those who compost at home and use resource recovery centres.” People who put in the effort to keep garbage out of the landfill are still taxed for curbside pick-up when they do not even use the service, or use it much less.

Boyd would like to see more resource recovery centres started by local entrepreneurs. A problem with leaving recycling up to big business, according to Boyd, is that profits are usurped out of the community and the process can be inefficient. Instead of creating large trucks to pick-up waste at the home, Gibsons residents can drop off their unwanted items on their way to other places. All fees at Gibsons Recycling Centre are minimal (a couple of quarters to drop off an entire car load of clothes and unwanted thrift store items). It is a rate that low-income individuals can afford. The local business sells the items back to the community and employs a small of residents.

“Operations like Buddy Boyds…are exactly the kind of thing we need to find productive uses for discarded material goods,” says West.

On September 1, the Depot was invited to present to Surrey City Council. This was the Depot’s first invitation to present to a regional or municipal government in the decade of the Depot’s operation.

On the day I visited the Depot, Gerry Tretick, of Gibsons City Council, was seen poking his head around and asking Boyd questions about his work.

It seems that after 10 years of proof, governments may be taking the hint.

As Boyd says, “it has to start from the bottom up.”

Ben Amundson is a gringo living in Canada supporting positive alternatives to status quo problems as the planet spins forward.

Garbage mining pic

Signs of a Long Road for BC Climate Campaigners

Moira Peters — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:54:47 +0000

Gateway Program covers fertile land with a freeway

VANCOUVER—Lower mainland groups are opposing a massive expansion to local highways, which they say paves over farmland, encourages pollution and carbon emissions, and opens the gate to ramping up of resource extraction in British Columbia.

“Climate action now!” reads a new banner unveiled April 25 by Gateway Sucks and the Delta, BC, chapter of Council of Canadians. Both groups are opposed to a series of highway expansion projects from northern BC to Port Twassen proposed by the provincial government’s Gateway Program.

"The action took place at River Road and Centre Street in Delta," Tom Jaugelis of Gateway Sucks. "[The sign] is visible from the Alex Fraser Bridge. Activists also planted trees at the site today to highlight the area's potential as a riverfront park, not a riverfront freeway.”

This new banner comes on the heels of one removed by the province. A hand-built “Farms not Freeways” billboard stood on Loranda Farms off Highway 17 in Delta, BC. It was removed because it stood on land under lease to the province. Farm owner Michaela Robinson succumbed to financial pressures, six months ago, to lease part of the land to the Gateway Program for a year. Just behind the sign, government trucks paved over some of Canada’s most fertile soil.

“The very base of the road [construction crews are laying the foundation now] is taking just over an acre of our land. So we’re gonna have a really busy highway with tons of trucks right in our back pasture where our horses roam freely,” said Robinson.

Loranda Farms is part of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). Richmond city councilor Harold Steves, a founder of the ALR in the 1970s, explained at the banner drop why the ALR was created.

The ALR was developed as a mechanism to stop huge companies like Western Reality and Wall & Ready Corp from developing agricultural land into more profitable housing developments, said Steves.

“[In 1972] the land was regarded as zoned land by Richmond, Delta and Surrey, but [developers] regarded it as unzoned,” he continued. Since there was no provincial legislation, developers paved over farmland. “The ALR stopped that [development], until today. It is same type of companies that want to develop this land today.”

Steves believes Delta could be transformed into Surrey-style sprawl. The best soils in BC will be covered with asphalt, just like Richmond, a suburb south of Vancouver known for having paved over top quality soil in favor of blacktopping the land for a corporate grocery store.

The prospect of losing more agricultural land has Ben West fuming. He’s a campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, which supports the direct action of Gateway Sucks and Council of Canadians. They are the educational and outreach arm of the movement to stop the Gateway Program.

“One of the most important archeological dig sites in North America, if not the world, has been paved over as a result of the Golden Ears Bridge, the Katzie First Nation site where they found evidence of pre-colonial agriculture,” said West.

The Golden Ears Bridge is part of the Gateway Program, which is about 10 per cent complete.

On the other side of the bridge another farm was lost. “The first colonial farm in British Columbia—the Hudson’s Bay Farm in Langley—it was actually a historical heritage site,” said West.

“A beautiful big blueberry farm that we tried to protect—an organic farm, family-owned—now has a road going right down the middle of it.” West also described a contemporary farm lost to the Gateway Program.

West sees Gateway as mostly causing destruction. But, the project has its supporters.

“Gateway Program is a series of transportation projects to complete the network of roads for the lower mainland that are necessary for the transport of goods and to assist with effective transit,” said Geoff Freer, Executive Director of the Gateway Program.

West disagrees.

“The Gateway that’s being referred to is actually a gateway to the Asia-Pacific corridor... So this really isn’t about moving folks from Surrey to Vancouver. It’s about moving goods in and raw materials like our forests, raw logs, coal from mines in British Columbia—about 20 million tons of it a year—and whole bunch of oil through pipelines to Asia,” he said

However, Freer thinks there are ecological benefits to the Program.

“Environmentally, one of the main objectives of the Gateway Program is to reduce congestion-related idling, which contributes to reduced regional air quality. By getting big trucks off neighborhood roads we will reduce the amount of smog and we will see a reduction in noise for these communities,” he said.

The highway will act as both a shipping corridor and a transit route. According to Freer, citizens consistently rate transportation as the number one issue in the region. “As we go forward there is going to be a million more people in the lower mainland over the next few years,” he said.

Freer sees Gateway as an opportunity to promote public transit: “Port Mann Highway is going to be tolled. That tolling is designed to discourage traffic and encourage people to go into transit. I think everybody agrees today that building more and more roads is not the answer.”

A BC Treasury Board study found that the petroleum industry produces three jobs for every $1 million spent. The automotive industry creates seven jobs while public transit creates 21 jobs for every $1 million spent.

A loss of land base to the Gateway, however, results in loss of contingent benefits such as the migratory bird flyway. One thousand hectares will be directly affected by highway pollution. “Ninety-seven hectares of our best farmland in Delta is slated to be lost... [and] the expected loss of farmland could feed 100,000 people,” according to Steves.

West agrees, saying he is more concerned with the resulting sprawl than the highway itself. He thinks government can mandate a strong line around ALR and build vertically rather than horizontally.

Freer, too, worries about sprawl, but offered no immediate solution. “The land use plan for the lower mainland that’s been in place for twenty years and that’s currently under review is trying to reduce the tendency towards urban sprawl.”

West said another problem at the root of Gateway is that the program is not a local initiative, but one put together by private interest and government. In spite of these frustrations, West feels power in mobilizing against the Gateway Program.

“It really is something that you become addicted to when you realize the power you have as a citizen, just as a regular person. If people care about something, it doesn’t matter who’s in government—they’re going to stop and listen to what the people want.”

West sees the Save the UBC Farm campaign as an effective three-way conversation. Students stopped housing development plans that would have reduced the university farm to one third its size. They did this by talking with Wilderness Committee and other news outlets. Plans for keeping the Farm as a “future housing reserve” changed. An academic plan was presented to the UBC Board of Governors in January. Academic Provost David Farrar said, “From my perspective this is a huge win. It’s huge for the university but more for the students.”

For West, a similar strategy can be used by citizens engaging with media to prevent the undesirable development of land. He sees the UBC Farm campaign as a small local victory. The Gateway Program is the large-scale national battle. Both battles are aimed at mitigating climate change by supporting local agriculture.

Micheala of Loranda Farms is still under pressure to sell her farmland. The "Farms not Freeways" billboard is gone, but as of April 25 a new banner snags the attention of drivers on the Alexander Fraser Bridge. In spite of provincial efforts to silence resistance to the Gateway Program, more direct action events are planned. Wilderness Committee will continue to push for three-way conversations between the organizations, citizens and the province.

Final funding for the Gateway Program is not secure. “It’s important to highlight that Gateway is actually a 20-step plan,” said West. “It’s not a done deal. But, it’s basically a plan to ramp up the industrialization of the BC coastline.”

Writing from Vancouver, Ben Amundson is an undergrad in Human Ecology at UBC; this is an article for Digital Communications in Agriculture. Check back for an upcoming article on bike tours as a means of supporting food sovereignty.

gateway sucks

Connecting the Dots with Jason Kenney

Moira Peters — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:46:14 +0000

Why food sovereignty can solve the climate crisis and how Canada's immigration policy serves our free trade interests

VANCOUVER—After the Copenhagen Climate Conference failed to produce a legally-binding agreement, Kim Carstensen, Leader of the World Wildlife Fund's Global Climate Initiative, stated in a press release that the Copenhagen Accord translates into “three degrees Celsius of warming or more.” Those three degrees could trigger the migration of millions of impoverished agriculturalists around the globe.

The direction of climate change negotiations concerned 150 small-scale farmers of NGO La Via Campesina for a different reason. “Our farms are not for sale on the climate market,” they protested in Copenhagen on December 15.

Negotiations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change favoured agro-fuels on large-scale farms as a means of climate change mitigation. However, an underreported result of industrial farming is the millions of poor, landless migrants who are losing their land to large-scale farms.

The international peasant movement La Via Campesina (literally, "the way of the farmer") represents millions of small farmers, landless peoples, and rural men and women from around the world. The group calls for radical changes to the global food system.

“To really change the food system, it is important that all sectors of society work together,” says Josie Riffaud of La Via Campesina.

Food sovereignty, or “the peoples' right to define agricultural and food policy,” is a proposed solution to climate change’s drastic effects on farmers. Via Campensina, which coined the term “food sovereignty,” claim that these radical changes have the potential to achieve reductions of between 50-75 per cent of current global emissions simply by returning organic matter to the soil, developing local markets and reversing intensive livestock production.

A food sovereignty system requires the re-localization of food production, and, perhaps, the re-localization of migrant workers. These farmers are not begging for carbon credits or other trade-based solutions; rather, they are offering a solution to the current crisis: a diverse food system that supports local markets and promotes local labor.

Moreover, food sovereignty is not a new idea; societies have been food-sovereign for most of human history. Only in the last 100 years has industry taken over food production. This de-localization of food supply and labor has contributed to climate change.

****

In Vancouver, No One is Illegal (NOII), a grassroots anti-colonial immigrant and refugee rights collective, aligns its goals with those of La Via Campesina.

Immigration is not a topic often associated with the food system, but Harjap Grewal of NOII says immigration and the food system are “very much linked.” He sees immigration as “the human impact of free trade policy, [and therefore] the reason why [farmers are] migrating.”

Immigration is a growing issue in Canadian politics in the past decade, stemming from an increase in the number of people seeking refugee or migrant worker status in Canada. “We've actually made the politically difficult decision to maintain historically high levels of immigration,” Jason Kenney, Minister of Immigration, said to the Calgary Sun.

On the surface, Kenney seems to be making it easier for migrant workers to stay in Canada. Kenney said migrants are “doing work Canadians are unwilling to perform,” and that his government, despite the recession and rising unemployment, will maintain its practice of encouraging immigration and foreign labour. Tarina White of the Calgary Sun reported, “Calgary newcomers will have access to more language training (to the tune of) almost $9.5 million in funding. ... Kenney said he hopes the investment will boost the percentage of immigrants enrolling in language programs each year, which currently sits at 25 per cent.” According to Bill Kaufman of the Sun, Kenney said his government is stepping up its monitoring of foreign workers' treatment while making it easier for the newcomers to become permanent residents and citizens.

However, a closer look reveals a different agenda. Documented by NOII, Kenney “oversaw the largest immigration raid in recent Canadian history, which went largely unreported. In an illegal move, 41 [migrants] were tricked into signing waivers that removed their right to a hearing and many have now been deported.”

White reported that Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan blames international free trade agreements for “setting up foreign workers to be exploited.” McGowan accuses Kenney's ministry of “washing its hands” of temporary foreign workers once they arrive only for them to be routinely abused by their employers. He noted, “Only three per cent of migrant workers are eligible for permanent residency.”

“We're the ones who set up an advocacy office to help workers who are exploited; we're the ones picking up the pieces. ... I find it galling [that] Kenney's trying to wrap himself in the cloak of virtue.”

****

“How can a self-proclaimed bigot responsibly manage Canada's immigration policy?” This question by a concerned citizen during a Q&A session with Kenney at UBC in November was seen by those overseeing the event as “too impassioned,” and the individual was later detained by UBC campus police.

A similar event had panned out differently at McGill. There, 50 people confronted the minister outside the Arts building, briefly denying him access. The event was canceled. When questioned about his immigration policy, he responded, “I plead guilty, I’m a racist,” with a “hint of sarcasm,” according to NOII Montréal.

Kenney's subsequent visit to UBC was greeted with less animosity, and a police presence.

Campus Conservatives President Robert Sroka, organizer of the UBC event, said, “[It was] an opportunity for anyone who wanted to respectfully participate in interaction between students and government.” But, he admitted, “It's a contentious issue and there is always going to be someone unhappy.”

Fathima Cader, a participant at the UBC event, confirmed the negative reception of the controversial MP. “A majority of the questions were highly critical of the MP's immigration policy, to which he mainly responded by talking around the question,” which, she believes, is because Kenney is aware of the real reason immigration in Canada is increasing.

“The increasing number of migrants and refugees around the world is due to the effects of capitalist exploitation that Canada is complicit in,” says Grewal. A report by the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report of 2005 states, “Unfair trade policies continue to deny millions of people in the world’s poorest countries an escape route from poverty, and perpetuates obscene inequalities.” In other words, international trade policies result in poverty abroad, thus creating the incentive for foreigners to partake in the jobs that Canadians are “unwilling to perform.”

The rise of capitalist culture has changed the ecology-based farming tactics of farmers in both North and South America. The majority of North America’s arable farmland grows non-diverse industrial crops. In much of South and Latin America, 20 per cent of the population owns 80 per cent of the land. The result of this imbalance—both ecological and economic—is migrant workers: seasonal agricultural employees who are overworked and underpaid. Our culture of respect for farmers as public servants is gone. The industrial food model has degraded our ideas about food.

***

“When culture breaks down, you'll find addictions,” SFU Professor Bruce Alexander recently said at the Four Pillars Drug Strategy Conference in Vancouver.

Culture in Latin and South America has changed drastically since the rise of industrial farming. Subsistence growers are bought off their land by powerful and wealthy people who create industrial farms. The tradition of local, organic and subsistence growing has been nearly wiped out. To cope with this loss, people turn to drugs. Drug addiction is connected to gang activity, causing people to fear for their lives and apply for refugee asylum overseas.

One of the major points of contention during Kenney's visit to Vancouver was that of a particular immigration case. A Mexican woman applied twice for refugee asylum in Canada due to death threats by gangs in the state of Jalisco. Canada denied her asylum twice, and flew her home. She is now dead.

****

In our quest for cheap food, Canadians buy into the industrial farming model every day at the grocery store by purchasing subsidized food from monoculture farms far away. BC residents now pay a lower percentage of their income on food than ever before.

On 31 October 2008, Harold Steves, Chair of Agriculture for Metro Vancouver, said, “California is running out of food. California and Mexico is where we get much of our food supply. It's not a matter of if the trucks stop running but when.” If left alone, the food supply in BC would last three days.

Decreasing subsidies on large-scale farms now and providing incentives for local production is in our best interest. Any catastrophe, such as climate change-related disasters, could leave millions hungry in Metro Vancouver. In addition, a shift toward local food production—food sovereignty—would likely decrease the influx of migrant field laborers to Canada, encouraging sustainability locally and abroad.

Ben Amundson is an undergraduate in Human Ecology at UBC.

Food sovereignty in Cape Breton