B.C. environment minister eyes Cache Creek landfill expansion
By Kelly Sinoski
Vancouver Sun
August 27, 2009
 The Cache Creek landfill site was earlier scheduled to close in 2010. (Photograph by: Handout photo, Vancouver Sun files) |
Environment Minister Barry Penner is pitching the Cache Creek landfill expansion as a possible alternative to exporting waste to Washington, setting the scene for another showdown with a local first nations group.
Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council chief Bob Pasco said the first nations group will fight the expansion of the landfill, claiming it’s polluting local rivers and affecting salmon stocks.
The group has already filed a suit against the landfill operators, claiming it was excluded from the environmental assessment process.
“They continue to move in the direction of putting in a landfill that’s already leaking,” Pasco said. “Twenty years ago we told them this and they shoved it down our throats.”
Penner hasn’t specifically said B.C. will approve an expansion to the Cache Creek dump, but it’s an option as Metro Vancouver struggles with a garbage crisis.
Metro had applied for provincial approval to temporarily export 600,000 tonnes of waste annually to Washington state, but the province now says it will outlaw international exports of B.C.’s garbage.
This surprised officials in Cowichan Valley, which already exports trash to Washington. Powell River and Whistler also send their garbage south of the border.
Penner said he prefers a “made-in-B.C. solution” and noted the government is reviewing two environmental assessments on proposals to expand the Cache Creek landfill.
One of the proposals would see it expanded by seven hectares, which would keep it open until 2012, and the other by 45 hectares, which would allow it to remain open for another 20 years.
Metro could also consider sending the region’s waste to a proposed incinerator at Gold River on Vancouver Island, he said.
“Those opportunities are right there,” Penner said. “Those are two alternatives I’m aware of besides exporting garbage to the United States.
“It makes sense to deal with our environmental problems here in B.C., rather than exporting our problems to somewhere else.”
But Marvin Hunt, a Surrey councillor and chairman of Metro’s waste management committee, said Penner’s suggestions are hypothetical because neither the Cache Creek expansions nor the proposed Gold River incinerator has been approved.
The Gold River facility would only be built, he added, if Metro signs a deal to send its garbage there, while first nations are adamant about closing down the Cache Creek landfill.
The province halted the approval process for a new landfill at the Ashcroft Ranch site over concerns about aboriginal land claims.
“Bobby Pasco has basically said ‘over my dead body,’” Hunt said. “[Penner] is sort of tentatively defying [first nations] on the expansion, but that’s become his issue, not ours. We’re still going around the same mulberry bush.”
Hunt maintains Metro’s only option now is to strike a deal with Vancouver to temporarily dump the region’s trash in the city landfill, location in Delta.
But if the province is willing to defy the first nations and build a landfill in the Interior, he said, Metro is ready to go on the Ashcroft site.
But Pasco said “there are better ways than hiding” trash in the south Cariboo.
“We don’t like Metro Vancouver wanting to protect their environment down there and keep it clean and pure and export all the bad stuff up here,” he said.
“They’re going to try but I don’t think we’re going to sit back and let them do it.”
Cache Creek Mayor John Ranta, however, is hopeful the landfill will be expanded as it will keep 200 jobs in the community and bring Cache Creek $1 million in royalties every year.
Although the tribal council opposes expanding the Cache Creek landfill, first nations leaders for the Ashcroft and Bonaparte bands are in support of it.
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Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 28 Aug 2009