Metro Vancouver will spend $150 million over the next five years to ship our garbage to dumps in the Interior and the United States.
“In our region, we have capacity for roughly around a million tonnes of waste and currently we require over a million tonnes of waste,” Metro Vancouver’s solid waste director, Chris Allan, told Global News.
The amount of trash produced by the region has been rising over the past 20 years, Metro Vancouver said, as population and density grew as well.
The organization has now awarded three contracts for the next five years to Republic Services, Waste Management of Canada and GFL to carry the trash by truck and rail to Cache Creek and across the border to Washington State and Oregon.
“We’ve had great success,” Allan said.
“We’re a leader in North America in terms of where we’re at. Our recycling rate is at 65 per cent so that’s gone up a fair bit over the years.
“And another thing we track is per capita disposal, which of course is doing quite well because that obviously takes into account population growth in the region.”
Two years ago, Metro Vancouver generated about a tonne of trash per person that went straight to the landfill.
It is now down to half that amount.
Metro Vancouver said the best thing that everyone can do is not buy what you don’t need and reduce, reuse and recycle.