The Capital Regional District (CRD) Board has approved the next steps for a number of new policies that will see more waste diverted from Hartland Landfill starting as early as June 2023.
The CRD has proposed strategies aimed at diverting up to 35% of the mixed waste currently received every year at the region’s landfill to instead be recycled, repurposed or recovered for beneficial use.
The new policies currently being explored by CRD staff include:
- expanding landfill bans to include wood, roofing shingles, textiles, carpet, flooring, rigid plastics, furniture and mattresses
- reducing tipping fees for ‘source-separated’ loads that do not contain banned materials
- increasing tipping fees for mixed waste loads to both incent diversion and offset the cost of lower tipping fees for source-separated loads
- expanding material stream diversion services at Hartland Landfill to ensure that banned materials end up in alternative processing streams or end markets
- expanding enforcement practices related to all material bans at Hartland Landfill
Once diverted from the landfill, the CRD says that these materials can be further processed for beneficial use—including as potential feedstock for thermal technology options in the future.
In the short term, materials that are collected through expanded diversion services at Hartland Landfill will be processed either on-site or by private sector businesses.
Reducing the region’s waste by at least one-third over the next 10 years is a key deliverable of the CRD’s new Solid Waste Management Plan.
On May 11, the Board directed staff to move forward with a procurement process to understand private sector options and costs for further processing of these divertible materials.
Following that work, staff will return to the Environmental Services Committee with detailed financial implications in fall 2022 and then again in January 2023 with proposed revisions to the Hartland Tipping Fee and Regulation Bylaw No. 3881.
CHEK News
