By Brian Lee
Anyone who spends much time in the bush hiking, biking or driving can tell you that our forestry roads are a dump. You can’t pull off into the trees without finding someone else’s garbage within a kilometre of the highway.
Last month someone called me to say they witnessed a young mother drive up a popular forestry road in a pickup loaded with a sofa and appliances and return awhile later empty.
This person was frustrated because he knew who it was and had a licence plate number but the RCMP weren’t interested and SCRD bylaw officers said they can’t write a ticket unless they catch someone in the act themselves.
Discarded TVs, furniture and appliances are common up there but so are construction materials like duroid shingles and drywall. Ironically, our solid waste policies encourage those with questionable ethical tools to continue the practice. In our zeal to achieve “zero waste” and cost recovery on landfilling, we’re making it increasingly difficult to dispose of trash. Waste diversion just makes sense and any sensible person must agree that we should pay according to the amount of garbage we generate. But the sensibility spectrum is pretty broad around here and you have to wonder, are we pushing these solid waste initiatives too hard?
Recent increases in tipping fees for municipal waste, from $125 per tonne to $150 per tonne, wouldn’t even seem unreasonable if that’s all it was. But it’s often what you can’t take to the dump that ends up littering recreation corridors. Electronic waste like TVs must now be transported to Gibsons while WCB regulations require gypsum board to be inspected by a qualified consultant to ensure the mud contains less than 0.5% asbestos. If not, expect an added premium for disposal elsewhere — unless you dump it in the bush.
To save money, the SCRD closed the Sechelt Landfill on Mondays and Pender Harbour on Tuesdays but that brings a hidden cost. I can tell you from experience that it’s really hard to do the right thing when you have a pick-up load of dirty junk and you arrive at the landfill surprised to find it closed.
So far our local government’s response has been to document illegal dump sites and to encourage volunteers to clean up the mess. The results have been encouraging — 50 people collected nine tonnes of garbage from Port Mellon to Roberts Creek last month. Unfortunately, most, if not all of these efforts have been focused on the lower Sunshine Coast.
Case in point: Of the 200 sites identified in the SCRD’s illegal dump site inventory, McNeill Lake Forest Service Road — in my opinion, ground zero for local dumpers — isn’t even listed.
So, if aspiring to achieve zero waste is progress but dumper’s gonna dump, what’s the solution?
For now, I’d say if you have to dump illegally, do so on the access road to the Pender Harbour landfill. Not only will it simplify the cleanup but our SCRD staff and directors will be able to better measure the effect of future “waste diversion” policies.
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