It feels like EcoWaste is back to square one in its plans to build a large-scale recycling facility.
This is how it felt to the landfill’s vice-president of recycling and waste services, Christian Dietrich, as the company figures out how to move forward with plans on its east Richmond site.
After a surprise decision from the province earlier this year to exclude its land from the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) - despite opposition from Richmond city council – Dietrich met with city staff to figure out next steps.
EcoWaste plans to build a large materials recycling facility on the east Richmond site to recycle about 30 per cent more of the waste that’s brought onsite, with a recycling goal 65 per cent.
But in order for its business case to be viable, it needs time and height – a long-enough timeframe so its investment is worth it and a higher height maximum to continue burying those materials that can’t be recycled, Dietrich explained.
Without the latter, EcoWaste will have to start shipping excess demolition waste to places such as Washington State.
The city gave EcoWaste six months to file for rezoning.
Essentially, the landfill would be rezoned from its current agricultural zoning to an agricultural zoning with certain permissions allowing the landfill business to continue operations.
The city indicated it wants a farm plan to revert the land to agricultural once the landfill stops operating, Dietrich said.
EcoWaste created such a plan about 30 years ago, something the Agricultural Land Commission required it to do.
“We haven’t changed that strategy, but the city wants more detail,” Dietrich told the News.
MLA defends exclusion decision
The BCNDP MLA who represents the riding where EcoWaste is located defended the province’s decision to pull the land out of the ALR, saying it “makes absolute sense.”
The decision “has no impact on food-producing land,” said Aman Singh, MLA for Richmond-Queensborough, given the site has been used as a construction and demolition landfill for decades.
Allowing the land out of the ALR means construction companies will have somewhere to deposit their waste, thereby, stopping them from depositing it on viable food-producing land, Singh said.
“This ensures no more dumping on farmland,” Singh said.
And now Ecowaste can plan its material recovery facility, which they say will double their capacity to recycle, reducing the amount of waste that gets buried, Singh added.
Ultimately, however, it was the ALC’s and province’s decision, Singh said, and the government had to look at the issue on a province-wide basis.
Furthermore, Singh questioned whether anyone would want to eat food grown on a former landfill.
“That site holds no soil-based agricultural value,” he said. “There’s no reasonable way to remediate that land.”
Before the exclusion decision, the company was caught in a regulatory bind when the province changed the rules in 2019 and said properties in the ALR could no longer be used as landfills.
At that point, EcoWaste had been operating for almost 50 years, but they had created a plan for the materials recycling facility.
They asked Richmond city council to allow an application to go forward to the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) to pull the land out of the agricultural reserve, but they received a unanimous “no.”
It was a few months later when the province made the announcement that the land was being removed from the ALR.
