Waste to Energy creates more problems

Writer criticizes Metro Vancouver for leaving a trail of solid and vaporized garbage in their wake.

Dear Editor

Metro Vancouver politicians are insisting that burning our waste is okay as long as you do it to create energy. This is actually a simple solution for them, they can justify polluting the Fraser Valley airshed with toxic chemicals, and creating eternal wasteland at Ashcroft in the drainage of the lower Thompson, and solving the great trash problem of the GVRD population.

They do this because they are not interested about our air quality in Hope and Chilliwack. They don’t see the eternal wasteland they’ve created in Cache Creek and Ashcroft. They don’t care that their solutions only add to the real problem of creating waste that’s not reusable or recyclable and mask it under the pretext of creating green energy. Their only concern is where the masses are voting and appeasing it, and that happens to be the lower mainland.

So to even further make their case, they dream up their own energy price based on a dollar figure that justifies a profitable operation based on a price that is two and half times the norm. They do this so they can fool us into thinking that they are taking care of two problems (waste and energy) at once, but in reality, they are creating three (air pollution, ground water leeching, and wasteland), all in order to get reelected and keep their fat salaries, and it’s all based on an unreal hypothetical situation. Now Hydro has come out and said that these projects do not qualify as clean energy producers, so now the price goes unsustainable, so if they go ahead, they’ll be subsidized by the taxpayer.

In the meantime, we all get to breathe carcinogens that blow east. If that isn’t bad enough, they also turned once pristine country into eternal wastelands, with the Cache Creek Landfill.

We should all stand with Mayor Sharon Gaetz and the Fraser Valley Regional District and oppose this ridiculous system of creating product that’s not reusable or recyclable, but instead turned into poison on the concept of creating energy by burning garbage.

Art Green

Hope

Ashcroft Cache Creek Journal