The staff at the Burns Lake landfill politely asked their bosses to stop a pilot project dealing with the piles of metal that accumulate there.
The directors of the Regional District of Bulkley Nechako (RDBN) politely refused, but only after an hour of conversation circled the table. It was not an argument, but a thorough examination of what went wrong in the first place.
The project might better have been called a study. It stemmed back to when metal piles at landfills became a free-for-all with people picking through them looking for everything from bits of iron for home welding projects, grabbing the broken bike or lawn mower for personal repairs, but also extending to people who were ransacking the piles for commodity metal they could melt down or bale up themselves to sell to scrapyards.
Telkwa director Stoney Stoltenberg recounted physical altercations and staff being assaulted, at the landfill in his area, but the story was similar everywhere, which led to the complete ban on the public being able to access the metals. That was 2017.
The plan with the pilot project, in summary, was to allow small amounts of metal claiming by the public at the Burns Lake Transfer Station to see how different approaches might work region-wide.
In a report to RDBN directors by Janette Derksen, waste diversion supervisor, the program was deemed unworkable. There weren’t the fistfights over valuable metals, but people were unsafely climbing on metal piles to get what they were after, and there were other impediments.
It was taking an inordinate amount of staff time, it greatly impinged on the available workspace, and the dirt ground was too weak to handle the industrial scale of moving the metals.
Also, the contractor that bales the metal and hauls it away to the Lower Mainland (where they sort it all into its various values and re-sell it on the commodities or used metal markets) was set pay an estimated $410,000 for 2023. They would pay much less if they knew it had already been picked over to get the good stuff.
Complicating matters was the people who didn’t collect metal for their own projects, but instead collected it and took it to a scrapyard to sell for their own profit.
RDBN heard the reasoning and came to a different conclusion.
“I won’t be supporting this motion (to halt the pilot project) for several reasons,” said Burns Lake Rural director Michael Riis-Christianson, who led the dialogue. “The first one is, we committed to this last year, and of all the calls I get regarding our environmental services operations in this area, the question of salvage re-use at the Burns Lake Landfill is by far the biggest. We told people we were going to do this. I told people who called me that we were going to do this. Backtracking at this point is going to look very badly for our organization.
“I’m also not supporting it because re-use on a small scale is actually the right thing to do for the environment. Re-use is better than recycle and it’s higher on the waste management framework,” meaning that all the hauling and processing of the metal piles caused more emissions than if local people were able to use the metal within the region.
Riis-Christianson was happy with the report, however, despite his vehement opposition to the final suggestion, because it illuminated what had to be done to make it successful.
“The point of the pilot project was to observe the problems in action, take note of the issues, and solve the problems. The report has completed some of that work, except the board now has to implement solutions,” he said.
He got a full round of agreement from the other RDBN directors. The conversation hinged on what to do about it. Francois Ootsa Rural director Clint Lambert said he was someone who definitely needed scrap steel, and was emblematic of people who could make good local use of a discard pile. The pathway to achieving that was not one that pleased him, however.
“I hate hiring more staff, because that’s a killer on taxes, but we need to be able to sort the steel, because these companies come up here and take good angle-iron, good channel-iron, good I-beam, they take it away, don’t sort it, and just sell it as used steel. They turn it around and ship it all the way back up to us and sell it as used steel. As a Regional District, why are we not doing that?,” he asked.
The fact companies would bid in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to scoop it all up in one lump, truck it away, sort it, and then sell it back into the marketplace again was evidence enough that profit could be made from doing that locally, the conversation theorized, which would more than offset the loss of money paid by the scrap company and the hiring of additional staff. Burns Lake mayor Henry Wiebe wondered out loud if the Regional District and/or a partner could become that sorter and vendor, with local people getting first chance at the materials and the taxpayer getting the financial reward.
The general idea would be that a bike or law mower in need of repair, or as spare parts, would be available to the public for free, but more valuable material would be for sale at discounted prices. All transactions would be supervised by landfill staff to ward off the problems identified in the report.
“If we prioritize salvage, but don’t provide the additional resources, I don’t see that as an equation that’s going to work out,” said Smithers mayor Gladys Atrill. “What are the resources necessary to make things safe? And functional for staff? If we’re not willing to provide the resources, then I don’t think it’s going to work.”
Granisle mayor Linda McGuire added to that thought.
“This pilot project wasn’t completely implemented, per the motion of this board last year. And Janette clarified that yeah, we didn’t do everything that the motion said, last year. I’m agreement with mayor Attrill that we have to do our due diligence here, and I would be in favour of an extension of the pilot project, just to get more information.”
The room well understood that in order to achieve the original goal of the pilot project, more staff would be needed, perhaps more infrastructure and equipment (maybe even another site dedicated to metal recycling, and then the question arises could even more commodities like wood or concrete also be processed for a profit?). The suggestion to end the pilot project was defeated and a new motion to re-invigorate the pilot project was passed.
This new attempt would begin in December and run through 2024, according to the motion made. It would also commence after Derksen was able to craft some options that were realistic, based on the knowledge gained from the previous year.