On the fifth and final day of last week’s Union of BC Municipalities conference in Victoria, the Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development, Peter Fassbender announced that Bowen Island has been awarded a $10,000 grant to be put towards further research on the creation of a local facility to process Bowen’s green waste.
Last spring, the Solid Waste Resource Advisory Committee presented a report on the possibility for such a facility to council.
Local engineer Pete Taggart was chair of this committee, and has worked on this issue since roughly 2011.
“I was part of a committee known as SWARMAC [Solid Waste & Resource Management Advisory Committee] that was charged with making improvements to the way we deal with solid waste on Bowen. The green bin program, started in 2013, came out of that,” says Taggart. “We now divert 70 percent of what we throw away from the landfill, and that is something I think Bowen should be quite proud of. Now though we’ve got a good feel for composting with lots of good data from Bowen waste, figuring out a way to process that on-island is the next logical step.”
The Solid Waste Resource Advisory Committee has explored four different composting technologies that might be feasible on Bowen Island, and proposed a number of possible locations including the recycling depot land and lot 1, beside the gas station.
In their report, they say that Bowen Island produced 430 tonnes of organic waste in 2015, and with population growth, they see that number growing to 700 tonnes. An on-island composting facility, they say, could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent. They also predict that there will be a positive impact on local employment, which would include an increase in market gardening.
“These numbers, and other aspects of our research need to be verified by someone who is an expert in this field,” says Taggart. “We also need to do public outreach and consultation on the issue. That is what we are calling phase two of this project, and we have come up with a cost of $20,000 to do it.”
When these findings were presented to council in June, it was decided that if the committee were successful in obtaining the $10,000 infrastructure grant, the municipality would consider covering the remaining $10,000 for research and outreach.
Taggart says that he has stepped down from the Solid Waste Resource Advisory Committee to make room for someone who might be more oriented towards the public consultation side of this work.
