A staff report showing the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) has the second-highest tipping fees in B.C. prompted one director at last week’s infrastructure services committee meeting to ask if high fees were causing more illegal dumping.
At $150 per tonne, the SCRD’s tipping fees are second only to the Powell River Regional District, where it costs $205 per tonne to dispose of household waste at the landfill.
For the SCRD, the high fee was linked to it having the third-lowest per capita landfill disposal rate in the province.
“That makes sense. We have to charge more for the tipping fees because we have lower amounts going into the fill,” said Egmont/Pender Harbour director Frank Mauro, who had attended the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities (AVICC) workshop in September that generated the staff report.
But Roberts Creek director Donna Shugar asked if the low per capita disposal rate was due to more waste being diverted from the landfill or to more people dumping their garbage in the bush.
Mauro said no conclusion was drawn at the workshop because numbers are not available for direct comparison.
“But it was assumed that, yes, the higher the tipping fee, the more dumping in the bush,” Mauro said.
Elphinstone director Lorne Lewis, reminding the committee that he had voted against the increase in tipping fees, said illegal dumping was a “common theme” among delegates at a Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference in Vancouver last year and was a nationwide problem.
The issue was also raised at the Roberts Creek election forum on Nov. 6 when candidate Hans Penner said illegal dumping was growing noticeably worse and should be addressed by making the landfill “more user-friendly and less costly.”
The minimum fee required to drive diversion in B.C. is estimated at about $100 per tonne, Mauro noted at the committee meeting.
“If tipping fees are less than $100 per tonne, people will tend to not recycle and will just dump it into the landfill,” he said.
Also reported from the AVICC workshop:
• Tipping fees at U.S. landfills range from $25 to $75 per tonne.
• Several regional districts in B.C. are considering illegal dumping bylaws.
• Some tipping fees are being evaluated on a volume basis to account for landfill airspace costs.
• Comox-Strathcona is considering incineration as a waste management option.
• Siting new landfills may be “nearly impossible” in the future.
