Dear editor,
I can only assume that the members of the Comox Strathcona Waste Management board have never heard of climate change, or if they have, they do not believe it is caused by fossil fuel emissions.
Otherwise, how could they possibly have approved a plan to truck all the solid waste from Campbell River down to the Comox Valley for disposal?
The Arctic ice is melting, coastal cities are making plans to protect their shorelines from rising waters, drought is causing major crop losses around the world, and other effects of global climate change are becoming more obvious every day. Oil is selling at around $100 a barrel, and as fossil fuels become more difficult to find and extract the price will continue to rise.
Yet in spite of all this, the waste management board has made a decision that is going to seriously increase fossil fuel use by garbage trucks.
The board says they have a plan to reduce solid waste by 70 per cent, and that their goal is zero waste, and yet they won’t even let people remove perfectly usable objects from the landfill. So I find it hard to believe that they are serious about that.
And they say they will have a food composting plan in the near future. Well, that’s ridiculous, too, because with the proper education, composting can easily be done right at home. Our dinner scraps don’t need to be hauled around in yet more fossil fuel-powered vehicles to centralized composting facilities.
This is aside from the fact that residents of Cumberland, the community to which the solid waste is going to be delivered, are strongly opposed to this plan.
Cumberland already receives all the solid waste from the Comox Valley, and its roads are showing the effects of this traffic. The trucks travel right through a residential area to get to the landfill, so now the residents will be impacted even more by noise and pollution.
What kind of democracy do we have when a community can just be told that it is going to become a regional disposal site for solid waste, and the people who live there have no say in the matter?
Sometimes I don’t have much hope for the human race when members of my species can make decisions like this one.
Ellen Rainwalker,
Cumberland