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WEDNESDAY May 12, 2010
Inside
Look for the City of Coquitlam Program Guide, inserted in today’s paper.
Your source for local news, sports, weather and entertainment. www.thenownews.com
Wal-Mart pegged as PoCo tenant Jennifer McFee and Maria Rantanen editorial@thenownews.com Wal-Mart could be opening its first store in the Tri-Cities as early as next spring. The City of Port Coquitlam, recently received a development permit application from Onni, naming Wal-Mart as the major tenant for a new largeformat retail building. The proposed location is in the Dominion Triangle, west of the Pitt River Bridge below a future extension of Nicola Avenue and west of a future extension of Fremont Street. Onni project co-ordinator Pierre Laross said the company expects the development to be finished in about a year. Onni is developing about 300,000 square feet of retail space and two towers in Fremont Village. Laura Lee Richard, PoCo’s development services director, said large-format retail land-use properties usually attract businesses like WalMart, Home Depot, Costco or Canadian Tire. While the development application states the tenant is Wal-Mart, in the end, the property owner makes the decision on who to rent to, Richard said. Mayor Greg Moore said, regardless of whether it’s WalMart or another big-box store, the development will bring additional services to the area. “That site was key in developing the rest of the Dominion Triangle because with the development comes added services — bringing roads and water and sewer and all of the utilities out to the Dominion Triangle, which will then allow all of the other property owners to develop as well,” Moore said.
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COLOUR WHEEL: Golden Spike Can-Can Dancers brighten the festival’s May Day Parade float in Port Coquitlam. For more photos, see Page 3.
Naturalists trash waste incineration Garbage diversion included in plan, but residuals are sticking point: mayor Jennifer McFee jmcfee@thenownews.com Trash incineration was a burning issue at Port Coquitlam’s council meeting Monday night. Elaine Golds of the Burke Mountain Naturalists weighed in on Metro Vancouver’s draft solid waste management plan, which seeks ways to deal with the 3.4 million tonnes of garbage and recyclables produced annually by the region’s residents and businesses. The target of the plan is to increase the regional diversion rate to 70 per cent from the current average of 55 per cent. But for the remaining trash, Gold stressed incineration is the wrong way to go. By reducing waste overall and keeping compostables out of the residual waste system, there will be no need for costly incineration plans, she said. “Our main concern with incineration is it would
actually be a threefold increase in greenhouse gas emissions from burning garbage. … We just don’t see that that’s acceptable or sustainable,” Golds said. “This is surely a step in the wrong direction.” These calculations include both biogenic and fossil fuel sources of greenhouse gas emissions, she added. “Mother Nature’s rules are that all carbon dioxide emissions will contribute to global warming, so we have to stop emissions from burning waste,” Golds said. “It’s true we could derive some energy from burning garbage, but in B.C. our electricity is essentially greenhouse gas free. It’s soon going to be completely greenhouse gas free, so it doesn’t make any sense to burn garbage to generate electricity. Burning garbage is worse than burning coal. “And as for heat, we could get some, but we don’t need the heat year round, so a lot of it would be wasted.” Golds also stressed that society needs to support
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the production of more durable goods. “If we go with the waste incinerator, we’re actually enabling the producers who produce shoddy products and creating a solution for them,” she said. “We need to be pushing back against that whole system and going back and having products that last.” Mayor Greg Moore, chair of Metro Vancouver’s waste management committee, said incineration remains a hot topic. “The question seems to boil around what we do with our residuals, although nobody likes anything that we do with our residuals,” Moore said. “We all want to be 80-, 90-, 100-per-cent zero waste so we don’t even need the Vancouver landfill because if we want to protect the environment, that’s frankly one place we should be looking at, sooner than later.” Metro Vancouver is accepting feedback on the draft plan until July 14.
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