A new company will take operational control over a Metro Vancouver incinerator that burns nearly a quarter of the region’s garbage and could soon heat up to 50,000 homes.
This month, the Canadian subsidiary of the Paris-based company Veolia began a five-year, $245-million contract to operate and maintain the south Burnaby waste-to-energy facility. The company operates more than over 60 waste-to-energy plants around the world, mostly in Europe and Asia.
Metro Vancouver is currently developing a district energy system that would raise the amount of energy the facility can recover to provide heat and hot water to 50,000 homes, up from the 16,000 homes it currently provides electricity to across Vancouver in Burnaby.
First, however, the company is working with the regional government to prioritize basic maintenance work at the facility. Capital spending plans would likely target improving efficiency — not improving environmental performance, said Veolia Canada’s manager of business development Wesley Muir.
“We’re going to be doing the same as the previous operator,” he said.
Critics slam incinerator's 'dirty electricity'
The Burnaby incinerator has faced several waves of opposition since it was first opened in 1988. Sue Maxwell, the head of Zero Waste B.C., has been lobbying Metro Vancouver to shutter the plant in favour of policies that would instead focus on eliminating garbage at the source.
She pointed to 100 tonnes of sulphur dioxide and 90 tonnes of hydrochloric acid that the facility released into the air in 2023. Maxwell, as well as other groups who have raised concerns over the facility’s impacts on the environment and human health, have also raised concerns that Metro Vancouver does not monitor the release of dioxins and furans to the same standard as many jurisdictions in the U.S. and European Union do.
A number of groups opposing the incinerator say there are 7,600 people living within two kilometres of the incinerator — not including commuting workers. Air pollution from the facility not only affects local residents and employees but also extends to downwind communities in the Fraser Valley.
Tim Takaro, a medical doctor and researcher in occupational and environmental health at Simon Fraser University, said in a statement last month that there are no safe levels of dioxins as they accumulate in humans and the environment.
“The Burnaby incinerator adds these toxins to our environment and we need to shut it down,” said Takaro, who is also associated with the B.C. chapter of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
In December 2024, Metro Vancouver applied to the province to amend an operating certificate that would allow it to continue emitting more sulphur dioxide and hydrochloric acid than B.C. government guidelines usually allow.
With an already “very clean grid” in B.C., she said the region does not need the “dirty electricity” that comes with burning garbage — especially, that which could contain mercury, cadmium and lead.
“It’s not designed as a fuel. It’s a mistake to burn it,” said Maxwell. “They should be consulting with the public to see are we comfortable with this in our midst.”
Maxwell also raised concerns over the ongoing cost to maintain the aging facility. A 2024 report from Zero Waste B.C. found incineration was the most expensive way to dispose of garbage.
Now more than 35 years old, Maxwell said the Metro Vancouver incinerator is beyond the three-decade life-span when California and Oregon chose to shutter all of their incinerators.
“It’s expensive to maintain,” she said. “They’re kind of replacing things piece by piece.”
Metro already pushing to reduce garbage at source
Paul Henderson, Metro Vancouver’s general manager of solid waste services, said the region is “completely aligned” with Maxwell’s group when it comes to targeting garbage at its source.
According to Zero Waste B.C.'s own calculations, Metro Vancouver residents reduced the amount of garbage they produced every year by about 172 kilograms per person between 2010 and 2020 — equivalent to 476,000 tonnes or the weight of about four CN Towers.
Henderson said Metro Vancouver’s current 65 per cent recycling rate leads North America and is twice the Canadian average. To improve those numbers, he said the regional body is “open to all ideas” as it drafts a new plan on how to deal with its garbage, recyclables and compost.
“It's the whole purpose of the development of a new solid waste management plan. What more can we do?” he said.
Metro Vancouver planners see the Burnaby incinerator as an important part of that plan.
Metro says incinerator is region's safest, cheapest option for excess garbage
The regional government has done thorough dispersion modelling of pollutants from the facility, and multiple years of monitoring have shown pollutant concentrations well below provincial limits, according to Henderson.
When it comes to age, he said proper maintenance has allowed many European incinerators to successfully operate for a century.
Moreover, he said, there are few options as cost effective as the Burnaby facility.
Of the roughly million tonnes of garbage produced across Metro Vancouver every year, about 240,000 tonnes — about a quarter — is burned.
Disposing of garbage at the Vancouver landfill costs slightly more than the incinerator ($129 per tonne versus $120 per tonne). But the amount of garbage that can be diverted there is at its regulated limit.
Another 140,000 tonnes of garbage is currently trucked to landfills in Cache Creek, Oregon and Washington state at a current average cost of $249 per tonne.
And while capital costs to upgrade the incinerator are expected to raise the price of burning garbage by 20 per cent, that’s still much cheaper than shipping the garbage to far-away landfills.
“The reality is, if the waste-to-energy facility shut down, the only option would be to ship that garbage to these remote landfills, which is nearly twice as expensive,” said Henderson.
Then there's the question of tariffs. So far, Henderson said contractors have informed Metro Vancouver that excess garbage sent to the U.S. would not be subject to surcharges under future tariffs.
“We've also been told that recyclable materials being shipped into the United States would be subject to tariffs,” he said. “There’s lots of uncertainty.”
“That's why we have such a robust system,” he added, “to be able to respond to things that change, that are effectively impossible to predict.”
