While work is being delayed on converting the Pender Harbour landfill to a transfer station, work to prepare a resource recovery facility for Area A is moving ahead.
Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) directors heard a staff proposal for a process to follow in the coming weeks at the infrastructure services committee meeting Thursday, April 1.
Dion Whyte, manager of sustainability services for the SCRD, told the committee that consultation with the community and zero-waste experts can begin shortly.
"Essentially, the purpose will be to develop a conceptual plan for the resource recovery facility in Pender Harbour that will be complete enough to give to a design firm and allow them to do the engineering work to prepare for development of the site," he said.
Whyte said one of the first steps should be a planning session of local stakeholders, meeting with members of the solid waste plan monitoring advisory committee (PMAC) and experts on zero-waste issues.
He suggested members of GRIPS recycling and the Area A advisory planning commission as some ideal planning group members.
Once the group's participants have been solicited and vetted, they'll sit down for a two-day planning session to get agreement on some of the details for the facility, including deciding on an ideal location, what materials will be accepted and what will happen with them afterwards, a design and layout for the facility, operating requirements, opportunities for local economic development, costs and funding mechanism and public education.
Area A director Eric Graham made the motion to get staff working on Whyte's proscribed plan.
"I'm pretty excited about it, and I think the people of Area A will be too," he said.
Whyte said he has been able to arrange for Brock McDonald, executive director of the Recycling Council of British Columbia (RCBC), to facilitate the meetings, which will likely take place in June.
Beyond that, Whyte said the SCRD had been invited to send delegates from the board, PMAC and solid waste management plan update working group for a question and answer session with a panel of experts at RCBC's annual zero-waste conference in May.
Gibsons director Barry Janyk asked Whyte when other areas of the Coast including Sechelt and Gibsons could expect resource recovery centres of their own and what the plan was for funding them.
Whyte said the first draft of the SCRD's solid waste management plan update is nearly complete and he expects it to have recommendations for other resource recovery sites soon. He added that funding for resource recovery facilities is something the Pender Harbour resource recovery planning group will discuss first, and that there are ways to make them self-funding.
