Construction company plots massive new landfill near Hope

A private company wants to create a large landfill for construction waste in a rural area outside of Hope. And they say doing so would actually be good for the global environment.

But the scale of the facility is potentially so big that local officials are asking the province to step in and provide guidelines for how it might begin to evaluate the proposal.

East of Hope and just west of the small community of Sunshine Valley, a gravel road leaves Highway 3 and climbs into the surrounding mountains. Although its destination can’t be seen by the average traveller, the road goes to a gravel quarry operated by a Surrey-based business called B&B Contracting.

That company now wants to do more on the site than just remove gravel. It wants to dump up to a quarter-million tonnes of construction waste each year for approximately 40 years. To put that in context, Chilliwack’s Bailey Landfill accepts nearly 85,000 tonnes of waste annually. And officials estimate that across the entire region, around 230,000 tonnes of solid waste is disposed of each year.

The figures suggest the proposed facility—which the applicants are calling the “Hope Resource Recovery Park”—could be triple the size of the Bailey Landfill.

The company formed to lead the project, called Hope Environmental Limited Partnership (HELP), says the facility wouldn’t be open to the public. Instead it would provide a final home for demolition, land-clearing, and construction (DLC) waste. HELP says the site is needed in part because there are few local destinations for such material after the closures of several similar DLC landfills on First Nations land throughout the Fraser Valley.

In its detailed proposal for the facility, the company calls the current waste situation a “crisis” and warns that “if the construction industry is not able to dispose of its waste, this major vibrant and growing industry will be materially constricted and constrained.”

And despite the negative connotations associated with any new landfill, B&B Contracting and the company it has created to manage the project say the dump would actually be an environmentally friendly solution to a problem that already exists.

The company says the waste trucked to the site will be composed of “inert residuals”: trash free of “practicably recyclable” material. The facility would accept asbestos, the company’s proposal says. They write that trucks will haul gravel from the site and return with processed construction waste. That “backhaul” process, with trucks carrying material in each direction, rather than travelling empty half the time, will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the company says. They also say keeping the material in the region is more environmentally beneficial than shipping it far away. Currently, the company says waste is being trucked to central British Columbia, Washington State, and even Oregon.

Material would also be subject to the Fraser Valley Regional District’s $3-per-tonne waste levy, which could result in annual revenue of up to $750,000.

Whether it fits with larger waste plans for the Fraser Valley is another matter altogether.

Although the would-be operator of the facility says the site fits into the FVRDt’s official Solid Waste Management Plan and only needs a simple permit to start operating, local officials are much less certain.

They say that the facility wasn’t previously considered in the region’s regional waste plan and, because of that, requires much more scrutiny. Staff want to ask the province to suggest potential changes to the plan and anything else needed before they even start evaluating whether the facility should be allowed to proceed.

FVRD staff also want to study the “current disposal capacity and flow dynamics” of construction waste in the region.

The regional district’s board of directors will consider the matter at a Thursday meeting. But whether the proposal ends up laying the groundwork for a new landfill or is itself destined for a waste bin may not be known until staff and provincial officials get a chance to consider the matter.