Lulu Island plant to be Olympic showcase for sewage biogas power
For goodness sake we don’t need any more Olympic showcases! Do you seriously think anyone coming here for the speedskating is going to want to look at the Lulu Island Sewage Plant?
We should be doing this anyway - should have done it years ago. When I worked for the GLC twenty years ago all the sewage works were fitted with biogas digesters - and we sold power to the grid from the garbage incinerators too. We (The BC Enegry Aware Committee) made a big song and dance a few years ago now about gas capture in the Delta landfill mainly to shame Delta Corporation into giving it third reading! They could hardly turn it down after accepting an award for environmental awareness now could they?
Flaring biogas should be an offence.
I hope that this process will mean that Metro Vancouver stops dumping virtually untreated human waste into the Fraser at long last. Again, thirty years ago treated, dried solids could be bought from GLC sewage works for fertiliser for back gardens!
“ooh, yuck!”
I went to Garry Point in Steveston this afternoon. I had just received some new screw on lens attachments I wanted to try out. There were some people swimming but they objected when I pointed my camera at them. So I did not take the shot but walked over to talk to them.
Had they seen the signs? I asked
“No” they said. So I explained that they were two miles downstream of the Lulu Island Sewage works which pumps out human waste which is only “screened” not treated. I said I was surprised to see anyone swimming there, as I certainly wouldn’t, given the very high fecal coliform counts in the area. That was why I was going to take a picture. I had hoped that my new wide angle lens would be able to capture both them and the sign. Sadly it wouldn’t - the angle was wrong. But I had not taken a picture of them and I was sorry if I had spoiled their day.
Then I looked behind them, where we were standing talking. They hadn’t seen this sign either.
As I walked back to the concession stand a mother and her children came into step with me. She had heard what I had said. She thought the signs warned about the current. So I explained why it concerns me to see people swimming around in diluted but untreated human waste. She thought that if it had said “human waste” on the sign people might have taken more notice.
Her little boy asked me if I meant that they had been swimming in pooh, and I said “Yes”
His reply is the headline
