Recycling in Greater Vancouver has reduced the volume of waste going to the landfill by more than 50% in five years. The City of Vancouver makes a profit off of its recycling program, extracts methane from its landfill, burns it for electricity that is sold to the grid, and pipes the CO2 and waste heat to a nearby industrial-scale green house complex that grows tomatoes and other kinds of produce year-round. These initiatives have dramatically reduced the operational costs of waste management and extended the life of the City landfill by 40 years. The Greater Vancouver Regional District (metro gov't) has a Zero Waste program gretting under way that intends to end traditional garbage disposal in a decade. This is partly out of necessity because the regional dump (already 100+ km away) is full and the next closest one is hundreds of kilometres further. It is more cost efficient for the region to massively scale up recycling, composting, etc., than to buy and operate a new dump that far away.
The City of Vancouver is also developing its EcoDensity urban planning initiative. The basic principle of EcoDensity is to scale up the volume and variety of housing types available in the City and to deeply integrate sustainability into the City's path of growth. Vancouver is putting many of the core ideas of EcoDensity into practice in the Southeast False Creek neighbourhood. The initial phase of this new brownfield neighbourhood will serve as the Olympic Village for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. The eventual build-out will be on the order of 10,000 dwellings. The Olympic Village, ~1,000 dwellings, will be a minimum of LEED Gold, the community centre will be LEED Platinum, and a senior's housing building will be Net-Zero, meaning an equal amount of electicity and water will be returned to the grid than is taken from it over the course of a year. The entire neighbourhood will be a neighbourhood energy utility that siphons latent heat off of the sewers. All buildings must have at least 50% of their site be green space, combined with zero-lot-line guidelines, the architects have no choice but to incorporate extensive intensive green roofs. Every building must have viable opportunities for urban agriculture, storm water retention cisterns and landscaping, and irrigation water cannot be drawn from potable sources.
Ecodensity:
http://www.vancouver-ecodensity.ca/
Southeast False Creek:
http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/commsvcs/southeast/
Other things include the City's full support for regional mass transit infrastructure construction. A 19km automated light metro, the Canada Line, is currently under construction linking downtown Vancouver to the international airport and the City of Richmond with service throughout the corridor. Translink, the regional transportation, both roads and transit, body is in the process of replacing all the electric trolley buses that operate in Vancouver. To date about a third of the eventual 227 new electric trolley buses have been delivered. Translink is also expanding the bus fleet at a rate of about 5% a year, coupled with massive fleet replacement, bringing annual procurement to about 10-12% of the overall fleet. Included are natural gas buses and community shuttle minibuses. A 11km light rail line is also planned for the northeast part of the region, and construction will begin in the next 12 months for a 2011/12 completion.
Canada Line:
www.canadaline.ca
Translink:
www.translink.bc.ca
The City of Vancouver has mandated that all of its future civic buildings will be a minimum of LEED Gold. The City's Tall Building Guideline compells applicants to prove their proposed building's sustainability credentials else they be denied. To date this has yieled a glut of ground-source heat pump-equipped proposals, regenerative elevators, solar hotwater systems, passive solar design, etc...