Industry News

Did Vancouver live up to its green standards?

Vancouver, the laid-back coastal Canadian utopia of half a million, is still the most ‘liveable’ city in the world, according to a new ranking from the Economist Intelligence Unit. The Canadian city topped a ‘livability survey’ of 140 cities, as it did in 2008.

As hosts to the 2010 Winter Olympics last February, the eyes of the world were on the city to see how it lived up to its reputation and its own recent re-branding as ‘Vancouver Green Capital’.

Situated in an exceptional natural environment surrounded by mountains, parks and beaches, this recent accolade reinforces the city’s aspiration to be the world’s standard bearer for urban sustainability and North America’s model for using renewable energy sources, but how much is ‘greenwash’?

Vancouver has an ambitious 100-year plan for clean and green living. The city already leads the world in hydroelectric energy, which currently makes up 90 percent of its power supply. It has also successfully reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to the 1990 levels established at the Kyoto Protocol, with plans to reduce them further by 20 percent. Fossil fuel use will be reduced with city investments in wind, solar, wave and tidal energy systems. Additionally, as part of its energy-efficient plans, Vancouver has taken bold steps towards implementing emerging technologies; Solar-powered trash compactors have sprung up around the city, each the equivalent size to a normal trashcan but able to hold five times as much waste (which puts fewer emissions-spewing garbage trucks on the roads).

The city’s first renewable district heating system powered into action on January 14, 2010. The Neighbourhood Energy Utility (NEU) provide heat and hot water to all buildings in Southeast False Creek, including this year’s Winter Olympic Village, the first time in North America that heat recovered from untreated wastewater is being used as the primary source of energy in an urban area.

Other measures include a zero-emission partnership with both Renault-Nissan Alliance and Mitzubishi to showcase their electric cars and provide power points for ‘filling’ them up, a 50 percent financing scheme for fitting solar power to new houses, stocking the Vancouver Public Library with ebooks and downloadable audio books, implementing energy efficiency overhauls at all City facilities and a sustainable commuting program for employees at City Hall.

All well and good, and arguably made relatively easy to achieve with a city as small, in a country as wealthy and an economy as stable. But beneath the veneer problems persist; the city, pre-games, was $250 million in debt, the metro system is notoriously unreliable, an antiquated sewage system overflows when it rains and you wouldn’t want to swim in or eat anything out of False Creek, the inlet around which the city is built.

Typical of the vision of Vancouver’s charismatic mayor, Gregory Robinson, this presents an opportunity rather than an obstacle; a $30 million power plant that runs on human waste was switched on in January, ahead of its Olympic debut. The energy centre, one of the first in North America to use sewage as fuel, will ‘keep 2,800 athletes and officials warm during the Olympics,’ Robertson said.

The Winter Olympics, which cost an estimated £3 billion to put on, have provided an arena in which the city’s ambition will be tested. Robertson launched a raft of economic strategies that he hoped would sling-shot off the games and have the city well on its way to environmental sustainability by 2020; encouraging green business, creating green jobs, ensuring carbon neutral construction, making existing buildings energy efficient, encouraging alternative transport solutions, promoting access to recreational park space, improving the water and air quality and promoting locally sourced food service with a Buy Local campaign.

However, despite claims to be the ‘greenest Olympics ever’ and PR statements about ‘sustainability’, the games are notoriously expensive and environmentally destructive. Tens of thousands of trees cut down and mountainsides blasted for Olympic venues in the Callaghan Valley (near Whistler) and the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion. In the summer of 2007, a record number of black bears were hit on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, road kill that was linked to Olympic development. Massive amounts of concrete used in construction have also caused millions of salmon to die in the Fraser River, where tons of gravel are being mined. Since winning the 2010 Winter Games in 2003, Vancouver has lost over 850 units of low-income housing and during the same period homelessness has increased from 1,000 to over 2,500, although the streets were conspicuously free of ‘street people’ during the games themselves.

Perhaps most detrimentally to the games’ international image was the lack of snow, at one point threatening to turn the event into a fiasco a week before they opened. When the sea level city, which always has warmer weather than 7000ft-high Whistler, experienced its mildest January on record, contingency plans swung into action; several helicopters and hundreds of trucks brought in snow from up to 100 miles away, ‘snow machines’ churned out enough to cover the runs and snow-hardening chemicals were used, all of which will have had an as yet undisclosed, damaging effect on the environment.

All this might lead the casual observer to detect a degree of complacency, a kind of corporate vanity and socio-political smugness in the PR spiel, but that seems churlish. For those of us who live in ‘proper’ cities, metropolises of multiple millions with all the ostensibly insurmountable problems that sheer weight of numbers entail, Vancouver’s natural beauty, charm, easy going mentality and optimistic outlook sounds positively Arcadian. After all, how much pollution can a few hundred thousand people produce?

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