This is the month it becomes officially illegal to put food scraps into the landfill.

That’s one of many elements in Metro Vancouver’s Zero Waste Challenge of diverting 70% of our “waste” in 2015 out of costly, leaching, methane-leaking landfills and the Burnaby incinerator and into cleaner, smarter, more productive uses. It’s a policy that’s been widely embraced and pretty successful, with 58% of our waste now being diverted, en route to an ultimate goal of 80% diversion by 2020.

The zero-waste strategy aims to make less waste, recycle everything possible, recover energy (incinerate) from what’s left and “manage the residuals.”

The plan requires us to manage as much of our waste as possible in the Lower Mainland, while protecting our air, land and water.

January is also the month when Surrey-Panorama MLA Marvin Hunt, a leader in initiating the Zero Waste Challenge when he was on the Metro Vancouver board, reports back to the province on the high-stakes battle between Metro Vancouver and certain waste companies over how much authority Metro Vancouver needs to achieve 70% diversion. Those powers were proposed in Bylaw 280, passed in 2013 by the Metro Vancouver board. It would give the region control over all regional waste treatment facilities, so it can stop the growing volumes of Metro Vancouver garbage that are being trucked into Abbotsford, Chilliwack and southern Washington state.

The region’s big private waste haulers, especially Belkorp (the Cache Creek landfill operator), BFI Canada/Progressive Waste, which operates a transfer station just outside Metro Vancouver in Abbotsford, and investors in Northwest Waste Solutions and Belkorp’s proposed mixed-waste-material recovery facilities (MRFs) in south Vancouver and Coquitlam that would compete with a new incinerator, have won the heart of Environment Minister Mary Polak. They’ve called the bylaw “a police state around waste” that would prevent them from taking waste where it can be most affordably processed.

Her baffling refusal to approve Bylaw 280, fulfilling a plan already approved by the province, has enraged the elected and staff officials at Metro Vancouver.

Those opponents don’t include 11 Recycling First recycling companies who have invested $135 million in the past five years on infrastructure that does a better job of sorting recyclables than MRFs.

Bylaw 280 unfortunately fails to clearly distinguish between controlling all the waste in the region and deciding to build another incinerator. That has enabled the private operators to fan the embers of resentment over a new incinerator in BC Liberal-held ridings outside Metro Vancouver.

“It’s all about building a new incinerator no one needs or wants,” insists MRF proponent Ralph McRae.

Bylaw 280 isn’t about a new incinerator, but it is a precursor to a new, proposed incinerator.

In fact, it simply isn’t possible to measure progress toward achieving 80% diversion if haulers can take waste wherever they want, regardless of what’s in it. That’s what’s happening now.

Metro Vancouver estimates the volume of regional waste, some including now-banned organics, being shipped south through Abbotsford has doubled in the last two years – to 100,000 tonnes, about 20% of the region’s commercial waste.

It’s true that Metro Vancouver’s plan to gradually raise tipping fees for commercial haulers at the regional landfill will increase landfill dumping costs, but that’s also an incentive to divert to cheaper recycling. Those fees also finance fixed-cost landfill improvements and subsidize residents who bring their own loads to the dump. And the MRF that could supposedly do it all more simply and cheaper is most likely going to produce compost of such a low quality that it will end up being shipped to Belkorp’s Cache Creek landfill, which Metro Van otherwise plans to phase out in 2016.

Marvin Hunt should give priority to monitoring and achieving the region’s laudable, provincially approved waste diversion goals, not protecting the economic interests of powerful waste companies with well-connected and highly paid lobbyists.

Peter Ladner (pladner@biv.com) is a co-founder of Business in Vancouver.