Agricultural Land Reserve blocks methane reduction in Penticton

Methane from a landfill in Texas, Carbon Mapper

This article was first published in Castanet May 5, 2026 

When you send your organics (yard waste and food scraps) to the landfill, you might imagine it is turning into dirt. That is not happening. The trash in the landfill is buried so deep it doesn’t have access to the air. When organics decompose without oxygen, they don’t produce dirt, they produce methane.

Methane is a serious problem and a powerful opportunity. It's a problem because methane is an extremely strong greenhouse gas, about 30 times stronger than carbon dioxide. Methane is an opportunity because it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for very long. It has a half-life of about 10 years, compared to hundreds of thousands of years for carbon dioxide.

About 30% of today’s warming is caused by methane. If we can aggressively reduce the amount of methane we release, we could significantly slow global warming.

The material that has been deposited since 1975 in the Campbell Mountain landfill in Penticton is releasing methane. Because it's not a very big landfill and because conditions are so dry in the Okanagan, Campbell Mountain is not a good site for methane capture. Instead, in 2023, B.C. approved using a biocover, which absorbs about 70% of the methane. (The biocover contains waste-water treatment products which are odor-free, germ-free and do not attract pests. Read more about the Teaspoon Energy project here.)

Penticton's 2021 Climate Action Goals

To prevent methane emission in the future, organics need to be diverted from the landfill to a location where they can decompose (methane-free) into dirt. Commercial composting is more inclusive than backyard compost. It can include sticks a few inches in diameter, meat, bones, citrus, dairy and paper contaminated by food. Diverting organics to a composting facility would also extend the life of the Campbell Mountain landfill, which is going to be extremely expensive to replace when it is full.

The Regional District of Okanagan Similkameen spent seven years looking for a site for a compost facility. In 2020, an 80-acre property came on the market at 1313 Greyback Mountain Road, near the Campbell Mountain Landfill and RDOS snapped it up. The property is 80 acres, 55 acres of which is inside the Agricultural Land Reserve and 25 acres are outside of the ALR.

The ALR was established in B.C. in 1973 and prohibits development on farmland. In North America, the most fertile farmland is buried underneath cities. Historically settlers chose to move to regions with the best farmland, more people joined them, towns turned into cities and suddenly all the best land was under six inches of pavement.

There is also a tax-burden which falls on farmers. Everyone pays property taxes based on what their land is worth. Farmers, with low profit margins, can wind up paying high taxes because their land would be worth a lot of money if it was developed into condos. However, once the ALR excludes development, the land appreciates more slowly and property taxes are lower. (In B.C. there are also specific tax breaks tied to ALR designation).

Studies in B.C. and Ontario show the ALR-type restrictions are effective at slowing farmland loss. ALR policies are also good for climate change. Farmland holds more carbon than suburban developments. The ALR forces communities to “build up” rather than “build out,” which results in more energy-efficient communities which are also more walkable and can be better served by public transit.

Compost is considered a “non-farm industrial use”. The RDOS can operate a small-scale compost facility on the non-ALR portion of the land but to fully scale up compost for the community and include processing for biosolids, it needs the Agricultural Land Commission to release some of the remaining 55 acres from the ALR. The commission has turned down both the RDOS’s initial request and a subsequent appeal.

Penticton’s major sources of carbon emissions are transportation, energy-efficiency in buildings and methane from organics in the landfill. Over a period of decades, the ALR will continue to have a positive impact on transportation and energy-efficiency but the ALC is blocking methane-reduction, which is a major contributor today in Penticton to climate change.

Penticton is really caught between a rock and a hard place. 

 

Articles and cartoons on Teaspoon Energy by Kristy Dyer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. This column may be republished free of charge under Creative Commons Attribution with no edits except for length. Editors may request localization for their region. Images and photos belong to the original artists.