USED GLASS in mid-1988. Burnaby and Port Moouay will join the two North Shore com- munities in the Greater Van- couver Regional District (GVRD) program, designed to help recycle some of the estimated 8,500 ton- nes of glass generated annually from residential areas in the four municipalities. All of the glass is currently be- ing trucked to Jandfiils. GVRD spokesman Bud Elsie said Friday the four i. ; a q F ory ject NORTH VANCOUVER City and District will be among four Lower Mainland municipalities participating in a pilot project for glass recycling that is scheduled to start News Reporter for the Premier Street dump will instead be taken to North Van- couver District’s baling station for transfer to the incinerator, and recyclable material will be taken to the new $9° million resource recovery plant being built in Coquitlam. District of West Vancouver Bos TMT RD PLLECTION SITE SOR ORIEN Photo submitted IGLOO-SHAPED containers tike these will be used in a gluss-recycl- ing pilot project initiated by the GVRD. They wit! be set up at 75 locations, including sites in North Vancouver City and District. municipalities were chosen on the basis of interest shown in glass recycling ‘‘both politically and at the staff level.”’ ‘ Total garbage produced in the three North Shore municipalities “in 1986 was 101,651 tonnes. ‘North Vancouver District Mayor Marilyn Baker said her municipality has been very active in recycling and was one of the first .Lower Mainland com- munities to initiate newspaper recycling. She said, in addition to glass recycling, the district is looking into recycling a host of other ma- terials.‘‘We are prepared to go as far as we can (on recycling).”’ The district’s Premier Street landfill is scheduled to ciose next June. But the closure date will depend on completion of the $75 million GVRD refuse incinerator in Burnaby, which Elsie said could start accepting garbage by March 1988. Refuse that has been destined Weather: Sunday and Monday, sunny with cloudy , periods. Tuesday, mainly cloudy. Highs near 14°C. _ years, social planner Richard Wagner said the municipality has been operating two glass recycling drop-off depots for the past 10 Approximately 11 tonnes of glass are collected at the depots each month. The municipality, Wagner said, would be interested in look- ing at all options of glass and other material recycling. Under the igloo plan, the GVRD’s first recycling proposal, about 75 ‘bottle bank’ locations will be set up at shopping centres and other high-traffic areas in the four communities. DEPOTS Two igloo containers, one for colored and one for clear glass, will be placed at each depot. They will have a capacity of about one tonne each and cost about $750. The GVRD will put out to public tender proposals for supp- ly of the igloo-shaped recycling containers and operation of the igloo system, which has been us- ed successfully in Europe and the United States. Firms will also be invited to submit proposals for curbside glass pick up and a multi- material curbside pick up. The GVRD estimates that half the glass produced by the four communities can be recovered for recycling in the program, and thereby save an estimated $126,000 annually. IGLOO . North Vancouver District (population 66,000) will get 20 ig- Joo depots. Projected glass re- covery rate at 50 per cent will be 950 tonnes per year. In North Vancouver City (population 35,000), 10 glass re- covery stations will be set up with a projected target recovery of 750 tonnes annually. According to GVRD figures, there has been a dramatic in- crease in commercial glass recycl- ing recently. In 1986, 1,500 ton- nes of glass were recycled from commercial sources. The number this year will be closer to 12,000 tonnes. There is an estimated 40,000 torines of container glass tossed into the GVRD waste stream an- nually. Projecting that 25 per cent of total waste glass produced in the ‘four pilot program communities is recycled in the first year, 40 per cent in the second year and 50 per cent recycled in the third year, the GVRD estimates the program will have a revenue shortfall of $55,000 in the first year, will break even in the se- cond year and will have a $40,000 surplus in the third year. RECYCLING International Paper Industries Ltd. provides blue -newspaper recycling bags in all three North Shore municipalities. In North Vancouver City 510 tonnes of newspaper is recycled annually under the blue-bag system; in the district the same blue bag system yields 2,340 ton- nes annually from 19,700 house- holds and various additional bins. The West Vancouver blue bag system, along with three newspa- per recycling depots, helps remove 1,350 tonnes of newspa- per from the waste stream each year. In all 27,000 tonnes of. news- paper are recycled in the GVRD each year. INDEX Business............ 40 Classified Ads........47 Doug Collins......... 9 Comics ..... Editorial Page........ 6 Entertainment Bob Hunter.......... 4 Lifestyles............93 Mailbox... seeee 7 Sports..............37 TV Listings..........45 Travel.............. 91 What's Going Gn.....42 3 - Sunday, October 25, 1987 - North Shore News oo feck FEE : ~ photo by Michaot Bocker TWENTY YEARS of hard work is starting to pay off for West ‘‘an- couver physicist Suso Gygax, a research director at Simon Fraser Univer- sity who is the head of a team studying the behavior of a new type of ce- ramic superconductor. SUPERCONDUCTIVITY W/. Van physicist on technological edge WEST VANCOUVER physicist Suso Gygax has suddenly burst to the forefront of research into superconductivity after toiling for over 20 years in the shadows of higher pro- file scientific inquiry. ‘*‘Superconductivity wasn’t sexy because there weren't big pay- offs,’’ Gygax said in a recent in- terview, ‘‘We did good research so we got average funding. Now the thing has just exploded.” Gygax, a Simon Fraser Universi- ty research director, is currently heading a team of fellow physicists working to understand the proper- ties of a new breed of ceramic superconductor. Superconductivity, first discovered by a Dutch physicist in 1911, is a phenomenon that occurs when metals are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero or 0 degrees Kelvin (-273 C). As metals are cooled to that temperature with liquid helium, they lose all electrical resistance and can consequently carry cur- rents without energy loss. They can also generate extremely powerful magnetic fields. In December 1°85, two physi- cists experimenting with various combinations of oxide compounds for Switzerland’s IBM Zurich Research Laboratory discovered a magic mixture of metallic oxides that showed signs of superconduc- tivity at 35 degrees Kelvin. NEW APPLICATIONS At the higher temperature, liq- uid nitrogen replaces liquid helium as a coolant, Said Gygax: ‘‘Helium costs tike a teal good, expensive bottle of wine. Liquid nitrogen is in com- parison, milk. Liquid nitrogen is plentiful, easily manufactured and is easy to get. Of course it would be better to get something to work at room temperature and that’s what everybody is working on and that’s a part of my job.” Eight physics faculty members are presently prodding and poking at a ceramic compound Gygax and SFU chemists are producing in their subterranean campus Jaboratories. The ceramic is made of yttrium, © BECKER News Reporter barium, copper and oxygen. It superconducts at a comparatively balmy 90 degrees Kelvin. Gygax and company are assess- ing the properties of the material, attempting to mold it into thin films for practical computer ap- plications and searching for a new combination of higher temperature superconducting compounds. The applications for incor- porating the new ceramic super- conductors within the next decade are mind-boggling: magnetic levitating trains, faster, smaller ‘and more powerful computers, nuclear fusion reactors, electric cars and toys. Most applications are expected to reach the commercial market in the coming decade. COMPUTER USE The more practical supercon- ductivity dreams include launching satellites with strong magnetic fields rather than rocket fuel-based technology. The old helium-cooled super- conductors are currently used in hospital CAT-scanners and smaller-scale devices that measure very small magnetic fields in nerves and the brain. Nitrogen-cooled superconductors will play a large role in the medicai field. But Gygax says the most impor- tant short-term applications of the new ceramic superconductors will be in computers. “You can then have a computer which doesn’: dissipate power ex- cept for the switching and you can compact it because the cooling re- quirements are much, much smaller,’’ he said. ‘‘You will be able to make computers the size of a brain which are now the size of a room.”* But before the many dreams become realities, some basic pro-