Stinky Richmond compost centre has residents plugging their nose

Metro Vancouver has received over 500 complaints in the last month about a stinky compost centre in Richmond, which residents say can be smelled across the city.

The Richmond-based Harvest Power is a composting facility that accepts 200,000 tons of green and food waste a year. The waste has been causing a rotten smell and it’s getting worse.

“It’s a hard smell to describe, but it can be anywhere, basically all over Richmond,” said one resident.

Ray Robb with Metro Vancouver Environmental and Enforcement Services says complaints are coming in daily, and so they have been visiting the site on a weekly basis.

Harvest Power says they are working on the problem after being unable to deal with an increase and backlog of food waste deliveries. They were also waiting for their air quality management permit to be renewed by Metro Vancouver.

“We’ve eliminated some of the stinkiest materials, which will help,” said Stephen Bruyneel from Harvest Power.

“We’re pretreating some of the other materials that go into the energy digester that produces electricity, reducing the size of the piles that we have out there. All of those are immediate actions and people should be able to see the benefits or decreases in odours within weeks to a month or so.”

But Richmond City Council’s patience is waning. Mayor Malcom Brodie says that if the smell doesn’t go away soon, they’ll be looking to temporarily shut the site down.

“Starting in January, if there is an odour for more than 10 minutes on four consecutive days, Harvest Power would be stopped from introducing any further product into their plant, and we think that by basically shutting them down even temporarily is going to affect them dramatically,” said Brodie.

The company has a couple of years to fix the odour issue, and fulfill 46 pages of requirements. Their permit will expire in 2020.