The City of Edmonton is looking into more cost-effective options for organics processing, six years after its current facility was built.
A report presented Tuesday to the city’s utility committee found the facility that currently processes organics at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre is not financially or operationally viable in the long term.
The High Solids Anaerobic Digestion Facility (HSADF) opened in 2018, costing taxpayers about $45 million.
The report says the facility’s current processing cost is roughly four to eight times higher than other methods.
“I’m starting to get frustrated,” said Coun. Tim Cartmell, who chairs the utility committee.
“We’ve spent a lot of money down there and I’m not sure I want to trust our administration to spend more money.”
By 2027, the city expects it will process an estimated 121,000 tonnes of organic material annually, due to the three-stream apartment and condominium collection rollout, and Edmonton’s population growth.
The city is exploring new options to meet that demand. That includes potentially building a new outdoor composting site and repurposing parts of the current facility.
Administration says that would save about $75 million in program costs over a 20-year period.
“Composting is an absolutely important part of the waste diversion strategy and what administration is proposing is very reasonable,” Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said.
Cartmell is concerned there isn’t enough information to prove that the city will recover the costs.
“We talk about that it’s going to be better on a net value basis to build this at the waste management facility than to do other things, but there’s no numbers,” Cartmell said.
“There’s a net-present value number, but there’s no capital cost number, there’s no operating number, there’s no analysis on the system.”
The city report said the HSADF was commissioned, designed and built before the adoption of the current 25-year waste strategy, which established new standards for waste reduction and
at-home waste sorting, reducing the need for specialized processing facilities.
Some assumptions made in the original HSADF business case, including revenue generation through the sale of clean electricity back to the grid and selling capacity to the private sector, are no longer economical under updated provincial regulations, the report added.
“Council of the day made the decision based on the best info that was available and some of that facility will continue to function and play an important role as part of diversion,” Sohi said.
No decision has been made on the facility’s future.
The utility committee did vote in favour of having an outside company process some apartment and condo organics.
Administration says that will give the city time to determine any transition.
Cartmell hopes any future plans will have more details.
“There’s not nearly enough info and it’s getting frustrating,” Cartmell said.