Assiniboia welcomes Weyburn Red Wings with open arms during ammonia shutdown
2h ago
Billets were found for all Red Wings players in just four hours.
The start of Regina’s green bin program draws nearer and nearer, but contractor EverGen might not be ready in time for the September launch.
During a town hall held Tuesday evening, the RM of Edenwold decided to delay the decision to approve EverGen’s Discretionary Use Application that would allow for the development of a commercial composting facility.
That has sparked concern for Mateo Ocejo, director of organics with EverGen. Ocejo said that all construction on the site has been halted.
“The more time we have before winter falls to continue construction, the better it is for the facility,” Ocejo said.
“We’re trying to keep this food waste out of the landfill and obviously the (RM’s) council now has to make their decision. The sooner they make their decision, the better it is for everyone.”
During the town hall, Deputy Reeve Stan Capnerhurst said the RM’s council needed time to consider the verbal submissions and review the written ones.
“It is also worth noting that administration is still waiting for additional engineered plans, responses from provincial agencies and provincial approvals such as the Ministry of Environment and the Water Security Agency,” Capnerhurst said Tuesday.
980 CJME reached out to both the Ministry of Environment as well as the Water Security Agency for comment. The ministry didn’t respond before publication, while the WSA said it didn’t have anything to do with the situation.
The proposed facility is about 1.6 kilometres from the town of Pilot Butte. The project is about $10 million to $12 million according to Ocejo.
“I would say no, we’re not going to be ready to collect on Sept. 4,” Ocejo said. “The city is still going to collect the waste but it’s going to have to get shipped somewhere else.”
Ocejo said EverGen has a number of contingencies that are designed for short-term operational issues but not long-term systemic issues like finding a completely new site location.
“EverGen is responsible for the site selection and the setup of the processing facility,” the City of Regina said in an emailed statement.
“The City is working with Evergen to ensure that processing capacity is available with the rollout of the food and yard waste program. The green carts will be picked up starting the week of September 4 as originally planned.”
Concerns over site
Residents of Pilot Butte have raised concerns about issues the proposed site would bring such as increased highway traffic, the attraction of pests and the smell.
They have also brought up concerns about the site’s proximity to the water treatment plant, but Ocejo has remained firm that these risks are much smaller than they’re made out to be.
“This is not something novel or new. It’s very common,” Ocejo said. “It’s just composting food and yard waste, it’s not nuclear waste, it’s not something crazy. This is already done in every major city in Canada, so I don’t know why everyone thinks this is going to contaminate their water. I don’t understand that.”
Ocejo has previously explained the proposed facility would use Gore-Tex covers and would be aerobic instead of anaerobic — which drastically reduces the chance of residents smelling any odour.
“Everyone’s talking about an army of rats that’s going to march to the city; that’s not what happens,” Ocejo said. “Sometimes rats come in the waste, so we have to manage them on-site, and we’ve got ways of doing that. But people are just making this out into a way bigger issue and it needs to be.
“(Composting) has been going on for 40 years in Europe and 20 years in Canada.”
Ocejo said the biggest issue he’s had is with trying to get people to visit an EverGen composting facility so they can see its viability.
He said if people saw how one operated, perhaps their fears would be eased.
“We’ve submitted an aquifer protection plan which includes three downstream and one upstream monitoring well(s) with a whole list of criteria that we’re going to be testing all the time to ensure that there’s no discharge from the facility,” Ocejo said.
Ocejo mentioned similar projects in Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Coquitlam as positive examples of what the facility near Pilot Butte might look like, saying that none of them have drawn odour complaints.
“If there’s a problem, we’ll shut it down,” Ocejo said. “We’re not going to try and keep some kind of eyesore in the community.”
What happens next?
Though construction has halted, Ocejo said EverGen still has equipment it has ordered that is needed for the facility, like shredders and scales.
The City of Regina expects EverGen to honour its end of the bargain, although Ocejo expressed doubts about the viability of some possible alternative plans.
He said existing composting sites in the Regina area are not as complicated or as capital-intensive as EverGen’s proposed building and they’re not well-suited for long-term processing.
“You’d just be moving the problem somewhere else,” he said.
Ocejo said the only other site in Saskatchewan comparable to the proposed facility would be Saskatoon’s — but transporting Regina’s waste there would bring its own issues.
“It can’t just double its capacity overnight,” he said. “It’s obviously very expensive and the City of Regina would be paying the trucking costs and the processing costs to send all their waste to Saskatoon which would be very expensive.”
He also said that more trucking would result in putting more greenhouse gases in the air, which defeats the purpose of composting.
— With files from 980 CJME’s Lisa Schick