City of Regina ends compost contractor deal, looks for new site

The Queen City’s quest for a permanent composting facility continues.

On Wednesday, The City of Regina announced that it mutually agreed to terminate its contract with EverGen to build a permanent facility.

EverGen is managing Regina’s temporary composting site at the city’s landfill but will hand over operation to city staff on Feb. 1. Food and yard waste will continue to be composted there until a permanent site is built.

Carolyn Kalim, director of water, waste and environment, said the city is posting new requests for proposals for the project.

“The city and EverGen have been working closely together to get this permanent site built, and we came to the determination that this was the best path forward to achieve those goals,” Kalim told reporters.

“We had challenges with the contract that we initially struck with them in getting a permanent site built, and as we were looking to make changes to the contract to facilitate that – we really felt that we were getting into a place where a full and public, transparent procurement process would be the best way to continue to pursue that.”

Carolyn Kalim, director of water, waste and environment said the city is far from its target goal of diverting 65 per cent of food and waste from the landfill. (Daniel Reech/980 CJME)

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Kalim said one of the major challenges in the process was the RM of Edenwold’s decision in December 2023 to reject EverGen’s proposed location near Pilot Butte.

Although the city continued to work through that, Kalim said this was still the best path forward.

So far, Kalim said the city has processed 20,000 tonnes of food and yard waste since the start of the program.

In December 2023, EverGen expressed concern that the temporary site would run out of space in a year, but Kalim offered a more optimistic outlook.

“The current temporary site is smaller than ideal for our processes, but we anticipate we can continue to receive the volume that we’ve been seeing coming through the site,” she said.

The city said the termination won’t cause any disruption to the green bin program. (980 CJME file photo)

However, Kalim added that a larger site would be ideal, though no timelines can be given until the end of the public procurement process.

“Through the RFP process that we’ll go through, we’ll be looking for the proponent to propose a site and purchase a site, but we are trying to add more flexibility in that location and (more) options to try and mitigate some of the challenges we had with specific locations not being approved,” she said.

Kalim said EverGen has been accommodating in training city staff to operate the temporary location and has negotiated with EverGen to keep some of the machinery and fixed infrastructure for the transition.

She said the city still has a long way to go to reach its target of diverting 65 per cent of residential waste from the landfill.

“We still have a lot of progress to make. Right now, we’re only bringing in the curbside residential service and we would look to expand that into the future to continue to meet those targets,” Kalim said.

980 CJME reached out to EverGen for comment but did not receive word by the time of publication.