For years, Montreal has been trucking the food scraps from residents’ brown bins more than 100 kilometres away to facilities in Ontario and Joliette, Que.
Now, at long last, the city has its own composting site for residential waste.
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante officially opened the facility in the borough of Saint-Laurent on Monday.
With the new facility now in operation, roughly 25 per cent of the city’s population will be able to have its organic waste treated locally.
“It’s great because, for the first time, we will be creating compost here that will be used here on our territory,” Plante said at a news conference.
In the past, she said, that food waste had to be taken by truck up to 180 kilometres away, spewing out greenhouse gas emissions in the process.
Soil for residents, fertilizer for farmers
The Saint-Laurent facility will process food and yard waste from the western part of Montreal, as well as some cities in the West Island.
It has an annual processing capacity of 50,000 tonnes of organic matter — the equivalent of 12 Olympic swimming pools.
Veolia president Frédéric Van Heems said the plant is designed to eliminate any stink for nearby residents, which had been a concern when the project was first announced.
“There is no odour,” said the head of the French company behind the project. “All the composting is done in tunnels.”
The resulting product will be made available to residents as top soil, he said, while another part will be sold as fertilizer to nearby farmers.
A second facility is still in the works in Montréal-Est, slated to open next year, which will process the other 75 per cent of food waste.
Delays and cost overruns
Construction of both facilities have been beset by delays and cost overruns, most recently due to a labour dispute involving Veolia and a local contractor.
In 2013, the city had budgeted $237 million for five separate centres across the city, but the project was later scaled back to two centres, at a higher cost.
The Saint-Laurent composting centre, located on Henri-Bourassa Boulevard, was built at a cost of $169 million — a price tag that climbed by roughly $5 million after a labour dispute at the facility.
The cost was divided between federal, provincial and local governments.
A greener option
At the announcement Monday, Plante encouraged residents to take part in composting.
As it stands, roughly 60 per cent of those in buildings with eight or fewer units compost their organic waste. That number drops to about 30 per cent in buildings with nine or more units.
“The people that already do it, continue to do it,” she said. “People that haven’t done it for different reasons, it’s time to start.”
Karel Ménard, executive director of the Quebec Coalition of Ecological Waste Management, said the Saint-Laurent facility is an environmental win, because it will provide rich soil to farmers and, at the same time, reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from organic waste.
“When we compost it, we turn it into a resource in the form of a much-needed amendment to our farmland,” he said.
As it decomposes landfills, food releases large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent in terms of warming than carbon dioxide as it breaks down over 20 years.
Environment Minister Benoit Charrette said roughly 50 per cent of what ends up in landfills in Quebec is compostable.
“It’s a total loss to send these substances into the landfill,” he said. “That’s why a project like this is so important.”