Edmonton falls short of waste diversion and biofuel goals

In Canada, a garbage audit shows that the city of Edmonton is not meeting its waste diversion goals, partially due to Enerkem’s biofuels project not running at full capacity. Enerkem turns Edmonton’s municipal solid waste into methanol and ethanol. The audit report also shows that the amount of waste diverted from the landfill has declined over the past five years instead of increasing as they had forecasted. In 2013, 49.5% of residential and commercial garbage went to the center for processing, but it dropped to 35.7% by 2016.

Doug Jones, the city’s deputy manager of operations, told CBC that he wasn’t surprised about the audit results and that the city really needs to update the 20 year old system they have in place. Jones told CBC that the city has accepted all eight of the auditor’s recommendations and the operations branch is scheduled to present its new waste strategy to the city’s utility committee at the end of February.