Edmonton city council tackles garbage

Edmonton City Council heard Wednesday that after four years, organic waste sorting has been a success for the city, but it comes as a new report shows the city is losing money on a 6-year-old organic waste processing facility east of Edmonton.

Wednesday councillors heard that organic waste separation — the green and black carts — have been reaching city targets for diverting waste from the landfill. But, council also heard the city’s new $45 million organic waste processing facility isn’t financially viable.

Councillor Andrew Knack blames a previous administration, telling CityNews it’s not this current council’s fault.

“It should not be at the feet of this current group of councillors. In fact, it should be set, again, as a recognition that we’ve been making changes because of the failures that we’ve seen in the past. Because the city has actually not been world leading when we said we were world-leading,” said Knack.

The city taxpayer-built organic process waste facility was built in 2018, council hearing that the facility has cost, more than $55 million.

In 2019, the City adopted a new 25-year waste strategy, after an audit found the City wasn’t as good at collecting trash as they said they were.

“That waste management strategy talked about a number of changes that need to be made so we an actually see better performance, and really, meet the performance we said we were always meeting. But not meeting in the first place, one of those changes was moving to the curbside waste management system.”