Canada/The first compost plant officially opens in Montreal
Montreal's first composting plant officially opens its doors on Monday, although it has been running in for several months. Radio-Canada was given access to the state-of-the-art facility, which has been 15 years in the making, and which turns citizens' table scraps into "brown gold" with a thousand virtues.
That's almost 25% of Montreal's population who will see their organic matter processed locally," explains Marie-Andrée Mauger, responsible for ecological transition and the environment at Ville de Montréal.
We'll be able to redistribute [the compost] to Montrealers, the city will be able to use it in its parks and it will be sold for agricultural use," adds the mayor of Verdun.
The brand-new composting center, built by French multinational Veolia at a cost of $169 million, is located on boulevard Henri-Bourassa Ouest in the borough of Saint-Laurent. It serves the boroughs and linked towns of the West Island, with an annual processing capacity of 50,000 tonnes of organic matter, including both food scraps and yard waste.
That's the equivalent of 12 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with apple cores, dead leaves and banana peels.
With this material, the plant will produce up to 20,000 tonnes of Grade A compost each year. With contamination levels below 1%, this brown gold can be safely spread on fields.
Currently, most of Montrealers' residual waste is trucked to Ontario or Joliette, in the Lanaudière region, traveling up to 190 kilometers before being processed. Thanks to this new plant, the distance travelled will drop to six kilometers," enthuses engineer Alexis Caron-Dionne, head of section in the city's environment department.
What about odors? The neighborhood has nothing to fear, he assures us. The plant is completely sealed - a rare feat for this type of facility in Quebec - and equipped with a state-of-the-art ventilation system.
Weeks of work
The composting center operates around the clock, thanks to automated installations. The twenty or so employees who work there are responsible for receiving the dump trucks that criss-cross the western part of the city to collect the contents of the brown bins.
On arrival, these trucks are weighed and then redirected to one of the four large doors in the center designed for this purpose. These doors open onto an enclosed passageway where the second door can only be opened if the first is closed. We really want to keep the air inside the building," explains Alexis Caron-Dionne.
The trucks will then unload the residual materials on the factory floor, where they will be collected and conveyed on a conveyor. The materials are crushed, cleaned of contaminants and blended within very precise parameters.
One of the features of the center is that we can remove small particles of plastic to ensure that the compost will have no restrictions on use," boasts the engineer, although he urges citizens to use cardboard bags to dispose of their table scraps.
The organic matter will then be transferred to concrete tunnels for three weeks, so that it can decompose while being aerated, and lose its putrid smell. Then comes the final stage: maturation, during which the mixture is transferred to another area of the center where it will rest for four weeks.
The result is a potting soil with a certain humidity and a pleasant smell," says engineer Alexis Caron-Dionne. Total duration of an apple core's journey through the walls of the Saint-Laurent center? Eight to nine weeks.
Montrealers shun the brown bin
With this composting center inaugurated with great fanfare on Monday, the Plante administration hopes to motivate the population to participate more in composting. While eight out of ten residences are served by municipal compost collection, only a third of Montrealers (35%) who have access to a brown bin or compost bag use it regularly, according to city data.
We need to boost participation," admits Marie-Andrée Mauger, "as the City is aiming for a rate of 60% by 2025. Our landfills are filling up fast," she points out, referring in particular to the only landfill in the Montreal region , which will be at full capacity by 2029.
Half of our garbage bag is made up of organic matter. When this organic matter ends up in landfill sites, it creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It generates methane and leachate, a toxic liquid.
A quote from Marie-Andrée Mauger, responsible for ecological transition and the environment at the City of Montreal.
She reminds us that the collection of organic materials - like recycling - is not optional, but mandatory in Montreal, although the City does little to crack down on offenders. Maximum fines are $2,000 for a first offence and $4,000 for a repeat offence.
A higher bill
The Saint-Laurent compost plant has been on the City's drawing board for some fifteen years. The announcement of its construction dates back to Gérald Tremblay's administration, which wanted to build five compost processing plants for a total cost estimated in 2013 at $237 million.
By 2019, the city had decided to retain two projects: the Saint-Laurent plant and the Montréal-Est biomethanization plant, scheduled to open in the coming months. Unforeseen circumstances and delays have pushed up the bill from $163.8 million to $169 million for the Saint-Laurent treatment center.
As for the eastern plant, the final amount is not yet known. However, in 2021, the Auditor General of Montreal, Michèle Galipeau, expressed concern about a cost explosion, criticizing the Plante administration for its lack of rigor in managing the project.
The bill for the project could be almost twice what had been forecast six years earlier for the five infrastructures, when only two would actually be built, her report stated.
In May 2023, the City of Montreal reached an agreement with Veolia after extending the budget by an additional $40 million for the two projects and agreeing not to charge the company $5.4 million in late fees. At the time, the worksites were paralyzed due to a commercial dispute.
Across Quebec, 16 projects for the treatment of organic matter by biomethanization or composting have received government funding to go ahead. Of these, 11 are in operation.
Source: ici.radio-canada.ca/
