Building a Waste Management Ecosystem

The City of Edmonton is recognized as one of the world's leading municipalities in the management of municipal wastes. By combining natural processes with groundbreaking technologies the Gold Bar Wastewater Treatment Plant has become one of the most advanced and progressive wastewater treatment facilities in the world. The Edmonton Waste Management Center is North America's largest collection of modern, sustainable waste processing and research facilities. Together with private sector partners and local industry the City of Edmonton has created a robust residuals management ecosystem that utilizes the best of modern waste management business systems and technology.With a critical mass of municipal waste management infrastructure in place Edmonton has been able to attract a number of private partners with a common goal of utilizing the various municipal waste streams for the production of valuable products. Massive municipal composting operations, materials recovery and recycling, landfill gas recovery and electrical power generation have been in operation for several years. More recently public-private partnerships (P3) have been created to produce industrial process water from the wastewater treatment plant and recover phosphorus from the municipal biosolids storage facility. A P3 was formed to build and operate an e-waste recycling facility that will come on line in early 2008 and even more recently a P3 to build and operate an organic residuals gasification plant has formed with production to begin in 2010. Several other promising and creative ideas for capturing the value that liquid and solid waste hold are currently being examined.This paper will describe the connections between the various waste management processes that have lead to a robust and healthy residuals management ecosystem.