ALBERTA INVESTS $58 MILLION IN CANADIAN CIRCULAR ECONOMY PROJECTS

The Government of Alberta is advancing the province’s circular economy by committing $58 million through Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA) to projects across the province worth $528 million in public and private investment.

Recycling asphalt from roof shingles, sequestering carbon in concrete, and novel plastics recycling are some examples of the technology solutions receiving funding through ERA’s circular economy challenge. If successful, these projects will result in cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions of up to 4 million tonnes by 2050 – equal to offsetting the GHG footprint of 1 million homes. The funding is expected to create 1,835 jobs in Alberta and have a $350 million GDP impact in the province by 2025.

Circular Economy Challenge projects support waste reduction, material, and feedstock substitution, value recovery, and reduction of the life cycle environmental footprint of materials and products. These technology solutions can reduce the impacts of material production, processing, and disposal. The invested innovations will support industry competitiveness, new venture creation, and economic diversification.

Republic Services has expanded its organics recycling operations in California with the acquisition of North State Bioenergy, an anaerobic digestion facility north of Sacramento. California requires the diversion of food and yard waste from landfills as part of its climate strategy.

The North State Bioenergy facility recycles food waste and other organics collected from across Northern California. The anaerobic digestion process breaks down this organic material and creates biogas, which can be used to generate electricity or converted into renewable natural gas to fuel vehicles in Republic’s fleet. The facility’s operations are fully circular, with biogas generating enough electricity to power the facility.

Republic has extensive operations in California to support organics recycling, including six compost facilities and three commercial food waste pre-processing sites. The North State facility is the company’s first anaerobic digester.

In 2022, Republic recycled one million tons of food and yard waste. Diverting this organic material from a landfill provides a climate benefit equivalent to removing the annual emissions of 16,000 passenger vehicles. Organics recycling directly supports Republic Services’ sustainability goal to increase the recovery and circularity of key materials from the waste stream by 40 percent by 2030.

Ascend Elements has opened its first commercial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling facility in Covington, Georgia. According to the company, the $50 million Base 1 facility is North America’s largest electric vehicle battery recycling facility. The facility began partial operations in August 2022 and now has an annual capacity to process 30,000 metric tons of used lithium-ion batteries and manufacturing scrap – equal to 70,000 electric vehicle batteries per year.

The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) reported an increase in worker fatalities in 2022 in the United States and Canada after a dramatic drop in 2021. For 2022, 46 solid waste industry worker fatalities were recorded by SWANA compared to 28 the year before.

Public sector workers represented a larger percentage of fa- talities in 2022 compared to previous years. About 35 percent of all solid waste workers killed last year worked in the public sector, whereas the average was around 21 percent over the past four years.

Collection remained the leading type of work for fatal incidents. The most common cause of collection worker fatalities continues to be their own truck (e.g., either falling off it, being struck by it, or the truck rolling over). Being struck by a third party vehicle remains the third leading cause of death for collection workers followed by crashes with other vehicles.

Post-collection and maintenance activities both saw large increases in fatalities in 2022, representing the bulk of the rise in worker deaths from 2021. Fatal incidents at materials recovery facilities jumped from one in 2021 to seven in 2022. Fatalities at landfills went from five to eight in 2022.

Maintenance also contributed to the rise in worker fatalities in 2022, with four people killed while working on trucks. Three of these incidents involved working on or around hydraulics.

Mechanical-related fatalities as a whole led the list of fatal events for the first time since SWANA has tracked this data. In addition to truck maintenance, work on and around shredders, balers, compactors, and other equipment led to 11 worker deaths in 2022. Single-vehicle crashes were again the second leading cause of fatal incidents.