Foothills Regional Landfill

 

Alberta's new Environment Minister is thrilled with a huge projects at the Foothills Regional Landfill.

Shannon Phillips says the Desviar project will keep a lot of materials out of the landfill, for use in other ways, while creating 40 new jobs.

"It's a mammoth composter, it separates organics, recovers nutrients, it recovers the heat generated for it's resulted in  a million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, which is fantastic," Phillips says.

She says this is the type of initiative that companies in the province need to be putting forward while the government reviews its climate change policy.

"Certainly for an area such as High River and Okotoks, there's a large amount of agricultural activity and other activity on the land that we can certainly be doing value added," she says. "Saving farmers money, saving potentially taxpayers money as well and insuring that we're creating good jobs while we do it."

The minister adds that the government has faith in entrepreneurs, small businesses, engineers and scientists in Alberta who are willing to solve climate change issues and that's why they've undertaken a review of the climate change policy to make sure that good jobs are being created and life is being made better for everyone.

The project has received $1.65-million of the total $3.3-million cost from the Alberta Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation.

It receives it's funding from high emitters who have paid a carbon tax to the government.