The Foothills regional landfill is among five major projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Adaptive Waste Digestion and Organic Nutrient Recovery facility will cost $3.3-million with $1.65-million coming from Alberta's Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation.

Managing Director Kirk Andries says higher temperatures and their affect on the ecology of Alberta has been studied widely.

"What's important of course is as the climate warms it will have a direct effect on significant weather events such as floods or droughts," Andries says. "It will have an effect on the type of plant communities that certain ecosystems can support and of course if we're talking about plant communities we're talking about a very important part of our economy called agriculture and so whole systems need to adjust to a warming climate."

The corporation's finances come from a levy that's placed on Alberta's large final emitters, like coal fired power plants, an oil sands facility, a fertilizer plant or cement plant that exceeds a certain amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Andries says they have to hit a target to reduce those and they have a number of ways they can comply including paying into a fund. The current rate is $15 a ton and the new provincial government is increasing that to $20 a ton effective next year and the year after that to go to $30 a ton.

Andries says a lot of the projects they fund are at landfills.

"Landfills typically have material in their organic waste that rot and when they rot they release methane, and methane from a greenhouse gas perspective is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide," Andries says. "So it's a very important greenhouse gas to manage."

The Adaptive Waste Digestion and Organic Nutrient Recovery facility at the Foothills regional landfill is, according to Andries, a perfect example of what needs to be done on a grander scale. He says the company behind the project Desviar will be recovering nutrients from agricultural waste material, food waste, liquid waste as well as others, and through their technology through composters and anaerobic digestion they can separate it out into useful products like bio-gas to generate power.

A side benefit down the road could be the sale of the technology to other countries.