Surrey’s Biofuel Facility has officially opened in the Port Kells industrial area. The $68 million facility is the first fully integrated closed-loop organic waste management system in North America.

The facility will convert curbside organic waste into renewable biofuel to fuel the city’s fleet of natural gas powered waste collection and service vehicles. Under this closed loop system, waste collection trucks will literally be collecting their fuel source at curbside. Excess fuel will go to the new district energy system that heats and cools Surrey’s city centre.

“Surrey has established a new sustainability benchmark in Canada with a state of the art facility that converts organic waste into renewable energy,” said Mayor Linda Hepner. “The Biofuel Facility will be instrumental in reducing community-wide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by approximately 49,000 tonnes per year, which is the equivalent of taking over 10,000 cars off the road annually. This reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will also completely eliminate the City of Surrey’s corporate carbon footprint of 17,000 tonnes per year.”

The city owned Surrey Biofuel Facility was established through a public-private partnership (P3). A consortium led by Orgaworld Canada was selected by the City of Surrey to design, build, finance, maintain and operate the facility for 25 years. Partners include Stantec Architecture Ltd. and general contractor Smith Bros. & Wilson (BC) Ltd.

The Biofuel Facility will divert 115,000 tonnes of organic waste from the landfill, produce approximately 120,000 Gigajoules of renewable natural gas and produce approximately 45,000 tonnes of nutrient-rich compost annually.