Composting site agrees to fine
Deal with city ends in $4,000 charge over odour offences at west end business
A west-end composting facility has accepted a $4,000 fine for 14 odour-related tickets issued by the City of Edmonton.
Cleanit Greenit Composting System Inc., a composting company in the Winterburn Industrial Area, reached a deal with the Crown to pay for some of the 33 tickets issued by the city since June 2019.
CEO Kirstin Castro-wunsch said Cleanit Greenit took the offer to avoid a lengthy and costly legal process.
The company takes responsibility for generating some of the odour that prompted concerns in neighbouring residential communities, but not all of it. There are several other odours in the area, including from sewers, which can create a layering effect, Castro-wunsch said.
“We're listening to the community concerns, we are doing the patrols, we respond quickly and if it is us, then we can do something about it,” she said. “If people say all the odour in the west end is us, then they're never going to get at the other sources of odour and get rid of those and I can't do anything about those.”
Complaints to the city about odour from the site wafting over west-end communities date back to 2003, but have picked up in recent years as development has increased in the nearby Trumpeter, Hawks Ridge and Starling neighbourhoods.
The city stopped issuing fines last February because of the significant amount already before the courts.
Since that time, the city has received about 300 complaints from nearby residents about the stench in the area, attributed to Cleanit Greenit.
Castro-wunsch said she takes issue with how the city issues tickets and is calling for a review of the bylaw.
She argued the investigation process isn't thorough and wants there to be proof where exactly the smell is coming from before a ticket is issued.
“We've been doing a lot of work to improve. Last year, we did 149 investigations of odour complaints and of those we found 21 were Cleanit Greenit-related and almost all instances there was no odour left at the site after one and a half hours,” she said. “We want to come up with more solutions; we're doing everything we can think of.”
In an email to Postmedia, city spokeswoman Chrystal Coleman countered that enforcement officers do investigate and gather evidence before issuing tickets. For odour concerns, officers look at the type, frequency, intensity, duration of the odour, the weather and ambient conditions including wind direction and speed.
Nearby resident Sarah Hunter said the $4,000 fine doesn't eliminate her concerns with the frequent odour in the area and she would like to see more action taken from the city in the form of an injunction to impose restrictions.
“It's not acceptable for a business to be producing that much odour every week.
“It's always there, it just depends on the wind on how far it's going to spread,” Hunter said. “Most of the people from the area don't even bother to report the odour anymore.”