How Montreal compares to other cities on organic waste treatment

When the city of Montreal went to public tenders last year for the first three organic waste processing plants that it plans for the island, it chose the same route as Toronto and several other public authorities in North America that have awarded all-encompassing design-build-operate-maintain contracts for their facilities.

One year later, however, Montreal has opened the bid envelopes to discover that its all-inclusive contracts failed to attract much — or any — competitive offers.

What’s more, as the Montreal Gazette reported this week, the prices contained in the envelopes are said to be so high that one organic waste management industry insider warned that the three facilities will become the most expensive “in this universe.”

The administration of Mayor Valérie Plante is expected to decide in the coming days whether to award the contracts despite the high prices. No one from the administration has responded to repeated requests for interviews on the matter.

So how does Montreal compare with other cities that had to decide how they would process their organic waste?

Toronto has a million more residents than Montreal Island, but it has just two facilities to process organic waste. Montreal, by comparison, plans to build five facilities on the island.

And while sources say the bids that have come in for the first three of Montreal’s facilities carry a combined price tag of $332 million, the two facilities in Toronto cost just under $150 million together.

Toronto’s Disco Rd. biomethanation plant, in the northwest part of the city, began operating in 2014. With a city council-approved budget of $77.5 million, the final cost of the plant with an annual capacity of 75,000 tonnes came in a little under, at $76 million.

CONSORTIA BIDS BARRED

Toronto’s other facility, known as the Dufferin plant, opened in 2002 and is being expanded so it can process up to 55,000 tonnes of organics per year. The expansion of that biomethanation plant is finishing up, and the city has so far spent $62.9 million of its $73.8 million budget.

The primary contractor and designer on the Disco Rd. facility was AECOM, while its joint-venture partner, E.S. Fox, was the builder and a subcontractor, Veolia Water, is the operator.

Montreal, by comparison, has barred consortia from bidding on its facilities, an element that industry insiders say has likely driven up the prices in the bid envelopes.

Like the plants planned for Montreal, Toronto’s facilities are fully enclosed with negative air pressure and a bio-filter to remove odours. They also have fast open-shut doors that are required to remain closed except to allow a garbage truck to enter or exit.

Both of Toronto’s plants include pre-processing of waste.

By comparison, one of the five facilities planned for Montreal will be a dedicated pre-processing plant, in Montreal-East.

The other four include two biomethanation plants and two composting plants.

And while Toronto says it collects about 145,000 tonnes of organics a year, Montreal estimates it will process 160,000 tonnes of organics per year once all of its facilities are operating. Montreal’s figure includes yard waste, such as leaves. Toronto sends yard waste to private contractors to turn into compost.

ORGANICS PROCESSING

Toronto’s Disco Rd. facility is on a 100,000-square-foot site.

In contrast, Montreal’s future composting facility in St-Laurent borough is to be built on a one-million square-foot site — more than double what the city determined it needed and which the city expropriated for over $18.4 million.

Within Quebec, the impetus for organic waste processing facilities comes from a provincial target to ban compostable waste from going to landfills by 2020.

But not all municipalities in the province want to build and own processing facilities.

Gatineau, for example, decided to contract organics processing to a private composting plant after studying the costs of building and operating its own facility in 2011.

In 2017, Gatineau awarded its most recent four-year, $9.27-million contract, including taxes, to transport and process about 21,000 tonnes of organic waste.

The winning contractor, Services Matrec Inc., transports the organic waste to a subcontractor that has a processing facility in Moose Creek, Ont., about 75 kilometres away.

A separate contractor handles door-to-door collection of organics for the city.

Gatineau estimated in 2011 that it would cost $7.8 million to build its own organic waste processing facility.

However, a city spokesperson explained that $7.8 million was only the price of construction, and that Gatineau would have had to still award contracts to collect and transport organic waste, and likely to operate the processing facility.

Meanwhile, Quebec City has chosen to build its own organic waste processing facility.

SEPARATE CONTRACTS

But unlike Montreal and Toronto’s design-build-operatemaintain structure, Quebec City is awarding separate contracts for each part.

It plans to award the construction contract next year.

Quebec City set up a project office and as project manager oversees the design and construction process.

The estimate for Quebec City’s biomethanation plant, which is to be built on municipal property and be finished by 2022, is $124.5 million.

But with a processing capacity of 86,600 tonnes of organic household waste per year plus 96,000 tonnes of sludge from the next door municipal waste water treatment plant, the city’s one facility will have nearly the capacity of all of Montreal’s planned facilities.