Coaldale breaks ground on recycling and energy facility
The Town of Coaldale just got a little more environmentally friendly and cost effective with their recycling and energy.
And residents should be feeling anything but blue.
On April 12, the Town of Coaldale, along with 2Point0 Ltd. – a company made up of local entrepreneurs – hosted a groundbreaking event for the start of construction of a new recycling and energy facility in Coaldale, a new approach to waste management which has the potential to pay dividends not only for the town, but the entire region.
“The goal of 2Point0 is simple,” said Tyler Beaulieu, partner at 2Point0. “How do we make the future better? There is a lot of pressure out there economically and a lot of pressure politically to do things and everybody has opinions about it. The really tough thing is to somehow make it economically viable to make it work within a community.”
On Tuesday morning, Beaulieu joined his partners putting the shovels in the ground during a cold, blustery – and brief for all the shivering folks – sod turning ceremony.
2Point0’s new facility, which is currently under construction and anticipated to be operating in the coming months, will handle waste from the Town’s ‘blue bin’ recycling stream, as well as providing a solution for the construction and demolition (CND) industry.
Bringing the Town’s blue bin waste to the facility will mean residents will also be able to take more materials out of the black bin destined for the landfill and into the blue bin, with all existing materials accepted at the new facility in addition to plastic bags, bagged shredded paper, Styrofoam and string.
At Tuesday’s ceremony, 2Point0 also announced that they had found a method for incorporating glass into their waste stream, meaning Coaldale residents may soon be able to recycle glass as well.
“Coaldale is a massive supporter. From Day 1,” said Beaulieu. “Coaldale is a forward-thinking community that tries to find ways to solve problems and how to keep costs down when they’re rising all the time, taxes are always going up and food is always getting more expensive. With 2Point0 being in this community and having the support of Coaldale, I don’t think we ever would have gotten here without them.”
2Point0 is a carbon-negative facility which will run similar to a landfill and will actually capture carbon, said Beaulieu.
“So it’s already cleaner just in that regard. It will generate its own power and its own heat using different materials and resources.
“We applaud what the City of Lethbridge has done with the landfill. They have to respond to the trends and the fact that landfills can no longer be the number one solution for the planet. We believe we have found a solution where we can seriously start to get away from landfill as the number one solution to the problems of waste within communities and we get to do it here first in our own backyard with people we know and people who believe in us to do it. Our never-ending goal is to make the future better and everybody wants to do that.”
The facility will also support the agricultural community. “Some of the powers we’ll create will allow for healthier animals at feedlots and on ranches and will allow potato farmers to increase their yields on soil which has already been either overused or it needs to add things like carbon reintroduced into the soil,” said Beaulieu. “We’re going to be able to generate excess power which will then get used by the town as part of the agreement they made to support us. After we’re done running our building, the town can run local utilities like the sewage lagoon. Now we have a waste facility that once used to house landfill products that is now going to create energy for the town, energy for us and will do everything in a carbon negative environment.”
With construction already underway, 2Point0 Ltd. is looking forward to getting up and running in the summer.
“The easiest answer is to say three months, it’s just the supply chain,” said Beaulieu. “Our building was supposed to arrive at the beginning of April and now we’re looking at maybe a week or two from now. So the building will go in and the concrete will go up.”
The equipment was all ordered within Canada for the blue bin side, said Beaulieu.
“So all of that material should be here within the next 60 to 90 days, whatever it takes to get the millwrights to erect it and get everything going. That will all be done locally.”
There are only two pieces coming out of the U.S. on the construction and demolition side, said Beaulieu.
“That will just be about supply chain and delivery. So we’re looking at CND as hopeful in August and we’re looking at the blue bins sometime at the end of the May or the middle of June, just depending on trades and when equipment arrives.”
As far as pickup schedules, Beaulieu said Coaldale will continue to operate the way they do with the same haulers.
As for future 2Point0 Ltd. sites, Beaulieu said they’ve identified a few they’re interested in.
“Currently, we’re very interested in communities and logistics similar to Lethbridge. We’d like to service a region where we can be a solution that allows communities that don’t have access to $300 million in funds to throw up something similar to what Calgary did, which is great. But with our models as innovators, they’re competitors to us. So there are various parts of Alberta which are wonderful for this where we can help them lower their costs and divert more from their landfill.”