REGINA - The City of Regina is on the lookout for a new food and yard waste processor after parting ways with the current provider.
At City Hall Wednesday, the city’s Director of Water, Waste and Environment Carolyn Kalim confirmed the city and EverGen have agreed to mutually terminate their contract to build a permanent composting facility.
The city “will post a new request for proposals to evaluate and find a new processor,” Kalim said.
Kalim told reporters that until a permanent facility can be constructed, the city's food and yard waste will continue to be delivered to the temporary site for composting.
The temporary site, which is located at the city landfill, is operated by EverGen, but city staff will operate the site until a new processor takes over. City of Regina employees will start operating the site on Feb. 1 and their whole contract with EverGen will be done at the end of February.
Kalim said EverGen has “been accommodating during this transition process and is training city staff to take over the operations.”
Residents should experience little disruption in the meantime.
“For residents, this requires no change to their current behavior,” Kalim said. She said residents should continue to use their green carts and their food and yard waste material will continue to be delivered to the temporary site for processing.
The parting of ways with EverGen Infrastructure comes not long into a deal struck for EverGen to process all of the organic waste from the City of Regina’s Food and Yard Waste Program introduced in 2023.
But things went off the rails quickly as EverGen ran into trouble getting approval for its proposed permanent processing site in the RM of Edenwold. Local residents voiced opposition at public meetings held in the R.M., citing various concerns with the location in the Pilot Butte area.
Following a Special Council Meeting on Dec. 4, 2023, the R.M. council unanimously denied EverGen’s discretionary use application for a Commercial Compost Facility.
Kalim pointed to the issues in getting a permanent site approved as one reason the two sides opted to end the contract early.
“The city and EverGen have been working closely together to get this permanent site built, and we came to the determination that this was the best path forward to achieve those goals,” Kalim said.
“We had challenges with the contract that we initially struck with them in getting a permanent site built, and as we were looking to make changes to the contract to facilitate that, we really felt that we were getting into a place where a full and public transparent procurement process would be the best way to kind of continue to pursue that.”
She acknowledged the decision of the R.M. was “one of the major challenges that we experienced early on in this process, but we continued to try to work through that and still decided that this would be the best path forward. “
Kalim said the city remains committed to building a permanent processing facility, and will post a new request for proposals to evaluate and find a new processor.
“We look forward to working with industry as we continue to look to turn our food and yard waste material into a valuable end product.”
Regarding the procurement process, Kalim made it known the goal would be to allow industry to come with all of their expertise and bring that to the bidding process.
“The same general concept would be that we would be looking for a processor that would select a site, build a site, operate a site for us and create some sort of end product of value that can be sold.”
As for where it might be located, the indication is it could go beyond the original parameters of within 15 km of the city. “We've added some more flexibility into that to try and get the best solution. You know, we want to still see something close by and beneficial for that though.
She said the city will share further information about a new processor and timelines, once the public procurement process has been completed. It was also confirmed EverGen will be allowed to take part in that procurement process.
Kalim also confirmed the termination has nothing to do with the changes following the Mayor and Council elections last fall.
“So through this process the city has been diligently working to kind of achieve our goals of that diversion from our landfill, through this food and yard waste program, and so this has been continuing on through this process.”
As for the current temporary site, Kalim said it is “smaller than ideal for our processes,” but anticipates theycan continue to receive the volume coming through the site.
Since the onset of this program, Kalim said the city has processed 20,000 tons of food and yard waste.
As for its ultimate goal of sending 65 percent of waste going to the composting facility rather than the landfill, Kalim acknowledged “we still have a lot of progress to make.”
“Right now we're only bringing in the curbside residential service and we would look to expand that into the future to continue to meet those targets.”
