By Becky Zimmer

Waste to energy projects offer alternatives to burning and landfills

Nov 21, 2022 | 12:54 PM

Flax and canola straw, sawdust, and wood waste— there have been very few uses for these biowaste products, and producers have been left wondering how to get rid of them.

However, new technological advances are popping up in Saskatchewan to give these byproducts a secondary use and a cleaner way to dispose of them.

For Tina Rasmussen of the Meadow Lake Tribal Council, there were two main reasons MLTC moved forward with the Bioenergy Centre, of which commercial operations happened earlier this year; environmental protection and environmental stewardship.

Wood waste from NorSask Forest Products, which was previously burned in a beehive burner is now being used as fuel in a process that produces both heat and electricity. The electricity produced from a renewable resource is fed directly into the SaskPower provincial grid replacing energy created by carbon-producing fossil fuels. The electricity produced through the process can provide baseload power for up to 5,000 homes, Rasmussen told farmnewsNOW. The bioenergy plant has been sized to the waste stream of the MLTC mill but there are two other mills in the area, and another in Glaslyn if wood waste is in short supply.

Even the ash that is left as a byproduct is being put to good use as it is being used by a local farmer on his land to amend the soil, she said.

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The Meadow Lake Tribal Council had been questioning what to do with the biomass waste from NorSask for decades. About 25 per cent of the trees brought in for milling winds up as waste and using the entirety of a natural resource has always been important to Elders and First Nation communities.

“Our nations have always said we have a responsibility to make use of what we take. If we’re taking a natural resource, we should be making sure we are using 100 per cent. But up until now, we haven’t been able to put together a plan that would allow us to make use of that waste residual.”

Titan Clean Energy Projects out of Craik saw how they could turn that agricultural biowaste into energy while sequestering carbon at the same time. Farmers bring flax bales to their facility and through pyrolysis and auto-thermal processing, the material is processed into biochar, which the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada defines as “an organic, carbon-rich material made up of organic residues such as plants and wood waste, like maple bark and pine chips.”

This was all material that would have been driven to a landfill or burned on the field leaving little of value behind and sending carbon emissions back into the atmosphere, Jamie Bakos, president, and CEO of Titan told farmnewsNOW.

“If we go and pick it up, and then bring it to our site and sequester all the carbon, it’s unlikely we would ever get into a situation where we’re generating more carbon than the alternatives.”

There are plenty of benefits to applying biochar back into the soil, including carbon sequestration, increased surface area and retention for nutrients and moisture, making both accessible to plant life. Bakos said for every tonne of carbon produced at the facility, three tonnes of carbon are removed from the atmosphere.

“It’s one of the most effective ways, it’s considered one of the top five technologies in existence today to remove carbon from the atmosphere in a cost-effective way.”

In order to reduce the carbon produced by transportation, Bakos said they are focusing on waste from local producers but they may be willing to go within a 400 km radius of the facility.

These are the types of projects that the Ministry of Environment are happy to see, both from a business and environmental perspective, said director of compliance assurance in the Environmental Protection Branch, Tara Pidborochynski.

And while there hasn’t been a lot of uptake of these types of projects, since they do take time to put them in place, having these conversations and finding these alternatives are important, Pidborochynski said.

“We need to manage our waste in the province whether that’s solid waste going to landfills or waste being produced just through facilities…if it’s not managed appropriately, it does impact future generations. And so it’s important that we look at waste minimization and reductions and how to deal with the waste that we are producing.”

Businesses have been finding ways to reduce costs or even find new revenue streams in these projects. And whether these new technologies are used in the future as carbon credit or a way to reduce their own emissions, Pidborochynski said anyway that people can do to reduce their carbon footprint are projects businesses should be looking into.

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becky.zimmer@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @bex_zim