To cut its carbon footprint, the District has awarded about $806,000 to build a new landfill gas collection system, which will complement the creation of a flare.
On July 21, council voted unanimously in favour of awarding the tender to Whistler Excavations, which was the sole bidder for this project.
"It's never ideal when there's only a single bidder, and we don't necessarily have a really good idea about what the market prices are," said Jesse Morwood, municipal capital projects manager.
"However, we did a lot of [work] to get down to that $806,000 and we feel that it's now at a fair value."
He noted the installation is quite technical and the landfill can be a challenging place to work, which may scare off some bidders.
The project is meant to complement the eventual creation of a landfill gas flare.
"What we're aiming with this project is to capture approximately 75% of the greenhouse gases that our landfill emits," said Morwood. "And once we capture it, we burn almost 100%."
For this new collection system, vertical wells will be drilled down into segments or cells of garbage that are layered on top of each other. These wells will be connected with pipes. In turn, the piping system will funnel gas near the surface of the landfill. It will then go to the flare and be burned off.
This particular tender involves only the collection system — that is, the drills and the pipes, Morwood said. The flare itself will be a separate tender.
According to District estimates, failing to have a gas collection system will have environmental consequences.
Should no system be in place, the landfill will emit about 677 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in 2020, according to a staff report. This will peak between 712 to 859 tonnes in 2027.
Coun. Chris Pettingill said that he was glad that the project was happening, given methane's impact on the environment.
He noted that methane has a bigger effect on global warming compared with carbon dioxide.
Methane is about 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth, on a 100-year timescale, and more than 80 times more powerful over 20 years, National Geographic reports.
"We're sort of in a crisis spot right now, so over the short term, the impact of doing nothing with that gas is huge," said Pettingill. "Which is why, somewhat counterintuitively, it's important to burn it and deal with this."
Mayor Karen Elliott said that this project wasn't a requirement, as the municipal landfill is already performing well enough for provincial standards. The District is taking it a step further.
However, she said it was disconcerting that other landfills of a similar size aren't doing gas capture and flaring, given how much of a carbon footprint they have.
