Peel Region is joining the increasing number of GTA municipalities looking at incineration to burn away their garbage woes.

While all eyes in the GTA have been on the Durham-York Energy Centre in Clarington, which just started burning household garbage last week, Peel’s plans to build it own incinerator are well underway.

The regional council approved plans to design, build and operate the Peel Energy Recovery Centre in June 2013. The proposed site is on region-owned land at 7795 Torbram Road, in Brampton, which currently houses a garbage-transfer station, composting, and the recycling-sorting plant.

The energy-from-waste plant site will likely be operational by 2021.

“Peel is growing, and so even as we increase our three R’s program: reduce, reuse and recycle, our forecast is that our garbage tonnage will continue to go up,” said Norm Lee, the Director of Waste Management for the Region of Peel. “So by developing an energy from waste (efw) facility in Peel…it will eliminate all the trucks going down the highway and eliminate the need to landfill the waste, which will benefit the environment.”

Incineration is not new to Peel region. Since 1992, the region has been sending a portion of its trash to the Algonquin Power Facility (now called Emerald Energy From Waste Inc.,) located in Brampton, but the contract ended in 2012. Since then, the bulk of residual waste, which was 280,000 tonnes in 2013, has been going to landfill — and will continue to do so until 2021.

Lee says at the beginning of the process, the region did a telephone poll of 800 residents across Peel region. “We asked them ‘do you support building an efw facility within the region’” and 73 per cent said, yes,” said Lee. “It was quite high.”

“Part of that is because we already had one. People are used to it,” he said.

In 2010, as the contract with Algonquin was coming to an end, Peel region considered a number of waste management options including: extending its contract with the facility, considered buying the facility, or building a new one from scratch.

The region decided to venture out on their own.

“When we compared all the options, the data pointed towards developing a new modern facility that Peel would own as being the better option,” said Lee.

Regional council has budgeted $500-million to build the plant. The facility is expected to process over up to 300,000 tonnes of household garbage, and 100,000 tonnes of industrial waste per year. The facility is expected to have a lifespan of 30 years, which can be extended by a few decades if it maintained and upgraded over time, said Lee.

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The region estimates that the plant will produce enough electricity to power at least 27,000 homes, allow the region to recover resources such as metal, and help to eliminate the need to haul trash to landfill, hence reducing greenhouse gas emissions by half.

Currently the project is in the request for proposal stage, and four vendor teams will be bidding for the contract for the project. The region also started a provincially regulated environmental screening process in May, to assess all of the possible environmental effects of the facility on the local environment and communities.