Long an international leader in waste management, the City of Edmonton is taking the first steps to spread its made-in-Edmonton waste technologies around the world.

And TEC Edmonton is proud to be playing a role.

Edmonton Mayor Steve Mandel recently returned from a China sales trip with two Memorandums of Understanding (the first step in doing business overseas) to explore the possibility of helping the mega-city of Beijing design, build and operate waste disposal and recycling operations similar to Edmonton’s vaunted city-run Waste Management Centre.

Born out of a landfill crisis many decades ago, the Waste Management Centre now consists of a waste processing and transfer centre, a giant composter that turns organic waste into clean soil, the GEEP electrical and electronic waste recycling operation, tire recycling and construction & demolition recycling centres.

Opening this year will be Greys Paper and Glass Recycling, making paper products from recycled paper plus used fabrics, specialty bricks from waste glass. When a now-under-construction leading edge biofuels plant opens in 2014, producing ethanol from burning trash, only 10% of Edmonton’s waste will end up in a landfill.

Nearby is the EPCOR Gold Bar Waste Water Treatment Plant, again a world leader in water treatment technologies and the recycling of specially treated waste water for industrial use.

Recently, the city and its partners – Alberta Innovates-Technology Solutions, AMEC, EPCOR, NAIT, and the University of Alberta – created  the Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence as a facility in which to both further waste management research, and to “commercialize” (i.e. sell) the made-in-Edmonton waste technologies developed at the Waste Management Centre and the Gold Bar Waste Water Treatment Plant. 

Which is where TEC Edmonton enters the picture: TEC’s business consultants are assisting the Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence in developing its business plan, an IT infrastructure and a strategy to market,  as proposed Mayor Mandel to an interested Chinese audience, our waste management solutions around the world.

Read the Edmonton Journal’s story on Chinese interest in our regional waste technology, entitled “Edmonton may help design waste management projects in China, mayor says,” by reporter Gordon Kent and published on April 16, 2012.