Toronto begins testing waste collection truck that runs on natural gas, and eventually biogas from waste
I reported earlier on plans by the City of Toronto to begin converting its organic bin waste into biogas that can be upgraded to natural gas and injected into the region’s natural gas pipeline. Currently, the methane resulting from the city’s main biodigester facility is flared, but plans are finally underway to capture methane at the existing facility and a new facility to be built. There are two options for how the city will use the gas. It could sell it into Enbridge’s natural gas pipeline as a way to offset the natural gas it currently uses to heat government buildings, or it could use it to fuel a new fleet of waste collection vehicles that run on compressed natural gas. Hinting at the latter, the city purchased and recently received its first waste-collection vehicle that runs on CNG. Read the city’s news release here.
It would be a great achivement if Toronto could one day claim to be running all its garbage trucks on, well, garbage. I know it’s not politically correct to call it garbage, but you know what I mean. Better to offset the use of diesel fuel than to flare a perfectly useful source of energy.
Tags: anaerobic digester, biogas, CNG, organic, waste collection truck
Tyler Hamilton is associate publisher and editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and former business columnist for the Toronto Star. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005.
November 9th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
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November 9th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Well done.
November 10th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
[...] Source: Clean Break | City of Toronto [...]