Rocky View’s compost dispute underscores challenges of going green

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Milton Scott tours around the rural roads of Rocky View County in his big, black Ford truck. He points at farmyards, identifying adversaries and allies.

“These people complained,” he says of a home on one side of the road. “These people didn’t,” he says about the home on the other side.

Smell. They complained – or didn’t complain – about the smell emanating from the compost at Thorlakson Feedyards, a family business at the centre of a community controversy with sweeping implications. Mr. Scott is the general manager of Thorlakson’s operation, which was founded in 1970, and in 1987 started composting the manure from the livestock brought there on the way to market. Thorlakson, in 2010, expanded the outdoor compost business, accepting waste from private companies and nearby communities. About 35 people work here.

Rocky View councillors recently voted unanimously to shut down the operation, but not its feedlot, in response to concerns from residents about odours.

The decision puts Thorlakson’s commercial customers in a bind and underscores the challenges of getting cities and businesses to adopt green policies such as composting organic waste.

“It is so incredibly bizarre,” Mr. Scott says. “We may have to start letting people go.”

Mr. Scott’s tour continues on the grid roads just east of Airdrie, Alta., a city that melts into the north end of Calgary. His company is a major business in Rocky View, the rural municipal district of about 40,000 people surrounding Airdrie and hugging Calgary’s northern, eastern and western boundaries. This is farming and ranching territory. Thorlakson itself farms about 4,856 hectares around its 72-hectare compost and feedlot operation.

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Alberta Environment and Parks approved Thorlakson’s application in 2010 to compost more than just the manure from its feedlot. The composting operation made up about a third of the company’s business, Mr. Scott says, declining to provide specific financial information.

Harmony Beef Co., a local cattle slaughterhouse that employs nearly 500 people, is among the Thorlakson customers needing alternative facilities to accept its organic waste, as is a contractor for Calgary bedroom communities Airdrie and Cochrane.

Thorlakson also absorbed restaurant leftovers and expired products stores could not sell.

Rocky View councillor Daniel Henn says the odour and garbage coming from the operation, well as the increased traffic, became too much for local residents.

“We all agree that compost is very important these days, but you also have to recognize that if [there are] negative impacts to the people that are close to it, that has to be, to me, paramount,” he says.

Thorlakson wants to expand its compost operation to 40,000 metric tonnes a year, up from 20,000 metric tonnes. The company’s lawyer said the province last year was on board with the plan, so long as the company obtained a letter from Rocky View confirming that the operation is properly zoned.

But council decided the bylaw under which Thorlakson was operating was no longer appropriate, and other classifications, such as industrial, were out of the question, the company says. And so council put the parcel of land with the compost operation under direct control, giving the politicians the power to close the waste business.

Mr. Henn, who put forth the motion to end the compost operation, says the company had ample time to improve its operations.

“My responsibility as a councillor is to the residents,” he says. “I’m the first one to say that I’m pro-business and like to see development, but residents are a big concern.”

The province has the power to overturn the county’s decision.

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Mr. Scott concedes the tidy rows of compost produced a powerful stench in last summer’s heat. The company in December added more wood chips to its compost recipe to keep the stink down, he says. The smell of rot is not detectable on his tour of the country roads around the site on a warm spring day. Plastic debris litters the corn field south of the facility. The field belongs to Thorlakson, and Mr. Scott says the material came with poorly sorted waste, and spilled after the company placed its plastic screener in a spot exposed to wind.

“The plastic is a concern, no doubt about it,” he says. The screening machine has been moved to a lower elevation to mitigate the problem.

Mr. Scott says company officials met last week with Angela Pitt, the local Member of the Legislature under the United Conservative Party banner. Ms. Pitt’s office did not return requests for comment. The company intends to ask the courts for an injunction to freeze council’s decision, arguing Rocky View did not follow proper procedure, according to Thorlakson’s lawyer, Keith Wilson.

Alberta’s growing enthusiasm for composting is, in part, fuelling this dispute and limiting alternatives. About 6,100 metric tonnes of compost from Airdrie was shipped to Thorlakson in 2018, according to Susan Grimm, that city’s team leader for waste and recycling. About 2,800 metric tonnes of compost a year from Cochrane was poured into Thorlakson’s piles, according to Fabrizio Bertolo, that town’s manager of waste and recycling.

“It is more than we generate in garbage,” he says.

Thorlakson’s problems will not immediately affect Airdrie and Cochrane. Their compost contractor – GFL Environmental Inc. – must deal with it. GFL did not respond to requests for comment.

Finding space for organic waste can be tricky, and the province does not track its compost capacity. Calgary spent $143-million to build its indoor facility, and it is strictly for the city’s residential composting program. The hefty price tag, Thorlakson argues, demonstrates why an indoor facility is out of reach for the private company. Edmonton’s indoor plant closed in May because the composting process was causing the roof to rot. It cost $97-million to build in 2000, and has been operating intermittently since 2017.

While Alberta has other compost plants, trucking waste is expensive. Jason Nixon, Alberta Minister of Environment and Parks, did not return messages seeking comment.

Mr. Scott’s tour ends beside the eight-hectare compost area. It smells here, but it is tolerable.

​"Something like odour is a very subjective thing," he says.

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