WESTLOCK – Brian Wonnacott summed up AltRoot’s first year in operations as successful, mixed with some growing pains.
Company operations manager Brian Wonnacott and business partner Colby Hansen provided the Westlock Regional Waste Management Commission (WRWMC) board with a yearly update and up-to-date summary of their operations at the Westlock Regional Landfill during a scheduled June 21 meeting — the WRWMC board accepted the presentation as information.
The composting facility began operating in December 2021 and has since diverted 28,000 metric tonnes of organics from the landfill and produced and utilized 11,000 metric tonnes of compost for use on area agricultural lands.
“The first year in operations was very challenging for sure, we learned a heck of a lot. We had a plan in place and that plan right off the get go had to change drastically and it’s kind of been that way for the first year, most of the time,” said Wonnacott. “We wouldn’t have known what to do without doing it and we know it’s caused some hardship. We work as much as possible to try to make improvements and learn what’s going on.”
Some of the challenges they faced included odours — the result of three contributing factors including a six-week vendor delay in screener delivery which resulted in cured compost piling up. There was a large volume of grain screenings accepted from the Westlock Grain Terminals (WGT) which threw the recipe off and created one bad batch, while not enough wood carbon fines in the recipe lead to anaerobic conditions and several bad batches.
While they did not know the origins of the odours at first, they now understand what happened and have made changes to mitigate any future problems, noted Wonnacott.
“Some of them are just learning curves,” he said. “We’ve made a lot of changes.”
With about 20 months of experience in hand, he and two site operators are able to adjust the recipe accordingly, noting “our recipe changes weekly and our guys can know, just by looking at stuff, what it needs.”
“When things are ticking, things are going good, (there’s) minimal odours and everything’s working as it’s supposed to. But the first year we have had three process upsets and during those times there definitely were some odours,” said Wonnacott.
Another highlight is a $300,000 investment this summer for further improvements and reducing the base-line odour by adding more air under the compost, which for the past year and half has been kept at the industry standard of four to six weeks.
“Microbes need just what we need, food, water, shelter and oxygen. All those are in a really good condition over there but I’m fairly confident that with more oxygen, the microbes would be happier,” he explained noting they will be under air for about 10 weeks. “We’re going to double the time that that compost can be under air for … we’re confident that’s really going to make a lot of changes.”
AltRoot recently received a positive inspection report completed by the Alberta Environment and Protected Areas (AEPA) which indicated it is very well run and in compliance.
Wonnacott also provided some details on current changes and improvements for the secondary batch process such as composting processes and use of technology including remote temperature monitoring probes and granulation of compost product development.
“We can make a graph of each batch and the goal of this is to understand how microbes are working, behaving, living more continuously,” said Wonnacott, noting temperature checks can be done every 15 minutes. “Right now we do every day, every other day temperature checks and you get a good handle on how things are working but I think that will give us better insight on how everything is functioning.”
