A new biofuel facility has opened in the Port Kells industrial area of Surrey, British Columbia. According to the City of Surrey, the C$68 million facility is the first fully integrated closed-loop organic waste management system in North America.

The facility will convert curbside organic waste into renewable biofuel to fuel the city’s fleet of natural gas-powered waste-collection and service vehicles. Under this closed-loop system, waste-collection trucks will be collecting their fuel source at curbside. Excess fuel will go to the new district energy system that heats and cools Surrey’s City Centre.

“Surrey has established a new sustainability benchmark in Canada with a state-of-the-art facility that converts organic waste into renewable energy,” says Mayor Linda Hepner. “The biofuel facility will be instrumental in reducing community-wide greenhouse-gas emissions by approximately 49,000 [metric tons] per year, which is the equivalent of taking over 10,000 cars off the road annually. This reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions will also completely eliminate the City of Surrey’s corporate carbon footprint of 17,000 [metric tons] per year.”

Read the full story at ngtnews.com.