Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be here this afternoon. It's late afternoon here Atlantic time.
I wanted to give you a little bit of the history of Island Waste Management. Island Waste Management is a provincial crown corporation that administers and provides solid waste management and services for Prince Edward Island. Waste is managed on a provincial basis in P.E.I. as compared to normal municipal bases in other parts of the country. I guess our geography has something to do with that.
Island Waste Management's mandate is to deliver a cost-effective and environmentally responsible waste management system for the residential and the commercial sectors of our province. It is a corporation organized under a board of directors with the day-to-day operations administered by me, the chief executive officer. We also have a mix of private and commercial identities that do a lot of the business we do.
We're fully integrated. We collect for every home in the province, and we do that via a commercial tendering process for contractors to collect the goods. All of our organic material collected province-wide goes into a central composting facility that processes all the organics collected on the island. That's a $20 million facility.
In addition to that we have under contract an energy-from-waste facility that takes the non-recyclable and non-compostable items and turns it into steam energy used as the central heating system for the University of Prince Edward Island and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, and it's on a grid that does a lot of commercial power. Both provincial and federal buildings use that for heat.
As for our history, Prince Edward Island isn't really blessed with a lot of areas that can house landfills without being close to someone. Unlike other jurisdictions, trying to source a landfill can be somewhat difficult. The province and the community understood that. At the time Island Waste Management was created, we had roughly 35 municipal dump sites in the province. Those have all been closed. We only have one municipal landfill now.
We generate roughly about 100,000 metric tonnes of waste annually, and we have diverted well over 50% of that waste since this program was put in place.
We have programs for many goods. In addition to compost and recyclables, we also have a used tire program. We also have an electronic waste disposal. And very similar to other jurisdictions we have a whole host of items we would divert under our program. We're well under way with our program.
An issue that we think that perhaps the federal government can assist us with is that there really isn't any financial consideration given for those who are attempting or trying or actually making an effort to divert. Again, on our own, this is totally funded by the taxpayers of the province. We charge a homeowner rate to every individual in the province to collect the waste curbside. It's separate from any property, municipal, sales tax, or anything. It's an Island Waste Management fee that's charged to each homeowner in the province. We charge that fee on a full cost-recovery basis.
We have made tremendous strides, most notably with the closure of 34 of the 35 landfills that were in the province. Really our concern is that given that there's no either incentive or disincentive for those who may want to do it a different way, the cheapest thing to do is to place all waste in the ground. It's not the right thing to do, but it's the cheapest thing to do. But there's no financial consideration given to municipalities or provincial jurisdictions that want to attempt to do it the right way.
In addition to that, what we've found in the recycling market is that there are ever-changing packaging materials and goods are not clearly identified as to the recyclability of their materials. As an example, you will note that for many packages you get from a grocery store, for instance, it is almost impossible to find out if that material is recyclable or not. One thing I would like to pass on is our feeling that it's hard to recycle something if it's not clearly marked as recyclable. We feel it's important for the federal government to take a role in having packaging materials clearly identified as to their makeup, so that if they are recyclable, they can be recycled.
These would be my initial comments. Thank you.