Of course, we talk about this all the time, so we're used to it. It's called the Peel energy recovery centre. That is to replace an old incinerator. It's going to be built for the private sector to handle roughly 300,000 tonnes of garbage, and be owned by the Region of Peel. We'll be able to use our garbage as a resource, rather than burying it in a landfill. We have decided it's going to be a mass burn combustion unit. There are about 500 mass burn facilities around the world, so we're definitely not inventing anything new.
One of the best things I wanted to promote on that PERC, other than the environmental benefits of not landfilling and the energy production, is the number of jobs we're going to create: 300 construction jobs and upwards of 40 direct and 120 indirect jobs. In waste management, you'll always have waste. It's good for the environment, it's good for energy, but it's good to keep people employed.
We have three composting facilities. No acronyms there. We produce compost from our organic waste. Much like Orgaworld, we market it to a number of facilities. A couple of the cool and exciting things we're doing there is that we have gone in with almost every major producer of material collected from the curbside in Ontario, Orgaworld included, as well as the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario, Dr. Lambert Otten from the University of Guelph, and the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association. What that's about is developing agricultural field trials to help us market material into the agricultural community. That's allowed us to open markets that weren't there before. As I said, this is all over southwestern and central Ontario. It's not just confined to the Region of Peel.
Before that, we also worked on using our compost in the Filtrexx line of products, which use compost as filter equivalents. When you spray down for roadside seeding, it's a filtration for erosion control, living walls, where they have a side of a cliff they're trying to revegetate. It was a very exciting thing, and that was in conjunction with the University of Guelph.
I could go on, but I think I'm close to the end of my presentation. I wanted to leave you with where we should go from here. Every one of you sitting around the table is an expert in the field of waste management. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees on what we need to do. More needs to be done to address the political and social issues surrounding waste management. Bringing together lots of successful projects takes a lot of committed citizens. A lot of people have input into a lot of alternate technologies. Talk about energy from waste siting, as in the Port Hope area, the last one sited in Ontario; the social and political inputs are very definitely almost as important as the engineering inputs.
As Dale suggested, we need to look more at organics. Organics can be used for a lot of things besides compost. You'll never get away from composting plants, but you can use composting in an anaerobic digester—AD, I would say, but I've already been there—and co-digest it with waste water sludges and use the fuel maybe not to generate electricity, but for transportation. We're going to use natural gas-fired vehicles for our collection in our new contract, getting away from the use of diesel.
As reported on November 21, a poll of 1,044 residents across the country support EFW. This is good news because I really believe that the future of waste management is in energy production. We all know about recycling MRFs, and that's good, but how do you get that next percentile? We're on our way to trying to get to a 90% diversion from landfill rate. We're at about 50% now without EFW, but a lot of that can be done by using our stuff as energy from waste.
Waste plastic is an issue that we hear about around the world. There are uses for waste plastics, but not all waste plastics can be reused. A lot of research needs to go there.
We need to look at more research, both non-partisan and company-specific. It's important. I talked about two research projects this afternoon. We need to do a bit more research on how to use waste.
Economics, of course, needs to be addressed. New and innovative solutions take time and money to develop, but they can replace many of the jobs lost in the manufacturing sector, and I think that's important. As a federal government we need to promote industry. One of the things about waste is that as long as you have people, there is going to be waste. That waste needs to be properly managed, and the waste can do valuable jobs. As I've said to many people who have wanted to listen to me, I've lived through about three recessions through my time at Peel. A lot of that is based on the fact that waste is a resource, and we always need to deal with waste appropriately.
With that, I thank you for the time. I hope I didn't go over my seven minutes.