Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for inviting us to testify today to the Standing Committee on Natural Resources.
We'd like to start off with a brief overview of the project for the organic waste and biofuel facility.
The catalyst for this was really two overriding documents. I'll be brief here.
The first one was the City of Surrey's sustainability charter. This was a document that the City of Surrey put into place starting in 2008. It's a comprehensive document that is sort of an overriding policy document that guides our decision-making in all areas of social, environmental, and economic factors, with the addition of sustainability over the next 50 years.
The second document that played into the decision to move to this biofuel facility was the Metro Vancouver integrated solid waste and resource management plan. This plan mirrors many of the City of Surrey's sustainability goals, but it also has some very specific waste diversion targets, for example, 70% waste diversion by the year 2015.
With those two documents, the city decided to move toward a more integrated form of waste collection and waste diversion, and also decided at that point to look at a biofuel facility through our waste collection. The idea is that we would collect kitchen scraps and kitchen waste, add that to yard waste, collect them curbside, and take it to a biofuel facility. The biofuel facility would turn that into a natural gas, and we would use compressed natural gas trucks to collect the curbside waste, thereby creating a closed-loop system. We're well on our way to doing that.
At this time, I'd like to turn it over to Mr. Rob Costanzo, our operations manager, to give you some of the details on that.