Edmonton is moving boldly to recycle what few others have recycled before.

End-of-life electrical and electronic products such as discarded computers and worn-out small appliances are about to be transformed into reusable metals and plastics.

A $30-million metals and e-waste recycling facility, to be built at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre’s Clover Bar site by Germany’s DiHAG/GEKO Group, was officially unveiled last week. The plant is slated to come online in the spring of 2005.

In addition to becoming the country’s most comprehensive metals recycling facility, it is being described by company officials as the first of its kind in Canada. GEKO Recycling Technologies, a newly formed subsidiary, has obtained exclusive license arrangements for the metal, plastic and glass separation technologies that will be used at the Edmonton plant.

Jack Dagley, Business Edge
Dieter Obergfell of GEKO, left, Jim Fleury Western Economic Development,and Edmonton Mayor Bill Smith.

GEKO’s plant marks the second electronic recycling waste firm to open in Alberta. In 2002, Calgary-based Maxus Technology officially opened Western Canada’s first facility in Rimbey, just northwest of Red Deer, in an unused provincial Parks and Recreation building.

Maxus collects electronic equipment from businesses throughout the province and has processed more than 2.7 million kilograms of e-waste out of Rimbey since the start of 2004. The company went public in November 2003 on the Nasdaq OTC exchange and now has offices in four countries.

Work on the 55,000-sq.-ft GEKO facility is expected to start before winter sets in and when it’s up and running, it will process 30,000 tonnes of provincial waste annually. Dieter Obergfell, managing director of parent company GEKO Holdings GMBH, expects those materials can easily be obtained throughout Alberta. The new plant will also create 34 jobs on a single shift, and while a second shift is a possibility, it would mean importing waste from other provinces.

GEKO will lease five hectares of land from the city of Edmonton and pay an annual market value lease. The project marks GEKO’s first venture outside of Europe, where the parent firm has more than 2,000 employees operating in various environmental industries and foundry operations.

“I could have built this plant anywhere in and around Edmonton but when I first saw this Clover Bar facility, I knew it had to go in here,” said Obergfell, referring to the state-of-the-art recycling and waste management facilities exist at the site.

The company was attracted to the city through the efforts of Bill Smith, who as Edmonton’s mayor formed the Mayor’s Task Force on Manufacturing in 1996 to explore new methods of growing the manufacturing sector in the Edmonton region. Based on its findings, Project Germany was launched in January 1999 to attract investment from Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Eleven companies, including GEKO, have since invested in the region.

“We needed to reach investors firsthand in their own community,” said Smith. “Edmonton was being passed over. It wasn’t on the radar screen.”

For Obergfell, Smith’s initiative came at the right time and an ad directed at attracting German companies here caught his attention. Four years later, it resulted in the sod-turning ceremony for the Edmonton plant.

Due its small size compared to Alberta, Germany is very active in recycling, said Obergfell. “We’ve been recycling for years. We try recycling an item four or five times before it would go to a landfill. We don’t believe in landfill.”

Obergfell, who will be moving to Edmonton once the plant is up and running, also said the new facility will be fully funded by his company, without the help of any tax dollars. He noted the recycling technology is all mechanical, meaning there will be no chemical component.

In addition to small home appliances and computers, the plant will also handle televisions, vacuums, irons, floor polishers, photocopiers, fax machines, lawnmowers, construction demolition materials such as metal windows, doors and vinyl siding, along with commercial and industrial equipment including electrical tools, wiring and motors. They will be transformed into iron, aluminum, copper, wood chips, glass, and hard plastics: high-density polyethylene, polypropylene, polycarbonate and polyurethane.

GEKO anticipates that it will be able to market 94 per cent of all the material entering its facility and said the remaining six per cent could either be composted or end up as landfill. The newly-recycled metals, plastics and glass will be marketed both locally and abroad.

In anticipation of the project, 2,200 tonnes of material is already sitting on a plot of land adjacent to where the project will be built.

(Laura Severs can be reached at laura@businessedge.ca)