Saskatoon hears options for 'strong and putrid odour' from rendering plant

Pile of pigs left outside business WATCH: A Vancouver-based company is apologizing after a pile of pigs was left outside of its Miner's Avenue rendering plant overnight.

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Saskatoon’s planning and development committee is considering options to deal with the “strong and putrid odour” of a north industrial-area rendering plant.

City administrators have offered three options for the committee to consider on Wednesday, including developing city odour regulations, changing the industrial zoning requirements, or simply doing more proactive monitoring.

Vancouver-based West Coast Reduction, which runs the plant, issued an apology in November after a pile of pig carcasses was left outside the facility in open air.

West Coast Reduction A pile of pigs was left outside of West Coast Reduction in Saskatoon in late November. (Kelly Singer/CTV News)

Mike Halvorson, the manager of TC Industrial Tire, located just a few steps away from the plant, told CTV News he could smell the pigs.

“It’s the smell of death. It’s the smell of rotting animals. It’s so putrid that your eyes water,” Halvorson said.

Bad odours are unavoidable in the rendering business, which recycles food waste and slaughterhouse leftovers to make ingredients for pet and livestock feed, soap, detergents and biofuel.

According to a report from city administration, several areas of the plant operate inside vacuums, which draw air from the room to be “scrubbed” using chemicals and water to wash particulates out of the air stream.

West Coast Reduction has run the plant on Miners Avenue since 1990.

Data from the City of Saskatoon shows the city has received 31 complaints about “rendering odour” in the neighbourhood since 1995, not counting four complaints submitted between 2017 and 2021, when the plant was not operational.

In 2022, when the plant resumed operation, the city received 11 complaints about the odour, more than any other year in that period.

City administration says they’ve been sending workers to the area daily to check for odour.

“Daily field observations by administration have so far resulted in zero detection of exterior odour at the site,” the report says, although they anticipate cold weather could be a factor.

Creating regulations around “nuisance odours” could give people a way to deal with their concerns, but the subjective and short-lived nature of odour complaints means follow-up would be difficult, administration says.

“In some cases, it can be difficult to definitively pinpoint the odour’s source. Other businesses have been subject to odour complaints within the Hudson Bay Industrial area. The evidence required to prove an odour qualified as a nuisance, beyond a reasonable doubt, could also be difficult to achieve, and therefore create challenges for any nuisance odour prosecutions,” the report says.

If they change the zoning rules for the area, for example by requiring a buffer zone between rendering plants and residential areas, provincial law dictates that pre-existing uses that don’t conform with the new rules can legally continue unaffected, administration says.

In its report to the planning committee, administration leans toward continuing to monitor the situation without any major regulatory changes, which would be costly to implement.

“Given the short, episodic nature of odour complaints and recent changes undertaken by WCR to address complaints, proactive odour assessments based on wind monitoring could be completed, by the bylaw inspectors, in the Hudson Bay Industrial Area, ensuring future complaints could more likely be traced to a probable source, given the concentration of potential nuisance odours in the area.”

The planning, development and community services committee meets in the council chamber at city hall on Wednesday morning.