July 16, 2024, marked a significant milestone for both waste management fleet, Emterra Environmental and supplier Mack Trucks.

For Mack, its largest ever single order of electric trucks was delivered to Emterra. Those trucks will be used to collect waste, organics and recycling in the city of Courtenay and the Town of Comox on Vancouver Island.

With this purchase of eight Mack all our electric refuse trucks, Emterra will now serve the entire community with zero tailpipe emissions. Paulina Leung is chief sustainability officer with Emterra. She explained the significance of the investment and why the company is aggressively slashing its emissions.

Paulina Leung: Adopting zero-emission trucks, leaning on new technologies to help us do our work for sustainably, has really been in our DNA since 1976 when our company was founded.

We started off by developing the first curbside recycling programs for residential areas and communities, and we leaned into adopting lower carbon vehicles at that time, which was compressed natural gas, and with the support now that we have from manufacturers like Mack Trucks and the dealer network, it’s become much more easy for us to scale the adoption of zero-emission vehicles so that we can work towards now providing all of our services with as minimal environmental impact as possible as we develop different resources from landfill for a circular economy.

So, in our fleet of about 500 vehicles, today’s fleet represents eight. What makes it unique — even though the number sounds a little bit smaller — is that this is our entire [local] fleet. This is not a pilot project. We have gone all-in to service the communities of the City of Courtney [and] the Town of Comox, using an entirely electric fleet, and we’re excited to grow this over time and scale the adoption further across Canada.

George Fotopoulos, Mack’s vice-president of its e-mobility business unit, talked to us about the truck itself, its capabilities, and why it’s a good fit for Emterra’s Vancouver Island refuse fleet.

George Fotopoulos: The batteries are 376 kilowatts of power that you have on board. Obviously, that’s running the powertrain, all the auxiliaries inside the cab.

And as you mentioned, the body as well. As you can see the body, it’s an automatic side loader body via Labrie. There’s many manufacturers out there, and we work with many of them.

And this application is with Labrie on the side loader application. The truck itself, it could do do 10 hours. It could do up to 100 miles on the job, as well. So that’s the capabilities of it on a single charge. Speaking of charging, obviously, it does take a fast charge. It goes up to 150 kilowatts of a DC Level 3 charger. That’s a quick overview of the Mac LR Electric.

OK, and this is the largest single truck order for the LR Electric?

It’s actually the single largest deployment of eight vehicles here on the Vancouver Island. They also have one more in their fleet as well. So, within Emterra it’s a total of nine, but eight specifically in the community here within Comox and the City of Courtney as well.