Waste-to-energy · Canada
Arc Ventures builds and operates waste incineration and gasification plants with Indigenous nations and municipalities — turning the waste a community already produces into heat and power it can actually use.
27.5 Mt
Non-hazardous waste sent to Canadian disposal facilities in 2024 — a record high (Statistics Canada)
100–300 t
Per-day processing capacity we target — community and regional scale, fed by local waste
2030
Year Yellowknife’s original landfill cell is projected to reach capacity (City of Yellowknife)
51 / 49
Our default equity structure — majority Indigenous ownership, minority outside capital
The problem we build for
Canadian communities are running out of places to put their garbage. Landfills are filling, hauling distances are getting longer, and in the North the economics are brutal — waste is trucked or flown at extraordinary cost to cells that are already close to capacity.
Meanwhile those same communities are burning diesel for heat and power.
Arc Ventures closes that loop. We develop, finance, and build thermal waste-to-energy facilities that take a community’s residual waste stream and convert it into district heat and grid electricity — shrinking landfill volume by roughly 90 percent while displacing imported fuel.
What we build
We are technology-agnostic by design. The waste stream, the heat demand, and the regulatory envelope decide which system goes in — not a vendor relationship.
Grate-based combustion with a heat-recovery boiler. The workhorse of European municipal waste management — robust with mixed municipal solid waste, high availability, and well-understood emissions control. Best suited to larger, consistent volumes.
Waste is thermally converted into a combustible synthesis gas in an oxygen-starved reactor, then burned cleanly for heat and power. Well suited to higher-calorific and industrial waste streams, and to sites where feedstock quality or footprint favours a reactor over a full grate line.
That band is deliberate. It is large enough to carry a proper energy-recovery boiler, full emissions control, and the staffing and offtake structure that make a facility bankable — and small enough to be fed by the waste a single municipality, region, or nation actually produces, without hauling garbage across the province. Below roughly 100 tonnes per day the economics rarely pencil, and we will tell you that early.
Who we build with
Waste-to-energy is not an equipment purchase. It is an agreement between everyone who touches the waste and everyone who buys the energy. We assemble that group first.
Majority equity partners and long-term owners, with governance, employment and revenue built into the structure from day one.
Host communities and waste authorities facing landfill closure, rising tipping costs, or diversion targets they cannot meet.
Utilities and district-energy operators who can offtake heat and power under a long-term agreement.
Collection and disposal companies who supply feedstock and gain a closer, cheaper, more predictable destination.
How we work
We measure what the community actually throws away and what it actually needs to heat. No facility gets designed off assumptions.
Mass and energy balance, technology short-list, capital and operating estimates, and an honest go / no-go.
Equity, grant funding, and concessional debt assembled around a majority-Indigenous ownership position, with offtake agreements secured in parallel.
Air quality, environmental assessment, and territorial or provincial licensing — run as a scheduled workstream, not an afterthought.
Supplier procurement, civil works, installation, performance testing, and operator training with local hiring throughout.
Flagship project
A waste-to-energy facility embedded in the Yellowknife masterplan — sited alongside the housing and community development it will heat, rather than pushed to the edge of town.
The environmental case
Every landfill cell in Canada is releasing methane — an invisible greenhouse gas roughly 28 to 36 times more potent than CO₂ over a 100-year horizon — as buried organic waste decomposes without oxygen. Landfills are Canada’s third-largest source of methane emissions, and leachate from decomposing waste can migrate into surrounding soil and groundwater for decades after a site closes (Environment and Climate Change Canada).
That contamination does not stay contained. Landfill footprints permanently remove land from productive use, and buffer zones around active and closed sites restrict what can be built, farmed, or harvested nearby — land that, for many nations, is treaty or reserve land that cannot simply be relocated once it is compromised.
Arc Ventures exists to reverse that trajectory. By diverting residual waste into thermal treatment instead of burial, we cut landfilled volume by roughly 90 percent, eliminate the long-tail methane and leachate liability of a new landfill cell, and turn the same waste stream into heat and power the community uses today — freeing land for housing, habitat, or economic development instead of surrendering it to a containment problem for the next century.
Landfill gas is roughly half methane. Canadian landfills are estimated to have emitted the equivalent of over 20 million tonnes of CO₂ in recent inventory years — emissions with no smokestack, no odour at the property line, and no easy fix once a cell is sealed (Environment and Climate Change Canada).
A closed landfill still needs monitoring, capping, and leachate management for 30+ years, and the footprint plus buffer typically stays out of productive use indefinitely — a permanent land-use cost layered on top of the waste problem itself.
Thermal treatment shrinks the waste stream by roughly 90 percent by volume, converts it into district heat and power instead of buried, decomposing mass, and gives nations and municipalities a functioning energy asset in place of a long-term containment liability.
Common questions
The questions we hear most from nations, municipalities, and partners evaluating a project with us.
Nothing. Arc Ventures sources 100 percent of the development and construction capital. Our default structure requires no cash equity from the Nation or municipality — the land contribution (typically a 99-year nil-rent lease) is the community’s contribution, and ownership is fixed at 51 percent Nation / 49 percent Arc from day one.
We target 100 to 300 tonnes per day — large enough to support a proper energy-recovery boiler, full emissions control, and a bankable offtake structure, and small enough to run on the waste one municipality, region, or nation actually produces. Below roughly 100 tonnes per day the economics rarely work, and we say so early rather than force-fitting a project.
Typically 18 to 24 months for an on-reserve project once feasibility and partnership terms are agreed — faster than a comparable off-reserve project because Nation-land jurisdiction removes municipal rezoning delays. Off-reserve projects generally run longer due to municipal permitting and environmental assessment timelines.
Arc Ventures does. We post all guarantees and the letter of credit, carry capital-cost overruns against fixed equipment pricing and contingency, and hold operational responsibility — compliance, maintenance, uptime — for the life of the asset. Our community partner’s exposure is deliberately minimal: no cash equity, no guarantees.
We are technology-agnostic between grate-based incineration with energy recovery and gasification, choosing based on the waste stream, heat demand, and regulatory envelope rather than a fixed vendor preference. APT Blaze supplies the thermal treatment technology at the core of our facilities across both pathways.
Through a blended capital stack: non-repayable grants (such as the Green Municipal Fund, Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways Program, and Low Carbon Economy Fund Indigenous streams), a Canada Infrastructure Bank senior debt facility priced near 1 percent, an equity tranche funded by infrastructure and First Nations lenders, and the federal Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit, which is refundable. Debt and equity are both serviced from facility revenue, not community cash.
Four things that compound over the life of the asset: 51 percent ownership of a long-life utility asset, a preferred energy rate that lowers household and operating energy costs, one-third of the facility’s recurring management fee paid out every year, and local jobs plus landfill diversion. None of it requires cash from the community up front.
Four things, all agreement and authorization rather than capital: a joint-venture term sheet, a Band Council Resolution authorizing the project on Nation land, the definitive long-form joint-venture, lease, and operating agreements, and, where relevant, Nation co-signature supporting a grant application. We handle the rest.
If you are a nation, a municipality, a utility, or a hauler looking at a landfill problem or an energy gap, we would like to hear about it. Early conversations cost nothing.