Providing high-quality city services to residents and businesses in Placer Valley goes beyond electricity. Roseville is also focused on environmental stewardship and is working to simplify recycling and conserve water, and it has plans to turn trash into energy to fuel the city’s power plant and garbage trucks.
Placer County’s One Big Bin program allows customers to toss all their waste into one can, and it is sorted for recycling at the Western Placer Materials Recovery Facility, which is jointly owned by Lincoln, Rocklin and Roseville. In Rocklin, residential and commercial garbage pickup is done by a private contractor, Recology, which turned 1.6 billion pounds of organic material region-wide into compost, according to its 2018 sustainability report.
“We collect 100,000 tons of garbage a year,” says Maurice Chaney, spokesman for Roseville’s Environmental Utilities department. The trash and 39 tons of commercial food waste collected weekly is turned into compost, which residents may purchase for use in their gardens.
Roseville is expected to expand its wastewater treatment plant from 9.5 million gallons a day to 12 million gallons. The project, estimated to cost $78 million, will also include an anaerobic digester that will turn sludge into methane gas and electrical power. “One of the largest costs of treating wastewater is electricity, and this project will help lower those costs,” Chaney says. “The compressed natural gas will be used to power our garbage trucks.”
The city helps residents and businesses conserve water use and cut down on their bills with audits that find ways to reduce water usage. To buttress the city against future droughts and to accommodate a growing population, Roseville has been replenishing underground reservoirs for a decade. In the spring of 2019, Roseville transferred 952 acre feet of water to a reservoir under the city, according to Roseville Today.
Water for Rocklin and Lincoln is supplied by the Placer County Water Agency, but Lincoln supplements that with four city-owned deep wells
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