Rivière-du-Loup, June 7, 2021 – In the presence of Société VIA President and CEO Jean-Sébastien Daigle, Société VIA Rivière-du-Loup Plant Manager Jimmy Bouchard, Caisse populaire Desjardins de Rivière-du-Loup General Manager Serge Ferrand and Rivière-du-Loup Mayor Sylvie Vignet, the new sorting center, located at 43 rue Henry-Percival-Monsarrat in the Saint-Ludger industrial park, was inaugurated.
An investment of nearly $13 million for this major project has enabled us to build a modern plant featuring state-of-the-art equipment that will improve production capacity and material quality, as well as making sorters’ jobs easier. These include an optical sorter, a robot capable of sorting up to 10 recyclables per second, ballistic separators and an eddy current for aluminum sorting.
Processing capacity at the Rivière-du-Loup sorting center will double from 10,000 metric tons to 20,000 metric tons per year per shift.
“I would like to congratulate Société Via on the inauguration of these new facilities, which will have a major impact on the quality of its residual materials sorting operations. RECYC-QUÉBEC’s financial contribution to the installation of new equipment will help us to achieve the objectives of modernizing selective collection, i.e. to improve the quality of materials and promote recycling here in Quebec. This contribution and Société Via’s dynamism enable us to make a difference for both the Quebec economy and the environment, says Sonia Gagné, President and CEO of RECYC-QUÉBEC.
The work environment has also been greatly improved to provide better working conditions for employees, the majority of whom live with functional limitations. Workers are due to be welcomed into the new environment and commissioned on June 14.
“It’s with a great sense of pride that we inaugurate today this brand new sorting center that we’ve been dreaming of for the past ten years! This sorting center is the biggest investment project Société VIA has seen in the last 43 years, and will enable us to sort materials efficiently in a quality environment”, says Jean-Sébastien Daigle, President and CEO.
Jimmy Bouchard, Rivière-du-Loup Plant Manager and Jean-Sébastien Daigle, President and CEO
Source: City of Rivière-du-Loup
A vision for the future
In addition to these modern facilities, the building offers additional space to increase production capacity in the short term, and the land offers expansion possibilities that will enable Société VIA to adapt its plant to future needs.
The team, which currently numbers some fifty workers, could grow in the future, as the new facilities allow.
What wonderful news for the entire Rivière-du-Loup community,” said Sylvie Vignet, Mayor of Rivière-du-Loup. We’ve been proud to work with Société VIA for over twenty years. The new sorting center will consolidate their presence in our city and ensure even more efficient sorting of our recyclables. This is reassuring for the future: it adds to all our efforts to ensure optimal management of our residual materials. I’m also thinking of the many employees who will keep their jobs and be able to work in a state-of-the-art environment. Well done!
Sylvie Vignet, Mayor of Rivière-du-Loup Source : Ville de Rivière-du-Loup
Key partners
Société VIA would like to thank its invaluable partners who contributed to the implementation of this project: our municipal partners, in particular the City of Rivière-du-Loup, with whom we have been working closely since 1999, Machinex and Pellenc for the sorting process, Desjardins, Investissement Québec, the Québec and Canadian governments for financing, Ronam, Eqip Solutions génie and Architectes Roberge et Leduc, Atelier Filz and all the other partners who have contributed in any way to the implementation of this new plant.
“Société Via has been a major business partner of Machinex in the field of sorting systems for over 30 years. It is therefore a great source of pride for us today to witness the inauguration of this new, state-of-the-art plant, designed for current and future needs. With their forward-looking vision, the Société Via team does an outstanding job every day of keeping its facilities at the cutting edge of technology. Always focused on optimizing operations to facilitate the work of their staff, they also ensure that the quality of the products sorted remains excellent, says David Marcouiller, Vice President Sales Engineering at Machinex.
