Met Council to break ground on 4th wastewater sludge incinerator in St. Paul

The Metropolitan Council needs more room and more horsepower to process the metro’s waste. To that end, a major initiative more than a decade in the making is officially on the move in St. Paul.

On Wednesday, officials with the seven-county metro’s regional planning agency will break ground on a long-planned fourth incinerator dedicated to wastewater solids at the Metropolitan Water Resource Recovery Facility on Childs Road, near Pig’s Eye Lake.

The facility, located across the Mississippi River from the city’s municipal airport, currently treats 180 million gallons of wastewater daily, serving 66 communities, while processing 850 wet tons of solids daily for 73 communities. In short, it handles a lot of waste — about 75% of the wastewater in the Twin Cities metro area, the equivalent of filling 1.8 million bathtubs daily, or U.S. Bank Stadium every three days — before discharging clean water to the Mississippi River.

The Childs Road facility, which dates to 1938, is already the largest wastewater treatment site in Minnesota and among the largest in the nation.

The fourth incinerator, in the planning since at least 2015, will add about 25% more capacity to serve the region, which the Met Council anticipates to grow by another 350,000 residents by the year 2050. Improvements also will preserve the facility’s existing water resource recovery infrastructure.

The $258.7 million project would install the new incinerator by September 2028. The existing three incinerators would be rehabilitated by the end of 2032 under a separate contract. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency took public comment on an environmental assessment worksheet and air emissions permit in 2023.

In all, the Met Council owns and operates 600 miles of regional sanitary sewers, which connect to 5,000 miles of sewers owned by Twin Cities municipalities. Those sewers collect about 250 million gallons of wastewater a day from 109 metro-area communities for treatment.

The system is funded by user fees from utility bills, not taxes.

Wednesday’s groundbreaking is not open to the general public.

Scheduled attendees and speakers include Met Council Chair Robin Hutcheson, Met Council Member Gail Cederberg, who chairs the council’s environment committee, and Met Council Environmental Services General Manager Leisa Thompson. Also invited are Ramsey County Commissioner Kelly Miller and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Assistant Commissioner for Air and Climate Frank Kohlasch.