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Spencer, the former director of the Seattle Metro Wastewater Utility, is part of a team of experts the CRD has hired to explore resource recovery for future treatment plants. The team presented some ideas on energy recovery and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to the CRD's sewage committee this week.

Saanich Coun. Vic Derman called it "the most exciting presentation I've seen at this committee in a long period of time.

"It's absolutely the direction that most of us of the committee, perhaps all of us, have been asking for," he said.

Meanwhile, a group of CRD politicians and staff returned from Sweden this week after touring sewage plants there renowned for resource recovery. Some Swedish cities, such as Gothenburg and Stockholm, use heat recovered from sewage treatment in apartment buildings, and bio-gas recovered from digesting sewage sludge to power buses and taxis.

Few buildings in the CRD use district heating, but it could be useful for future developments, Victoria Mayor Alan Lowe said. Sweden separates its organic waste from its garbage - which the CRD also does in a pilot program - and uses it to produce bio-gas, Lowe said.

That kind of integration between liquid- and solid-waste planning is key, said Esquimalt Mayor Chris Clement, who was also on the trip. "I was really impressed," he said. "It's just amazing what's going on in Sweden."

By selling the excess heat and fuel, the Swedish plants recover around 25 per cent of their costs, said CRD chief administrative officer Kelly Daniels. They also incinerate leftover sewage sludge. The incinerators run cleaner than European emission standards, Daniels said.

The next update into the CRD's resource recovery planning is expected by June, when the CRD is required to submit an interim business case to the provincial government. The CRD members who visited Sweden are expected to post information gathered on the trip on the CRD's website soon.