Metro Vancouver's Waste-to-Energy Facility has operated in Burnaby since 1988 and currently handles about 240,000 tonnes of garbage per year — roughly a quarter of the region's garbage. It is a mass-burn facility that turns waste into electricity — approximately 180,000 MWh/year, (enough to power 16,000 homes) — and recovers about 5,000 tonnes of metal annually. Metro Vancouver sells the electricity to BC Hydro and the metals to a local recycler.
In 2018 Metro Vancouver introduced technological improvements to increase metal recovery at the Waste-to-Energy Facility by installing an eddy current separator to separate non-ferrous metals such as copper and aluminum from bottom ash. A second magnetic separator increased the recovery of ferrous metals.